Comment on Why does Australia tend to ban or censor video games?
Quokka@quokk.au 15 hours agoThey may have grown up with video games, but video games were not the cultural force they are today. For my entire childhood they were for nerds, now everyone growing up plays them.
cerebralhawks@lemmy.dbzer0.com 15 hours ago
I don’t know what fortnight concerts are (you go to a concert every two weeks?) and while I do like a couple streamers of old games from my childhood, I don’t much care about video game streamers. I also don’t give two dry shits about online multiplayer games. Doesn’t mean I’m any less a gamer. I’m speaking for myself because I’m in that age group and generation you’re generalising. I’m not saying you’re wrong about all of us, but you’re wrong about me and the people who are about my age I know.
They were cultural enough. I remember commercials for video games shown on TV. I specifically remember the one for Super Mario Bros. 3 where a whole stadium is chanting “Mario! Mario!” over and over. Hell, I remember Final Fantasy VIII (8) advertised in theaters. I mean, now, you have car commercials and other TV-type commercials in theaters, it’s obscene, but back when you only had Coca-Cola ads and movie trailers, seeing a trailer for a video game on the big screen was insane. Then there was all the hype around a possible Super Mario Bros. movie. That movie came out in 1993, so I mean in the 1980s, early 90s we were anticipating it, Nintendo Power was talking about movie ideas, then at one point (not sure if before or after) there was the cartoon series… then the movie came out and we were all disappointed. Oh, and trading NES cartridges on the school yard. It was technically against the rules to bring video games to school. It was a big grey disk and you couldn’t do anything with it at school other than admire the artwork on the sticker. But there was a rule. But on recess, we’d trade games we’d beaten for new ones we hadn’t, and we’d swap secrets we’d found.
It was a different culture (streaming and online multiplayer games didn’t exist), but then The Wizard came out. It was a movie about us, about Nintendo gamers, and this autistic kid who could master any game within seconds of playing it for the first time. So his older brother “kidnaps” him, takes him to Los Angeles (I think), and enters him into a contest where Super Mario Bros. 3 is revealed to the public for the first time, so the kid’s never seen it, and he either beats it right then and there, or he gets further than anyone and figures out a couple secrets; either way, he wins by a landslide. That was the video game culture we grew up with. Oh, and we didn’t have GameFAQs, YouTube, or Google, so what we did was, we’d call this 1-900 number, and it was like phone sex, except for games. You’d ask about a game and they’d get you talking about games and other games to keep you on the line because the charges were ridiculous. So Nintendo had these people who basically groomed kids over the phone getting them talking about the games they play to rip their parents off on the phone bill. What they wouldn’t do was just simply answer your question and then take the next caller. Nah, they milked that shit. I never called but I knew guys who did, and they paid more for one tip than they did for the entire game. Imagine you paid $50 for a game, and then you got stuck and called the help line, they help you with the problem and you chat about games for a while, and you get a $60 bill. Make it make sense. Of course, it did make sense — to Nintendo’s shareholders. But, anyway…
Quokka@quokk.au 14 hours ago
I’m talking about political and societal attitudes; We’re outliers. Simply being on the Fediverse makes us outliers with a strong bias towards more tech and gaming based interests.
It will be another 10-20 years before politics catches up to us in normalising video games and understanding they’re important cultural elements not simply kids entertainment. Until that point in time, their importance is going to be neglected by politicians and Christian lobbyists will be able to exert their influence over moral policing them.
Coelacanth@feddit.nu 14 hours ago
You’re definitely right, although I grew up in Sweden and not Australia. But the same general cultural and societal trends applied. Growing up in the 90s/early 00s video games were still absolutely stigmatised and associated with nerds and social pariahs. It’s not that there weren’t games or gamers, but they were not really socially acceptable outside of the nerd subcultures and subgroups.
It wasn’t anything at all like how it is today, where everyone and their aunt is playing games and every kid from every social strata is playing some kind of video game.