In this exciting and visionary article, David Rejeski at Serious Games Source argues that the US needs a "Corporation for Public Gaming," modeled on the "Corporation for Public Brpadcasting." He has a fascinating history of how TV was perceived before the public broadcasters came on the air, and there's a really parallel to the current perception of games as unworthy "mere entertainments."
The saccharine sweet family shows of the 50s and 60s gave way to harder biting social commentaries like All in the Family. In 1967, the same year that CBS television ended a 17-year blacklisting of folksinger Pete Seeger, President Johnson signed legislation to establish the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), asserting that "we have only begun to grasp the great promise of the medium" and noting that noncommercial television was reaching only "a fraction of its potential audience – and a fraction of its potential worth." As part of the legislation, the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare was to launch major research on instructional television in the classroom. The $9 million investment in CPB in 1967 (about $47 million in today's dollars) has grown to over $300 million in annual funding today. Unlike television, the meteoric rise of computer and video games over the past decade has gone largely unnoticed except by the digiteratti and cultural anthropologists cruising web zines and blogs. This may be because games are not a technology per se, but applications that slip into our lives on the backs of existing technologies, from computers, to televisions and cell phones. They are less hardware and more software. Like many mass culture phenomena, games are understood more on the basis of prevailing myths than reality. Few people realize that the average gamer is 30 years old, that over 40 percent are female, and that most adult gamers have been playing games for 12 years.
(via Wonderland)
