Asymmetrical Information

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Video Games Sending the World to Hell in a Handbasket

We are raising a generation of screen vegetables insensitive to violence on a grand scale. These computer games kids play indoctrinate them in anarchy and violence to the population. The rules of the games are based entirely on violence, theft and coercion. Over time our children will be so used to these rules that the real violence of the world will not affect them, and they will come to believe that computer-game rules are the road to success. Something has to be done.

I am speaking, of course, of the "Sim" games, such as SimCity and SimPark. Pay attention to what your children are doing. Did you realize that in these games there is no private property? Everything is centrally planned. Just think, our children will grow up indoctrinated into communist central planning, a system responsible for more deaths than the World Wars combined! Our children will take state-sponsored violence, theft and terrorism for granted.

I yearn for the good old days when kids just rescued friends and shot up evil totalitarian aliens. Now they are the evil totalitarian aliens.

The computer game charts are in fact dominated by a completely different genre: what are called "god-games," or simulators, in which the player manages a complex system of interacting agents.

Should we really encourage our children to play god? What's next - sim global climate management? SimAirport Security? SimNationalized Telecommunications and Broadband Provider? SimIntellectual Property-Protecting Computer Vendors? Stop them now, before it's too late.

Note to Alex Beam - aimez-vous sarcasm? check with Bjorn on this post.

UPDATE: Lemony Snicket Jr. tells me Sim City 3000 has private property. There's a lesson here - we always fear what we don't understand...

Posted by Mindles H. Dreck at April 6, 2002 09:39 AM | Technorati inbound links