As Electronic Arts prepared to market Medal of Honor Warfighter, the latest version of its top-selling video game released in October, it created a Web site that promoted the manufacturers of the guns, knives and combat-style gear depicted in the game.
NYT.
I’m just saying and I’m going to go with one example,
Call of Duty makes a billion dollars of revenue every year. Hundreds of dudes and dudettes but mostly dudes line up when one of the main Activision franchise comes out. This core target of young males spends time online sharing a lot of interest in guns through discussions about the game or real life weapons. Guns that are accurately modeled and simulated by armies of engineers, sound designers and 3D artists. 40 million monthly active players. in 2011 alone, 21 new “First Person Shooter” games. The army itself uses them for training.
We game developers can’t disengage our responsibilities with the old freedom of speech trick while we know how powerful learning tools games are. We can’t say games build skills and then say of realistic shooters that no, they’re just “for fun”. Imagine 40 million players playing Sim City trying out solutions to make our lives in cities better.
If shootings are so wrong and we want to fix that problem, everybody should get onboard and be ready to change. Game industry included.