Going to Far?!

When reading the Origins of an Industry chapter, I found myself returning to the concept of breaking boundaries and going to far. I do not play a lot of video games but I have participated in some discussions centered on video games. The most popular of them all seems to be the question of violent video games and their effects on the human player. Now, I have heard different arguments for both sides, both from my peers and different professors, yet, I have never heard any sort of point made in regards to the origins of video games. I find it highly interesting that the root of video games was within our military agency. I also found it interesting that the first hackers could be considered as video game explorers. With these two concepts it seems that the argument that gives them a negative connotation is that the skills or characteristics of violent video games and hackers were taken too far. When and why did people get uncomfortable with either issue? What’s the goal of a hacker today? Are they still participating in the whimsical activity of divergent thinking? If not, has it been replaced with another goal or vice? These are just some of the questions that I thought about early on in the chapter.

In playing Asteroids and Space Invaders I also began to think about the diegetic element of scenery in which games are placed.  The chapter discussed the importance of the Sci-fi genre and its solidification of a prime youth genre with the release of the Star Wars movie. But I wonder if games like Asteroids and Space Invaders, that I assume mimic the early games like Spacewars or Battlezone, were not set in Space but on Earth with people instead of aliens and a cop car instead of a spaceship, would the issue of video game violence been raised sooner? Even though, if violence is the main concern, one might expect the violent act of shooting aliens to be one of uproar as well early on in the video game world.