Instead of talking about what games should not do with regards to social responsibility, I thought I’d talk about positive social responsibility. In other words, what should games teach the players rather than what they shouldn’t.
Coming up with this new angle was somewhat anti-climatic as I started thinking about it, because my initial thought was that games simply don’t have that kind of responsibility. They’re “just” entertainment.
But let’s then step into the realm of “serious games” and teaching games. There are sexual education games that are designed to teach young people about relationships, myths about sex etcetera. There are games (the one I found was a board-game, but still) that are in-fact about teaching social responsibility. I’m aware that these examples are more about society using games as a way of exercising it’s responsibility rather than the game itself having some sort of responsibility but I still find it quite interesting.
Going back to entertainment games, I actually think that there are quite a few games exercising positive social responsibility even though they might not have to. In Metal Gear Solid for example it is talked quite a lot about the horrors of nuclear weapons and I’ve read interviews with Hideo Kojima that he wants to educate his players about this. There are probably quite a lot of subjective values built into his story but I would certainly count the desire to educate younger generations as being socially responsible.
Now this was quite short, but hopefully it got you thinking about the positive sides.
Arcade
Arshak Ardeshir
Gustav Ziolkowski
Severin Brettmeister
Andre Beccu
