Posts Tagged: cultural

Culture / Experience — 1 Comment
3
Apr 10

RKD on… The name of the games

Earlier I wrote about how “Xbox” has come to be used as a generic term for videogames. After I noticed the phenomenon once, I started to see it everywhere, like in this news article from earlier in the week:

The glamorisation of crime has been condemned by Police Commissioner Andrew Scipione, who cited everything from Xbox games to television crime dramas and Hollywood movies as “abhorrent”.

Xbox is not the first brand to rise to this position of prominence; it only dethroned PlayStation sometime within the current console generation, and in the 1990s Nintendo was king. The dominant brand changes over time, but digging into the history is difficult, as the phenomenon is rarely remarked upon and examples are hard to find with a web search. I asked the other writers at RKD what they could remember about the names people came up with for videogames in their younger years. Continue reading →

Culture — 6 Comments
31
Mar 10

The name of the games

The latest console war has been underway for five years now, and it’s still difficult to call a winner on the basis of sales. But one game company is winning the battle for a place in our minds.

Have you heard of “the Xbox factor”?

The story goes that cinema ticket sales are increasingly dominated by romantic comedies, character-driven dramas and film adaptations of lusty vampire novels – in other words, “chick flicks”. Some Hollywood executives have attributed this to the fact that men are becoming less interested in going out to see a movie as they become more caught up in “sophisticated video games” (and the Ultimate Fighting Championship, apparently).

To me, the most interesting part of this story is the fact that the phenomenon has been dubbed the “Xbox factor”.

Not the “Playstation factor”. Not the “Wii factor”. Not the “Games For Windows Live factor”, amazingly. The word “Xbox” has been chosen to represent all videogames – or at least the videogames predominantly played by young men. Continue reading →

Culture — 2 Comments
24
Oct 09

Loaded Images: National Neuroses

Everybody has their hang-ups, even if they’re a nation. What we play in our games today can dredge up uncomfortable memories of our pasts.

When Basil Fawlty whispered, “Don’t mention the war. I mentioned it once but I think I got away with it alright”, the joke was on him;  however, he was far from being the first and last person to ever wander headlong into an international faux pas. Even Australia’s near brainless variety show Hey Hey It’s Saturday was left with mud on its face, after some of its guests decided to dab a bit on their own. As a fellow portion of the global industry that is entertainment, videogames hold the same ability to offend cross-culturally as they do to elicit any other emotion. Continue reading →