This document discusses the potential for video games to convey serious messages and topics beyond escapist entertainment. It notes that overcoming the perception that games are only for children is a challenge to being taken seriously. Additionally, interactive games can thrust the player into a position of moral accountability compared to passive media. However, gamers would need to show a demand for games that offer more than just escapism for commercial games to expand into more serious documentary-style topics and messages.

3. Serious Business

6. Rafael Fejardo
~Crosser~

7. 9/11 Survivor

8. Luc Bernard
Imagination is the only Escape

13. FACEPALM

15. “Getting over that barrier (of
being viewed as a children’s
pastime) is the hardest part
about being heard by people”

22. “The interactivity of a video game certainly has an effect on the message—
perhaps even more so, it is a significant method of delivery for that message.
To passively watch a film about school shootings, for example, allows the
viewer a kind of calculated, voyeuristic distance from the acts of violence. To
play a game about school shootings, however, thrusts the player into a posi-
tion of moral accountability and authorial control. The effect is as different as
watching a drag race from the sidewalk and drag racing.”

31. I have a hat now
“This is really more a question of what gamers want
from their gaming experiences. If gamers decide
that they want more than escapist entertainment
from their consoles, it is possible that the demand
will increase; commercial games may someday of-
fer the equivalent of a Michael Moore documentary
as well as the standard array of what amount to Mi-
chael Bay flicks.”

32. The End
Still by Jacob Paris.