how to delay an art form

At the moment, I've picked up on a rather disturbing trend in traditional media and similar institutions which has led to a divide in culture around the millennial line, older people who trust more traditional media and these same establishments without having looked deeper into and got involved with the culture of this industry have also fallen for a nasty ploy played by these groups since the beginning of time: "New is bad." In this case, we'll be talking about the demonization of the video game industry and how generalisation has been used as a weapon by traditional media, but most of these points can easily be translated to other types of upcoming art and media.

Now, I've bet you've either heard this or said this before if you've at all been around games. The sentence in question being the infamously vague "Games aren't art." Which mistakenly assumes that all games are the same, after all, the soulless money spinners of violence and gruff white guys like call of duty can't be easily compared to games about building a personality through social attributes including rhetoric and self examination like disco elysium, where you're much more encouraged to drink methylated spirits and debate on the street about the meaning of life like an diogenes without so much urine, but in the eyes of more traditional media, these two can be categorized the same way. Isn't it weird how this problem isn't expressed in other media like movies where certain ones are considered art but not others? Almost sounds like a double standard.

And here's another one with a grain of truth. "Video games cause violence." So to start off with the grain of truth, another hated function of screens can cause a form of violence, or more accurately, harm, social media has a nasty tendency to dress up reality and has shown to increase instability in emotional states, especially for teens which has been linked pretty strongly to a rise in self harm, but the idea that an Ipad is going to push you into a violent and destructive direction is almost completely fabricated, from juvenile crime statistics being on a steady decline to young adult crime statistics in every area being down.

So, now that we have had a look at those 2 claims, lets look at the one most close to the truth and how to address it. "Video games lead to gambling addictions."
So, here's a surprise for you, the people that work with numbers to addict people to casinos aren't particularly moral people and are willing to work with immoral gaming companies as well! To the dismay of many, people have recently been cataloguing a problem in gaming of using real world money or in game currency bought with real world money to purchase loot boxes, randomized drops which have thousands of shiny PNGs to look at as you get a racial slurs thrown at you through a 2 dollar mic. Now, that's all well and good until the game starts structuring it's entire gameplay loop is based around this (Which most multiplayer games without single player are.) Now, what the media obfuscates is that these are not all or even most games, these are just the same money hungry scumbags that are making the 43rd transformers movie about a child who's flesh and bone horrifyingly transforms into a tonka truck, but the big difference is they're aiming their gambling games at kids and there's no end to the money milking. The games that run off this strategy aren't referred to as "games" like the media presents it though, as a culture, they have gained notoriety as live services, games built not because they want to entertain you or make you think, but to nickel and dime you so hard that you think you've been hit by someone with a roll of pennies. So next time you hear someone use gaming and gambling interchangeably, make sure to say "live service" and gambling, because otherwise you let people think that every game is like this.


Now another question you may have if you've read through this mass of poorly thought out drivel is "Why would TV, radio and papers paint the situation like this?" And the answer is quite simple: attention, it's almost impossible to compete with an evolving art form like this, as old media has to rely on sensationalism and cliff hangers, a game doesn't because your part of it, you get to live in the artists head for a bit and because of that jump in immersion, more people are turning away from it, so, the obvious way to these execs have thought up to fix the problem is to demonize it in order to keep their current audience, give them a thought process to avoid it, and of course these scare tactics taint the minds of many who aren't even thinking about it. Actually, a good comparison to the way they do it is similar to how they treat political parties, with the moniker. "If you can't beat them, smear them."