Today over at Penny Arcade Tycho posted a brief discussion of the issue of violence in gaming causing violence in real life and the legal implications thereof. I say this not because I feel like this is an audience that needs introduction to the issue, but because he links to an interview with Dr. Henry Jenkins concerning the issue that’s pretty interesting. Dr Jenkins is the founder and head of MIT’s Comparative Media program. Go over to Penny Arcade to catch links to the full text, but I wanted to drop this quote on you:

Dr. J: Sure, most game criticism is trivialized. It’s tip sheets, and “cool graphics”, etc. But for a few exceptions, there’s no attempt to explain why a game is innovative or what its long-term implications may be. What you need is for a critic to come along and say that games are where the real innovation is, as was done with cinema, and tell people to pay attention to these innovations and get them to buy creative products. A lot of the big experiments done in games over the past couple of years have not been big sellers. “The Sims” is doing very well, but look at “Majestic”. Crashed and burned - it just died. My sense is that “Frequency” and “Rez” were only moderate sellers. Look at the games that are nominated every year for awards by developers. Outside of “Grand Theft Auto 3″ and “The Sims”, most of them were not big sellers because consumers aren’t being educated about what’s exciting and cool about these games. They’ll buy the next big sports franchise game, but something that goes in a new direction has much more trouble finding its way to the consumer base. That’s why everyone should foster more critical discussions of games. But with the current discussion being bogged down in violence, they aren’t being terribly helpful. Think about cinema. What if, all these years later, all anyone had ever written about was violence? We’d think it had completely trivialized an enormous epoch in the history of media.

We’re all pretty smart guys over here with the brain power to percieve implications, and while I don’t advocate the lynching of anyone who uses descriptors like “kickass rockin”, it did make me want to step a little deeper into the wider implications of any given game.

Talk amongst yourselves.