Are games too much like pornography? | 10 Years Ago This Month

28.02.2024 - 15:41 / gamesindustry.biz

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The games industry moves pretty fast, and there's a tendency for all involved to look constantly to what's next without so much worrying about what came before. That said, even an industry so entrenched in the now can learn from its past. So to refresh our collective memory and perhaps offer some perspective on our field's history, GamesIndustry.biz runs this monthly feature highlighting happenings in gaming from exactly a decade ago.

Ten years ago this month, Trip Hawkins opened his 2014 DICE Summit presentation with a bold question.

"Do you ever feel like what we're really doing is too much like pornography?"

Spoiler: it was a cheap question designed to grab the audience's attention and not a concept Hawkins engaged with seriously, and I am 100% pulling the same trick right now by leading off this article with it.

So if you came here expecting some hot, hot games industry B2B discussion about pornography, I'm sorry to say all I have to offer you is a column about educational video games hype. Feel free to grumble about clickbait and be upset that the B2B video game industry website's historical retrospective column isn't as pornographic as you expected.

OK, for the rest of you who are still here, let's get back to the porn talk.

"Yeah you feel that way," Hawkins continued, pointing to one unidentified member of the audience. "That's because what you're doing really is pornography. But for the rest of us, it's this undercurrent of bad feeling that the public, the government, the teachers… they think we're a social ill. And we kind of are.

"There's a whole bunch of side effects and problems that have been caused by games. And games have kind of taken over. Games are now monopolizing the attention of the digital natives that are growing up, so this is an issue."

Tonally dissonant banter aside, it was an eyebrow-raising start to the session. Here was a bonafide industry legend – the founder of Electronic Arts, 3DO, and early mobile gaming mover Digital Chocolate – raising the question of whether the industry he helped shape had done more to damage society than to benefit it.

But rather than answer the question he had raised, Hawkins went on a digression about the necessity to approach game development thinking like a scientist, even as he was trafficking in dubious assertions about why Finland had successful mobile studios and saying Candy Crush was also "kind of pornographic if you think about it."

(I have thought about it, but I still do not get why Hawkins thought Candy Crush specifically would be pornographic. If you think you have some idea as to what he meant, under no circumstances should you tell me. You keep that cursed insight