Corrupt should look into using games as another media outlet.

Maybe flash-based, like a very simple Choose-Your-Adventure thing, package some Corruptian ideology into an engaging, possibly branching story, then it can be easily submitted to sites like ArmorGames, Newgrounds, et cetera, who get hundreds of thousands of people visiting to play stupid little platformer games.

I know this secondhand - my siblings waste valuable computer time for them.

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Games were a staple activity through my formative years, and as adolescence comes to a close, I've weaned myself off of them.

Games are a waste of time, same as television and movies, and they all shouldn't be viewed as a main interest of any kind. They are interactive, however, which is something that television cannot offer.

It all comes down to the developer though, the masterminds behind the project, whether they want to make their game into a repetitive product to be consumed, or into a developing narrative that grows onto the player and makes them think about the very actions they choose in the game, and their consequences.

The most recent game I've found intriguing in this narrative, cause-and-effect manner was Bioshock.

Let me spare you the cost of buying the game and the time you need to waste playing it:

It's influenced by AYN RAND -- for the uninformed, she's a filthy, corrupted ripoff of Nietzsche, but with her own 'bitchy' objectivist-egoist personality; a great writer, but with a very fatal philosophy.

Strip away the dumb "entertaining" aspects of it, and you get a first hand examination of a flourishing underwater city where objectivist views of freedom coupled with laissez-faire economics. It places you in the middle of this suboceanic city torn apart by all of these freedoms given so the meek inhabitants can have total control over their own power. Throw in genetic superpowers, and disaster strikes as the major players who wish to control the city feud against one another, using every means possible.

It is the only game I've played that came out in the past 5 years that actually had this "quirky intelligent" part behind it, but unfortunately it doesn't force the player to think of it as such. It came damned close, though.

You have two endings, entirely dependent on whether you choose to save the 'Little Sisters' (at the behest of a former scientist, suffering remorse from having genetically engineered the girls to produce fuel for the genetic enhancements in the first place), the girls harvested to power the genetic enhancements, or not.

"A man chooses, a slave obeys" is repeated by Andrew Ryan, the original founder of the fictional city, as you kill him with his own golf club, via gene-based verbal mind control.

If you don't save the girls, which I suppose is akin to Ayn Rand's egotistic objectivism, then you get a cutscene where your main character and several bathyspheres come to the surface of the ocean, where the narrator explains how you come to world domination with the little girls and your genetic superpowers.

If you do save all of them, it shows the girls at various stages of their lives, having gained an education, meaningful relationships, and everything you would expect from the perfect 1960's Western lifestyle. Your main character is on his deathbed, while the girls symbolically place their unblemished, youthful hands on his as he dies, all of them thankful for the life he unselfishly gave them over his own immortality and personal gain.

I played for 30 hours for these two endings. I gained a little insight, but overall, it was a definite waste of time. I even realized this as I was playing -- It's likely more of a primer for people who aren't exactly philosophically inclined, but it doesn't jump out at you so much, other than making a few references to "Atlas" and other Ayn Rand things.

On a related note...
I never bonded with family over video games; the skill difference is often too great between myself and my next-of-kin.

They are and have been an excuse for procrastination -- a la heroin. I'm a perfectly capable artist and writer, but I feel my skill growth has been stifled for the sake of playing 4 or 5 hours of games.

If I was immortal then one day, once I had already read all the most important books, learned several languages fluently, and done anything I was reasonably capable of to make a postitive contribution to the world, I might get around to playing a computer game. It would probably be fun.
[Admittedly I did play them as a child when reading would have been preferable.]

(the last link leads to Prozak's article too)

I enjoyed the show. I agree with Alex Birch: bonding via video games is a weak point for defending them and (this is me) is a corrupt and artificial way of doing what humans should naturally do.

However I cannot agree with the label of "waste of time" so generally displayed upon video games.

Through time, video games have been changing and some things which were rare to see in the 80's and early 90's became the norm thereon.

One of them is "storyline". In the begining, with games like tetris or pong, you had almost absolutely no sense of a meta direction while playing, as there was no real ending or definite contextualized goal. These games could be recklessly adictive or a simple and ephemerous fun (and waste of time).

Further, there were games like Mario and Sonic which were divided into phases or stages, with some minimal context represented by fragments of a very simple story. Although these games could be addictive, they could also be finished in 4 hours and had close to no replay value. They too were a waste of time.

With the mentioned (in the show) Final Fantasy series and one game not so well known but probably the paramount of storyline called "XENOGEARS", you had a group of very intelligent and well read people coming together to create a game that had the main goal of telling a story. And thanks to the new technologies, such story could very complex and even epic in proportions. But of course, it is not the length of the story but its quality that I am trying to bring as a point.

In Final Fantasy VII, you played a cold nihilistic ex-solider joining a group of eco-fascists against a Blade Runner-esque Megacorporation called "Shinra", which produces eletrical and fuel energy using the "Life Stream", which is the vital flow ("blood") of mother earth and is replenished by all living beings (which lose all their identities and egos upon death to become material for other, new beings). Therefore, Shinra is effectively a parasite of nature, as well as a manipulator of politics and media for control of the unaware and numb masses (sounds familiar?).

The extreme attitudes of the eco-fascist group (such as blowing up power plants) eventually outlaws them and the group ends in utter failure (as, in reality, all groups taking violent isolated action normally end). However, through the journey the remanescents meet a girl named Aeris which is from a cosmic race that lives by an ancient religion of holistic views and deep love for nature and its ways (including the life stream cycle) and learns the use of magic (which is the result of really condensed lifestream). They face a great and similarly infinitely powerful being called Sephirot which wishes to be god by destroying and killing all life on earth, thus absorbing all lifestream. I'm sorry for the richness of details, but I think I have to go this far to solidify my point.

As for Xenogears, I'll try to be shorter but provocative: one of the many dimensions of the storyline is a religion whose followers are called "sheep" by a decadent civilization (which invented and "manages" the religion) living up in a sterile sky. These "sheep" are turned into zombies by a chemistry involved in their religious practicing and these zombies are then processed as meat to serve as fuel by and for the sky civilization. (this game was almost freaking baned from U.S. only for its story)

My conclusion is: the above mentioned games were a powerful and complex experience for those who played it. It shyed away gamers from the previous generation and aroused curiosity of ancient greece and japan, as well as philosophy, psychology and mithology. I can't really see why great movies (Bladerunner f.eg.) and books (The Lord of the Rings f. eg.) with provocative and critical views are accepted as art and those games aren't.

As a final note, MMO RPGS are Massive Wastes of Time.

"Second Skin" - A documentary on MMORPGS.
You should check the link it takes us to Prozak's article

Overall a good show. The last portion didn't entirely convince me; I'm not sure bonding via video games is a good defense of video games in general. On the other hand it doesn't make sense to brand them as "evil." They're simply a waste of time.