I met up with Will Wright, the legendary creator of games like Sim City and The Sims, earlier this week for a wide-ranging. The Q&A is here - he talks about the games industry, why he loves the Wii, plugging straight into your brain (!) and his forthcoming game Spore.
Among other things we discussed was the government's Byron review into the affect that games and the internet have on children. He was pretty straightforward in his opinion of why we continue having this public debate
(I reported his comments this morning in this story: 'Video games do no harm to children, insists Sims creator').
His basic argument was that games are the latest cultural form to take the place of society's bugbear: and that gaming isn't far off losing its subversive image as more people who were (or are) gamers become parents.
I think the cultural acceptance of games is inevitable just because people are going to have grown up having this technology."
"It goes in fits and starts over time. If there's a school shooting, it's always a case of 'did they play games or not?'. You don't really hear much about what movies they watch or what books they read," he said. "But 50 years ago that's exactly what you heard - 'did they read To Kill A Mockingbird?' or whatever it was. They would blame social ills on anything that was at hand."
In a general sense, I tend to think he's right - but do you? And do you think this argument will ever be over?
