Issues

There are a few issues that arise from this new media technology; firstly the small problem is that nobody is watching the online console gaming. The gamers themselves host the matches so there s no need for a host to control the game. Who says what is right and wrong within the game and are there actually any rules. This lets things that can not be controlled happen, for example from experience I know that people will ‘shout abuse’ at others online on the ‘Xbox live’ function on the Xbox 360. This cannot be controlled by a person in charge as it is only the voice communication. The user can mute the other players but then it stops normal communication. This is just one thing that can be classed as a problem over the internet that can not be controlled by the makes of the game.

Another thing that would be considered a major issue is the illegal activity that happens on online social games such a ‘second life’. There was a report that a paedophile ring was made on second life and people were able to go and join in with sex with clearly small children. They may not have been small but the fact is that they were shown to be like this. The moral question is why the creators didn’t remove these people rather than letting them do this. They said that it was because they didn’t know about it. This is the problem really; the game is so big and expands so fast that they don’t have time to check everything that is built. This is a small report on this issue on second life.

There is another small issue that these games create, this is that a large amount of people don’t leave there houses anymore as they can interact with new people and friends over these games so there is no need for them to go out. This does eventually create people that are hooked to the game and become engulfed in the computer. This will eventually create a moral panic for society that doesn’t need to leave there home as they can do every thing from a computer.

For games that are not online there is still the concern about those people that don’t leave there console and will play all day, this means they become dependant on it and can not do anything else. This then become the bad cases where children will go mad from playing a violent game and then someone gets seriously hurt. People then feel it is the games fault, where really it is the consumer who takes the game to literally or just is underage so doesn’t understand the difference between right and wrong. This creates the panic about violent games, which will cause companies to stop selling the games and them loosing money.