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Sitting in a back room at London's Barbican ans center, which is hosting the Game On Exhibition,Henry Jenkins delivers a line that would have jaws dropping in any gathering of the rich and famous.
"I think games are going to be the most significant art form of the 2lst century," he says.
It is, you might think, exactly what would be expected of someone introduced as "a professor of gaming."
But Jenkins is much more than that. He is the director of a graduate program in comparative media studies at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston, which also covers film, television and other mass media. "Games are a significant but not the primary focus of the program," he says.
"Our approach has been to integrate games more fully into the study of media, rather than apply them in one specialized field."
The problem is that video games have yet to achieve respectability. They are often seen roughly of equal status with pornography (色情资料），providing instant contentment for the sort of people no one would invite to a dinner party.Practically everyone plays video games,but you may feel guilty if you are caught at it.
But things did not go exactly to plan. Jenkins wrote:"We were trying to start a conversation about gender,about the opening up of the girls game market, about the place of games in ‘boy culture', and so forth. But all the media wants 10 talk about is video-game violence."
The media madness reached new heights following the Columbine highschool massacre, which looked like something out of a first-person shooter.
He says: "the question is not whether video games are violent-obviously all story-telling traditions haveincluded violence and aggression-the question is:‘What are games saying about violence?' Medieval epics are full of violence, and there's a lot of blood-letting-but such stuff would never get approved for a mainstream game title."
"The difference in films is that periodically the fighting stops, you bury your head, and you remember whowas lost. That forces you to think about the consequences of violence. And games are starting to introducesomething similar,like mourning the dead. It's not beyond the industry to say something thoughtful aboutviolence."
