Oh yeah, video gaming is definitely the new propaganda pipeline into young people's hearts and minds.
Here, ramrod noise and mind-altering motion graphics come together and sweep over an individual seamlessly.
Here I am -- not so young -- sitting around creating
my customized Madden team, which takes a lot of time, making fictionalized versions of myself, at QB, RB, WR, TE, LB, and FS, and between takes, the various songs on the game soundtrack play, loudly... here's a few lines from Green Day's
American Idiot (and just so you know, I'm not really a punk/alt rock fan, but these lyrics definitely caught
my attention, because they're very, well, political):
Don't wanna be an American idiot.
Don't want a nation that under the new media.
And can you hear the sound of hysteria?
The subliminal mindf*ck America.
Welcome to a new kind of tension.
All across the alien nation.
Everything isn't meant to be okay.
Television dreams of tomorrow.
We're not the ones who're meant to follow.
Convincing them to walk you.
Well maybe I'm the f*ckhead America.
I'm not a part of a redneck agenda.
Now everybody do the propaganda.
And sing along in the age of paranoia...
I'm old enough to pay attention to this stuff, and discriminate, but I wonder how this stuff plays in the bedrooms, living rooms, and heads of 14-year-olds, and 21-year-olds, and all the others in the 5 million-strong Madden Nation.
You spend lot more time playing a game like Madden than you do watching a lame-ass Hollywood movie, or a cheesy non-HBO television program, so if the game is packed with powerful messages, how much deeper will these messages sink into someone's grey matter?