Where Politics And Video Games Collide

This guy's article really is self-cancelling. He rightly observes that every generation has its broad cultural causes that the older generations pooh-pooh becuase the older generations do not recognize the undercurrents of real nuggets of respectability and social message in them that the young see (and later vidicate as respectable). Then in the next breath he goes on to identify the current broan cultural cause, and blithely and completely irony-freely proclaim from his perspective of the older generation how this current cultural cause clearly breaks the tradition by having in fact no undercurrent of real social message or value and being actually mindless.

I mean its like yes, that is precisely the pattern which even he laid out: of course he cant see the underlying value that the young generation claims to see in it, thats exactly the pattern he laid out as how it always happens. I mean its fine and good to say to the participants at the time (which was later affirmed in retorspect) that the beat generation was about skewering decency witht he aim or replacing it with an affirmative value steeped in buddhism and personal sexual expression, but you can bet your dollars to donuts that the old fogeys of that day were just focusing on what they sasw as the debased and mindless drug culture of say a timothy leary, or the without redeeming value appeals to the pruirient interests of Elvis's gyrating hips even as they were writing how this new youth movement was nothing like thier youth movement of the 20's (centered on lets say ragtime and the foxtrot) because THEIR movement though it was rebellious actually stood for something, unlike these current obnoixous, dirty hippies and their pursuit of sensation and profit.

I mean it doesnt take a rocket scientist to realize that the underpinning social message of GTA is some cocktail of a dose of nihilism and skepticism, with a level of biting satire and fondness for absurdity, and a blithe attitude towards simulated violence (which is directly analogous to blithe attitude towards real sexual acts or real drug use of the 60's counterculture) that is just a natural extension of looking critically at the world today from the perspective of the stereotypical 'young' (and here i mean 18-30ish) person. All it takes is to be one of those people in that demographic to see those, which is exactly the litmus test this critic lays out at the outset, just before skewering the younger generation from the fogey perspective and finding it (unsurprisingly) wanting.