This Instrument Can Teach

At the end of my last Yakuza game journal, I posed a question, "why am I enthralled by a Virtual Tokyo Travel Guide where I pretend to be a criminal and beat people up?"

Looking at it now though, it seems scarily self evident. It's escapism. It's interesting (or just plain odd) mores, aesthetics, shopping, food, and activities. It's beating people up.

I now want this game for every city with interesting crime, culture, music, etc.

Brawl your way through Moscow. Brawl your way through Rio de Janeiro. Brawl your way through Mumbai.

Sure, you can just read some books, but reading about it isn't like seeing it. And it certainly isn't like doing it.

Edward R. Murrow famously said of television, "This instrument can teach."

Yakuza isn't even trying to teach that much about Tokyo. It's just trying to tell a story in that culture. Without really being intended as a teaching tool, the game teaches a lot. It's opened my eyes to how much we're missing in games.

Some things we're missing because of censorship. We can have a movie like City of God (about shocking violence, often perpetrated by and against children in Rio), but a game with the same content would be rated AO. No console manufacturer would allow it to run on their machine, and no retailer would stock it for PC.

Some things we're missing because simulation costs more than fantasy. Games like Cooking Mama and Trauma Center are shadows of what they could be. But it would cost time and money to make them more accurate and labeling them as educational could just as easily hurt sales as help them.

When Murrow, Fred Friendly, and everyone else who worked on See It Now brought down McCarthyism. Their reward was losing their sponsor and CBS phasing out the show. Their value to the nation, to the people they saved from the witch hunt, meant nothing. It was about the money. It still is.

"This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and it can even inspire, but it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise it is merely wires and lights in a box."