Pipe Trouble’s government woes highlight gaming illiteracy

Interesting discussion of a political hoopla surrounding a Canadian provincial TV station’s support of a video game on laying an oil pipeline. In a previous job, I was evaluated by people who asked me to submit printouts of my online work; my printouts were then evaluated according to criteria that were developed for print work. A similar dynamic seems to lead to public outcry based on videos and summaries of gameplay.

Setting aside the issue that what TVO does with its editorial funds should be none of the government’s business — or why bother funding the channel at all? — if you’re going to censor the game based on the $10,000 it received from TVO, the government should also look into the money the developers received from the publicly funded Ontario Media Development Corporation (OMDC) as well.

And if you are going to do that, you should probably start making sure that the literally tens of thousands of other projects being funded with OMDC money stay within the same sort of fuzzy populist-driven rhetorical framework, though one might argue that it would change the OMDC from a business-development fund into a factory for underperforming government-approved pablum.

So, how could we have solved this problem? –Maybe someone in the government could actually sit down and play the game?

Financial Post.