Charlie Brooker: How Videogames Changed the World

I watched Charlie Brooker's informative documentary on the history and influence on video games and found it as entertaining as it was educational. But the truly enlightening part had to be on the founding of the ESRB brought about by games like Mortal Kombat.

I liked his take on the rating system being a means of games developers being able to begin targeting gamers of older audiences and having the fixed expectation of the consumer knowing what was in the game, so there would be no complaints about it.

Of course it wasn't quite that simple, but it makes sense to an extent. I figure that it is a point worth mentioning at some point in my written work - indeed I think I now feel compelled, almost obliged to write a section on the ESRB and it's founding, if not the rating system for games as a whole, because of their importance as official mediators of game content. When discussing the necessity of mature themes in games, the rating of the game becomes a very important variable.

Brooker touches on games like Doom, Minecraft and Pong, exploring the dark corners and bright sides of games and what they have brought to the world. I'm glad that gaming's positive influence is being recognized for once.