The Battle for Videogame Culture Isn’t Playstation vs Xbox

With Sony and Microsoft introducing their latest players this month, could videogames be a force for good?

Show Notes

November is a big month for the millions of people who devote their time and money to computer games. Within a two-day period Sony will be releasing its fifth-generation Playstation, and its main competitor, Microsoft’s newest Xbox, comes out as well. So it’s a good month to look at the culture of gaming and how it reflects the broader culture; how it reinforces it; and how it could potentially be a force for freeing us from some of the worse angels of our nature—or for trapping us further into them. Is there anyone better to ask than Megan Condis? She a professor at Texas Tech University and is the author of the 2018 book, Gaming Masculinity: Trolls, Fake Geeks, and the Gendered Battle for Online Culture.

What is Fixing the Future?

Fixing the Future from IEEE Spectrum magazine is a biweekly look at the cultural, business, and environmental consequences of technological solutions to hard problems like sustainability, climate change, and the ethics and scientific challenges posed by AI. IEEE Spectrum is the flagship magazine of IEEE, the world’s largest professional organization devoted to engineering and the applied sciences.