BRAVE NEW WORLD?
In The Times of 6 November 2004, the Business section had a report by Nic Hopkins, ‘Microsoft game set to break record’:
Microsoft is set to make software history next week. On Tuesday Bill Gates’s software group is scheduled to launch its futuristic Halo 2 computer game, which involves an alien invasion of Earth and which is expected to generate $75 million (£40.6 million) of sales on the first day. The figure easily eclipses Hollywood’s $45 million record first-day box office takings, set by Shrek 2 earlier this year.
Michael Cassius, director of Xbox – Microsoft’s games console – in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, said: “These figures show that computer games are now very firmly in the mainstream, they are as important as films in the economic and cultural sense.”
Indeed, breaking records is becoming something of a habit for the games software industry. Only last weekend another game, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, clocked up £27 million of sales, beating the UK record box office receipts generated by Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban on the first weekend of its launch. San Andreas, an ultra-violent computer game set in the ganglands of a fictional city modelled on Los Angeles, was created by Edinburgh’s Rockstar Games. It sold more than 700,000 units last weekend, almost treble the previous record of 250,000 set by its predecessor, Vice City. More than three million units of San Andreas, worth $150 million, are thought to have been sold around the world since it was released …
In John’s Gospel we read of God’s great love for the world. The challenge is to relate this to the (post-Christendom) world we actually inhabit: a rapidly changing world, the world of computer games and so much more that’s new. Even if it isn’t easy to do so, we have to try. In this chapter I want to look at the social state of the world we Westerners inhabit.