Ready Player One (Common Text 2014-2015): Films

From Pong and Donkey Kong to Final Fantasy and Tomb Raider, this program traces the remarkable history of video games by studying the companies, technologies, and economics that are fueling the industry in Japan, the U.S., and France. It also seeks to understand the driving force behind the video game’s phenomenal cultural penetration while offering insights into the rigorous development and aggressive multichannel marketing of games and game consoles. The inevitable convergence of the video game and film industries and the impact of the Internet as a global gaming environment are also considered.

With annual sales figures mounting up into the billions of dollars, video games have reshaped the leisure landscape. Who are the brains behind the big-budget masterpieces such as Star Wars: Force Commander and the Turok series, and what is it like to be part of a game development team? In this program, creative directors, writers, designers, artists, programmers, composers, sound effects specialists, and testers from Nintendo of America, LucasArts Entertainment, and Acclaim Studios step through every stage of the game development process, from initial concept to last-minute prerelease debugging.

Tens of thousands of people “live” there, and tens of millions of U.S. dollars are exchanged there. Welcome to SecondLife.com! After introducing viewers to this compelling virtual world, You Only Live Twice grapples with overlapping in-world/real-world issues ranging from cybersex and the psychological repercussions of virtual sex crimes, to intellectual property rights fraud, to taxation on hard cash made on virtual cross-border sales, to the medical use of Second Life as a schizophrenia simulator. Insights and opinions are provided by SL creator Philip Rosedale; virtual property development millionaire Ailin Graef; Play Money author Julian Dibbell; Lauren Gelman, of Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society; New York University’s Clay Shirky; Ted Castronova, author of Synthetic Worlds; and others. Contains mature themes and explicit imagery.

In her talk, Ali Carr-Chellman pinpoints three reasons boys are tuning out of school in droves, and lays out her bold plan to re-engage them: bringing their culture into the classroom, with new rules that let boys be boys, and video games that teach as well as entertain.

Anita Sarkeesian talks about online misogyny in the video game community, and her experience with harassment because of her work. She is a media critic and the creator of Feminist Frequency, a video webseries that explores the representations of women in pop culture narratives.