Why Video Games as a Senior Comp?

This is a picture of my finished arcade cabinet in the Allegheny College art gallery. The red line behind the cabinet was part of another student's work but ironically it set off the red present on the cabinet's buttons and title panel.

When I had to think of an idea for a comp, I already knew that I wanted to do something game related. This common thread of games seemed to reappear in most of my major works at Allegheny. My other works had been board games and I decided I wanted to reverse engineer video games into an educational form addressing a social niche.

At the beginning of the comp I had the thought to continue on the theme of racism, but this focus became narrowed into addressing a single social niche of the stereotyped modern day terrorist image. I discovered that since the September 11th attacks most people are trained to think that Middle Eastern people are exclusively terrorists. The media seems to propagate this message and continue to sell it to the American people. This really didn’t hit home until I discovered all of the anti-terrorist games in arcades and on the net contained about the same theme. The hero is always the white all American stereotype and the villains are always another culture, or race.

I had reasoned that if games were being used to condition people’s thinking then perhaps I could create games which have the opposite effect. I downloaded ROM copies of the games and an emulator to run them on because of the availability of free ROMs on the internet. I began searching for ROM games that had a simple story line or had a plot that already had a subliminal twist to it. I found three games that had the criteria that I was searching for and then began to alter those games to educate people and show them that they are in fact being conditioned to think certain ways.