STEVEN POOLE
Trigger Happy
Shoot first, ask questions later
There is a long history of debate about what constitutes a videogame, and before that what constitutes a game of any kind. Is it the most divine activity of humankind? Is it practice for hunting or war? Is it the opposite of productivity? Or, in 2020, is it mainly a vehicle for advertising?
The dystopian possibility that at least some people believe the last definition to be true is raised by the recent example of 2K’s basketball game NBA 2K21. Presumably in a bid to be noticed for sheer evil, which was particularly difficult in 2020, 2K added unskippable adverts to the loading screen of the game a month after its full-priced release, thus ensuring a similar outcry to the one when it did exactly the same thing last year.