2 CSPs I will compare = Tomb Raider and War of the Worlds.

Tomb Raider

Lara Croft – Main character and female partaking in violence – previously unheard of. The gameplay being as violent as it is with the main character being a woman could often confuse players who read into it even slightly – what is going on? Women running around with guns?

Despite this, Lara Croft is still dressed in very revealing clothing in order to appeal to heterosexual male audience – “Male Gaze”

This mix of such opposing elements is incredibly confusing and could even leave people wondering what kind of game they are playing – what culture and time period are we in where this type of product could succeed? How is the product helping individuals, societies or communities?

War of the Worlds

War of the Worlds was broadcast in 1938 and has been said to be a cause of over 7 million American people becoming terrified, and actually believing that aliens were invading the earth.

This was due to the fact that radio was still very new at the time, and it used the codes and conventions of a news broadcast in order to make a made up explosion and invasion of aliens seem like a real world issue and crisis.

CBS likely exaggerated impact of War of the Worlds for marketing and publicity purposes – people didn’t actually kill themselves and believe martians were invading – according to Jean Baudrillard’s theories around postmodernism. He states that “people lose the ability to distinguish between reality and fantasy”.

This links to the idea that the people who consumed War of the Worlds could not discern the fact that what played out in the broadcast was but a simulation and so did not occur in the real world. The idea of hyperreality is also relevant here because although aliens obviously do not exist, our world is so undefined and unfinished that change in this manner is not shot down immediately by humanity as a collective. The realm of possibility that mankind opens up by our own ways of thinking allow foreign and alien ideas to blossom, and this is what Baudrillard discusses and defines as a “postmodern” society. The fragmented truths and complications of our world can result in massive confusion, and this is evident in the outbreak of hysteria from War of the Worlds.