Shoot-em-ups go on AS-level syllabus

Vice City: Possible subject for textual analysis

Studying conflict and competition in video and computer games is an option in a new AS-level media studies course.

Developed by the OCR exam board for next year, it is a new unit to run alongside four existing topics: consumerism and lifestyle magazines, celebrity and the tabloid press, music culture and radio, and gender and television situation comedy.

But OCR chief examiner Peter Fraser, head of media studies at Long Road Sixth Form College in Cambridge, dismissed visions of rooms of students hunched over games consoles running such things as Grand Theft Auto: Vice City.

"It's about getting them to analyse the culture that's all around them," he said.

"We will be introducing them to case studies of particular games and inviting them to analyse things they might use themselves.

"They will be looking at the whole genre from Pong to, yes, Vice City of you want to include it," he said.

Role-playing

So they might investigate the controversy around a game such as Vice City - billed by its publishers as "a story of one man's rise to the top of the criminal pile".

Mr Fraser said it was a huge and growing industry. A former student was now lead programmer on the game developed from the John Carpenter movie The Thing.

One of the interesting new developments was the convergence of the TV and the PC, as seen in the BBC's FightBox championship.

A number of Long Road students worked with researchers from London University's Institute of Education investigating how youngsters use computer games - focusing on the role-playing genre and in particular Baldur's Gate, Final Fantasy, and the online game Anarchy Online.

As part of the study the college was given one X-Box console for them to use.

OCR says its specifications for the AS-level support the rationale set out in the aims of the Unesco declaration on media education:

"We live in a world where the media are omnipotent: an increasing number of people spend a great deal of time watching television, reading newspapers and magazines and listening to the radio.

"Children already spend more time watching television than they do attending lessons in school.

"We need to accept the impact of the media and appreciate their importance as elements of culture in today's world. Arguments for the study of the media as a preparation for responsible citizenship are formidable now and with the development of communications technology ought to be irresistible."