Of course you don't, and consequently, politicians in the States are pushing for a rating system for computer games. The uproar about computer games being bad for children shows some surprising parallels to the situation of comic books in the Fifties. We may not notice it, but today's computer games might turn out to be early and primitive examples of a new art form. The April 1995 issue ran a long interview with Mike Backes, a Hollywood screenwriter who turned storywriter for computer games, who suggests just this. In the January 1995 issue, John Shirley investigates one of the more bizarre expressions of computer gaming.
Flight simulators are among the oldest computer games.
It takes the player weeks of practicing just to get good enough not to crash all the time. Every other weekend, they meet with their Pentiums in their trunks, network them and replay WW II bombing missions with minute attention to detail. Blissfully untouched by any moral qualms, their only constant trouble is the issue of who's playing who. Of course, computer games are only one aspect of Wired . In between you can get dull and unremarkable stories like the cover story of the April 1995 issue, Viacom doesn't suck .