video games
Filmmaker Isaac Solotaroff on Wham! Bam! Islam!
Director Isaac Solotaroff talks about using Wham! Bam! Islam! and the recently released Hunt For the Noor Stone Interactive game to promote cultural understanding.
The interactive game, Hunt for the Noor Stone, just launched and features an in-depth, standards-aligned study guide for middle school students. The inspiration for the game came from THE 99, the comic book series featured in Solotaroff’s documentary Wham! Bam! Islam! which aired on Independent Lens last week, and is currently streaming for free on PBS.org. BTB caught up with Soloratoff last week to ask — why a game, and why now?
Who are you and what do you do?
My name is Isaac Solotaroff and on my good days I get to work on documentaries and on my bad days I try to figure out how to raise money to make documentaries.
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More Than a Game
World Without Oil
It’s been reported that the digital game industry is now bigger than the film industry, and dollar for dollar, this has been debated. What can no longer be debated is that, eyeball for eyeball, more people now play games than watch films.
A study released by a marketing research group reported that more Americans play video games than go to the movies. Carnegie Mellon University Professor, Jesse Schell claims that there are more FarmVille players than there are Twitter accounts: 75 million players per month. And with the explosion of mobile games such as Angry Birds and Doodle Jump for iPhone and social games like Mafia Wars on Facebook, games are taking up even more of our time. In a recent presentation at the TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conference, game designer and Director of Games Research & Development at the Institute for the Future, Jane McGonigal said that by the age of 21, a majority of kids will have spent 10,000 hours playing online games. And it’s not only kids playing games anymore. In fact, another recent study by PopCap Games, a popular social gaming company, found that the average player of online social games is a 43-year-old woman. So much for the stereotypical image of a gamer being a kid in his basement mowing down zombies.
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