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Raven 1
Charles Raven
Professor Mikki Tatum
Humanities 2250
25 February 2018
This Is Not a Paid Endorsement
At the risk of not doing the assignment correctly, I am gonna take a gamble and hope that
my plan here works out. I would like to use video games as my examples and show that they too
are forms of postmodern entertainment that influence society to an extent that may equal or even
surpass other forms. My social construct of choice is rebellion against authority, a construct that
has been at the forefront of the postmodern movement since its beginnings. I will show through
the examples of Final Fantasy VII and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas that people in a
postmodern society do not feel the need to trust authority as they might have in a bygone era.
In general, society has been rebelling against authority in some form or another for as
long as we can remember however, during the 1960’s, the counterculture movement began to
push back against their parents generation because they disagreed with the way the world was
going. They did not want to go to war, they did not want to be materialistic, and they wanted
their own personal freedom to express themselves without consequence. But this movement died
down in the 1970’s when many of their goals were becoming mainstream but also, because of
rising economic troubles. (Anderson 1995) Throughout the rest of the twentieth century
however, the spark had been set aflame and postmodernist media from Star Wars to NWA were
sending the message that in postmodern America, you need not believe everything you are told.
During the 1980’s and 1990’s, the modern video game revolution started and with it
came an artform that could speak to its viewer/listener in ways that no other medium could.
Raven 2
With literature, you imagined through words what characters did, and in film, you watched it
happen, but in video games, you did it yourself. You lived through a story and came out of it a
new person. The decisions made and the actions taken were up to you, and if you made the
wrong move, you were punished for it. The influence a great story can have on a person is
astounding and video game story arcs are no different.
In Final Fantasy VII, you play a protagonist who, from the very minute you start the
game, is fighting for the planet (albeit as a hired mercenary, but I am not in the business of hair-
splitting) against a powerful company that, for all intents and purposes, is running the world you
live in; Shinra Corp. They are robbing the planet of its life force in order to power their
technologically driven city, all in the name of the might dollar (or in this case, gil). You join a
terrorist organization (Yup, terrorist. This was clearly pre-9/11), whose goal is to destroy the
