While the Vatican attacks the videogames yet another time, accusing them of pushing the youngsters towards satanism, an apparently american company proposes a system to turn them into educational products. Mindbending inc., Inc. offers a range of programs that integrate with commercial videogames and modify their audio/video output in a biased way, to say the least. The Tranquilizer is an alternative to medicines like Ritalin that are prescribed to overvivacious children. This software deforms the video output of some violent shoot'em-ups turning the game sessions into hypnotic trips. The Intellectualizer and the Christianizer use a traditional technique of occult persuasion: scientific texts, musical scores and holy icons are superimposed to the game screens in a more or less subliminal way to acculturize or evangelize the player. On the site there are short flicks and documentaries that explain how this bizarre brainwashing system works. The site and company are of course an artistic project made by Florian Berger and Robert Praxmarer, a "reductio ad absurdum" of the accusations that state that the new technologies bear the responsibility of the good or bad education of the new generations.
Paolo Pedercini