The Blog of Anders Nissen

mandag, januar 30, 2006

Angry At Incompetent People With Power!

No, I'm not talking about George Bush. I'm talking about something far more important; namely why the Danish computer game hit-series Hitman didn't make it into the "kulturkanon"! The "kulturkanon" is a recently compiled collection of the most interesting cultural aspects of Denmark.

The government had appointed this task to a number of expert groups on different fields, each of which had to find a twelve items to the "kulturkanon".
Among other things, the design group discussed multimedia designs and had decided that at least one multimedia item would be among the twelve finally chosen items. The main choice for this item was Hitman.

Here's a translated quote from the discussion about whether or not to include the game Hitman in the "kulturkanon". Merete is the leader of the design expert group and Ursula is a ceramic and a member of the group.

Ursula: I tried putting myself a little into it. The person who's the character in the Hitman title. He's called "freedom fighter". He's typically an American or a Danish or western soldier, it isn't a freedom fighter. He's a Bush-man. You have to be as stupid as Bush to fight the evil by being this good.

Merete: But it doesn't have anything to do with the Iraq war. It really doesn't.

Ursula: Yes it does, it's a glorification of the good fighting the evil, right. In the most primitive way. If this isn't propaganda then what is? It's about form and contents and I can't vouch for the contents at all.

The outcome? Not a single item of multimedia design were included in the final package that the design expert group presented!

I don't get angry easily, but allowing people to judge something they are completely and utterly incompetent at judging really pisses me off. Instead of just keeping her ignorance to her self, she had to embarrass the viewers with the baffling display of obvious wrong facts about something she clearly knew nothing about.
I would have just laughed at it, had it not been important for the cultural development in Denmark and to what children are being taught in schools.
To me, this has shown beyond a shadow of a doubt that the "kulturkanon" is totally worthless.

You can watch a video clip of the discussions here (about 24-32 minutes into the clip).