Market forces mean that girls of 7 upwards have been flocking to the designer-style web game to create fashion-icon avatars on the pull and on the pill complete with lowest-common denominator must-have accessories:
- Racist character stereotypes. Check.
- Tasteless storyline threads. Check
- Inappropriate sexual content. Check.
- Pushing parental boundaries. Check.
Blighty Arts, the producers of the game. say My Minx is 'harmless, tongue-in-cheek entertainment'; but they can't even spell the name of their products (sic, 'My Minix') despite all the glitz of their user-interface design.
The relentless push for eyeballs means content gets dragged to the gutter in an unregulated market. Hence the internet and the likes of Fox TV can dream up grotesque virtual and reality freak shows with impunity from regulators.
The licence-fee arrangements in the UK enshrine public-taste standards, which at least keeps some of the wildest ideas off our screens. A constant barrage of tasteless programming eventually become boring, so it always needs to recruit new viewers and participants; hence the relentless, deliberate content pitched at children.
This is the media content equivalent of the drug pusher, and it isn't a pretty sight. The logical extension of such forces to give the mob want they want is ever more graphic sex and violence aimed at progressively younger audiences. This vision of society celebrates a regression to a pre-Enlightenment, violent past.
But perhaps, as the internet is so pervasive, the gloves are already off when it comes to content: at least until the next swing of the pendulum that attempts to impose a moral framework on a feral, free-for-all society where anything goes ... and frequently does.
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