Translation of an article from Libération.fr:

http://www.ecrans.fr/Jeux-sans-frontieres,2749.html

The big news of the purchase of Activision by Vivendi-Blizzard offers us an almost perfect prism to understand the divergent and multicolored rays that the video game industry produces, constantly and in all directions. Throughout the purchase is a crystallized image of the state of affairs. The abundance of economic and financial commentaries on the purchase has judged it as having great strategic influence as well as appreciating as logical and sensible.

The fact that an industry leader of French origins has bit into an American equivalent and threatens at the same time to dethrone the Number One of the industry Electronic Arts, also American, has certainly given some volume the French media's coverage of this story. But events of this nature have also brought to our consciousness that video games are indeed the battleground of games with huge stakes that are industrial and economic, but also cultural: one can begin to read in the chronicles of these sorts of tactics and alliances a geopolitics exactly as one could with Hollywood film.

But this affair could be the occasion to point out a great truth about this industry, which only contradict the previous statement in appearance. In essence: there are no national “leaders” in video games, which is undoubtedly a large, stateless, universal medium. The more it grows and multiplies, the more games escape the national determinisms that had brought about its origins. The question of a game's nationality is ridiculously empty when one compares it to the equivalent question asked of films (“Korean cinema”) or books (“Russian literature”). The power of the Japanese game industry, for example, is from having invented icons and a language that aren't international but "world", like the music of the same name. Similarly, the quality of a “French” studio such as Ubisoft owes everything to the intelligence of its global heritage, such as the quality of its “United Colors of Benneton” teams that compose its studios in Shanghai, Montpelier, or Montreal. Video games, its art, its business, and its culture are global: They are forming the first world government.