The video game is decades old and rivals film and music in revenues, yet mainstream reporting on the medium remains sensationalistic and largely uninformed. While Europe and Asia are getting wise to the diversity of this “tenth art,” North American portrayals lag far behind. Why is this the case?
Elias Parra Cardenas, Cutesy Monster, 2005
Certains droits réservés.
When the sound of digitized gunfire echoes through my apartment, the dog living next door takes issue. Video game shotguns especially unleash the beast: all I have to do is fire up a first-person shooter and before long he is howling and yowling away in response. The dog’s owner told me that “Poochie” mistakenly thinks someone is knocking on his door, invading his territory. But dogs aren’t the only ones to react to video games with slathering froth: there’s a long history of human territorialism as well.
Consider the story of Kevin McCullough, a small-time blogger at townhall.com who wrote a short piece about the sexiness of one of 2007’s most critically acclaimed video games, Mass Effect. Entitled ‘The Sex Box Race for President’, McCullough’s article expresses revulsion that the game allows players to “hump in every form, format, multiple, gender-oriented possibility they can think of.1” Imagine, the threat that horny teenaged boys might gain access to this sex simulator and virtually enact customized sodomy on their [Se]Xboxes! This was big news.
’Real’ gamers were quick to correctly point out that McCullough’s outrage was predicated on assumptions and factual errors. You can not change a character’s breast size in Mass Effect. You can not, as he suggests, have a threesome, or lead a lifestyle of unbridled digital promiscuity. The sex scenes in question are the thirty-second apex of a lengthy space opera in which a player can choose, if they wish, to romance a fellow crew member: guy, girl, or turquoise alien. Mass Effect is a game about shooting evil robots and wallowing through intergalactic politicka, learning valuable lessons about Not Being Racist (or Species-ist, as the rote sci-fi analogy goes) along the way. McCullough, who clearly had never played Mass Effect, spent his fifteen minutes of fame on uninformed moralist hyperbole. No change, and no refunds.
Although townhall.com soon removed the article, Fox News presumably saw an opportunity to spin moral panic. A panel of ‘experts’ assembled to discuss the dangers of Mass Effect where the one authoritative source – a gentleman who had actually taken the time to place the game disc in his Xbox and then press the controller buttons to make his character, you know, do things – was swiftly shouted down. The token psychologist laughed and exclaimed, “No!” when asked whether she had tried the game she was berating2. It was as if the very suggestion affronted her sensibilities. Then the braying began as the rest of the experts ringed around this incomprehensible media artefact.
Gamers have become used to the array of sensational rhetoric employed by mainstream media to describe their pastime. The stereotypes, for example, of the lonely revenge-plotting nerd trapped in the darkness of his parents’ basement, loved only by his zits and his killing simulator. Condescending remarks about how video game characters used to have the good grace to eat their power pellets, while staying away from serious human pastimes like sex, violence and sarcastic comebacks. Frustratingly enough, this unflattering bundle of cultural myths are often propagated and reproduced time and time again by people who have never held a controller for more than five minutes.
Players, of course, fight back: the recalling of McCullough’s slanderous piece was likely due to an onslaught of online complaints from readers. Cooper Lawrence, the unwitting psychologist trotted out by Fox News as an authority, also paid a price. Angry gamers responded in kind by reducing her latest book to a one-star rating on amazon.com, writing comments along the lines of, “I haven’t read this book yet, but I am pretty certain it’s about the preparation and eating of succulent human babies” (it’s not). “Reprehensible!” as one respondent pointed out, “I used the fact that I hadn’t read Cooper’s book as an ironic example of why it’s wrong to judge things you don’t know anything about.3”
Wrong indeed. Even Jack Thompson declared the Mass Effect porno witch hunt to be without merit, which is something worth noting considering that Mr. Thompson (for those who don’t know) is the U.S. litigator who unfailingly appears at the scene of every twenty-first century teen slaying to pin the blame on video games with saucy rhetoric and tenuous, shoddy research4. According to him, a scientific link between violent game play and aggressive brain activity is enough to draw a clear, causal line from innocent youth (before) to red-eyed psychopath (after)5. Driving a car or playing a game of hockey will arguably cause approximately the same type of arousal, but nobody is campaigning to ban cars or ice.
While the video game industry is lucky to have swarms of fans willing and able to informally e-battle on its behalf, millions upon millions of gamers – the vast majority of whom have not killed nor raped a turquoise alien – sit stoically in a position of flux: “the older generation just doesn’t understand. But at least they’ll soon be dead.” This is a surprising response given that the average game player is older than most would suppose: 33 at last count6. But not everyone has the time to engage in online zealotry. Most are waiting patiently for mainstream news coverage to catch up, to take on the same nuances that contemporary games themselves are now beginning to exhibit. Last year’s critically lauded BioShock, for example, was a shooting game, which also delivered a poignant critique of libertarianism, inspiring many players to pick up (but not necessarily read) Ayn Rand’s sizable novel Atlas Shrugged.
Games as Art, Games as Industry
Iconic film critic Roger Ebert once said that video games would never achieve the greatness held by more firmly entrenched media, such as literature and cinema7. Shortly thereafter, France bestowed Knighthood in the Order of Arts and Literature upon Shigeru Miyamoto, the man behind Super Mario. Some French theorists even pinpoint video games as the “tenth art”8. This leads to an interesting contrast in opinion: who best knows what art is, Roger Ebert or continental theorists? My bet is on the one that contributed New Wave cinema, Roland Barthes, and Surrealism to the world, not the man with the “Two Thumbs Up!” quote on every DVD box in Blockbuster. The European Commission, incidentally, declared this year that video game development will be funded with tax credits due to the “cultural importance” of the medium9. South Koreans see games like Starcraft as equivalent to professional sport. Meanwhile, in North America, video games are still represented as accessories to murder.
So, who cares if this side of the pond is lagging behind other parts of the world in taking video games seriously? Perhaps those who enjoy talk of money. Video games are beating ‘traditional’ media in the all-important economic sense. Games have outsold the Hollywood box office in the U.S. for several years now, and NPD Group research shows 2007 continuing the trend: the video game sector is growing exponentially compared to music and film10. Can we really afford to continue trivializing such a booming business sector?
The paratext industry which supports and bolsters gaming – magazines, review and fan websites, game guides – has become a significant player in and of itself11. Game reviewers are offered junkets and all-inclusive trips to exotic locales where giant robots battle for their amusement, with the implication that Exotic Locale Giant Robot Battler (not a real game) will, in turn, receive a spicy 10-out-of-10 review. Things are shaping up suspiciously like the movie business, but without much accountability anywhere. Reviewers are sometimes fired for giving mediocre scores to mediocre games, especially when many, many advertising dollars are spent to argue the contrary12. It is all very scandalous but it’s also very subterranean unless, of course, the release of an anticipated triple-A title floods urban centres with marketing material while news outlets scramble to decode the hype.
Gaming subculture is simultaneously monolithic and nuanced, requiring specialized knowledge and, above all, a modicum of experience with the medium to understand. The Internet hosts the brunt of these discourses: from stories about being beaten down, mob-style, by Chinese gold farmers in World of Warcraft to speculation about industry mergers and corporate reshuffling. Images of knitted toques adorned with Final Fantasy characters juxtapose with discussion on Barack Obama’s latest speech in which he offhandedly compares gamers to laggards. Scan the pages of Kotaku for a sampling of gaming topics, or check out some of the academic musings on the litigation of virtual worlds on Terra Nova. Game players are interested in a vast variety of things, game-related or otherwise; they are not all-encompassed by embarrassing stereotypes. Video games are simply another entertainment medium, the new kid wedged awkwardly into society alongside film, television, books, and music.
From a media ecology perspective, it makes sense that print news and TV documentaries paint gamers in unflattering tones. After all, consumer time is limited and as video games steal precious minutes and hours, other types of entertainment suffer ratings and revenue losses. The battle for screen supremacy is fully underway, but why can’t the old guard fight fair?
When critics like Kate Muir, writing for the U.K. Times, lament that gamers are “man-teens sitting before their kiddy consoles like huge manatees”13, they are doing everyone, and especially female gamers, a disservice. Women over the age of 18 represent a significantly larger portion (31%) of the game-playing population than do the normalized gamer stereotype of boys under the age of 17 (20%)14. North American game player gender is approaching parity. Then why the pithy responses based on outmoded representations? Simply enough, these myths are cultural shorthands, and circulate for lack of better understanding. (Bonus points: how ironic that Muir’s criticism of the “infantile” nature of video games appears alongside links to more ‘mature’ subjects, like fashion (image of guys wearing Tudor-style ruffles) and Scarlett Johansson’s breasts (very important).
Canadians are well placed to stand against this current of denigrating hyperbole. Triple-A industry companies like Electronic Arts and Ubisoft are based in Vancouver and Montreal, respectively, and smaller development studios are at work in most major Canadian cities. Even Canadian television treats video games with a level of respect, which is well above the currently ankle-high bar. CBC’s JPod sitcom, based on the titular book by Douglas Coupland, and the Gamer Revolution documentary each at least try to explore the complexities of the culture. We’re nowhere near as integrative as France, but at least the beginnings are there.
And that’s all game players should reasonably expect at this point: an attempt by people to understand, either by picking up a controller and playing or by doing some research which isn’t first based on media effects, before breaking a story. This is a minimum standard of competence enforced in other media but mysteriously absent when talking about games. A departure from adding, ‘on intuition,’ to the laughable pile of factually incorrect, knee-jerk reporting which only serves to publicly embarrass the writer. When dogs bark instinctively at shotgun sounds that they don’t quite understand, they set other dogs barking. This makes for a lot of noise, but it’s not really helping matters.
References
1. Although the original article has been removed, McCullough’s ‘The Sex Box Race for President’ can be read here: <http://boards.1up.com/zd/board/message?board.id=games&thread.id=551350> (Accessed February 28, 2008).
2. The FOX News segment entitled “Se”Xbox can be seen here: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKzF173GqTU> (Accessed February 28, 2008).
3. The amazon.com page for Cooper Lawrence’s book The Cult of Perfection: Making Peace with Your Inner Overachiever, can be found at: <http://www.amazon.com/Cult-Perfection-Making-Peace-Overachiever/dp/1599211793/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1204477767&sr=1-1> (Accessed February 28, 2008).
4. Anderson, C.A. and B.J. Bushman. “Media Violence and the American Public: Scientific Facts Versus Media Misinformation” American Psychologist 56 (2001): 477-489.
Gentile, D., Lynch, P., Linder, J., & Walsh, D. “The Effects of Violent Video Game Habits on Adolescent Hostility, Aggressive Behaviours and School Performance” Journal of Adolescence 27 (2004): 5-22;
Klopfer, P., Bakshi, S., et al. “Kids, TV Viewing, and Aggressive Behaviour” Science 297 (2002): 49-50.
5. Anderson, C.A., & Bushman, B.J. “Effects of Violent Video Games on Aggressive Behavior, Aggressive Cognition, Aggressive Affect, Physiological Arousal, and Prosocial Behavior: A Meta-Analytic Review of the Scientific Literature” Psychological Science 12 (2001): 353-359.
6. Entertainment Software Association. “Top 10 Industry Facts” <http://www.theesa.com/facts/top_10_facts.php> (Accessed on February 28, 2008).
7. A summary of Roger Ebert’s criticisms of video games as art can be found at <http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20051130-5657.html> (Accessed February 28, 2008).
8. Wolf, M.J.P., & Perron, B. The Video Game Theory Reader. New York: Routledge, 2003: 8.
9. Gamasutra’s coverage of France and the EU’s decision to fund video games as art can be found on their website, <http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3523/video_games_officially_art_in_.php> (Accessed February 28, 2008).
10. Eric Bangerman, “Growth of Gaming in 2007 Far Outpaces Movies, Music” <http://arstechnica.com> (Accessed February 28, 2008).
11. The phrase paratext was taken, in its contextual use, from: Consalvo, M. Cheating: Gaining Advantage in Video Games. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2003.
12. The story of Jeff Gerstmann’s firing from GameSpot can be found here: <http://www.1up.com/do/blogEntry?bId=8587828&publicUserId=4561231> (Accessed February 28, 2008).
13. Muir, Kate. “The Dark Ages” The Times Online <www.times.co.uk> (Feb. 4, 2008). Accessed February 28, 2008.
14. Entertainment Software Association. (2008). “Top 10 Industry Facts.”