Culture Clash

(March 2007)

Love the Skin You're In

I recently mentioned my professional life in the games industry to a group of people whose views I respect only marginally.

I may as well have said I drowned kittens for a living.

A great flurry of chatter ensued, centered on the evils of videogames and how they will lead to humanity's extinction. “…I walked in and they were playing that x-thing,” shrilled one woman, “they were just… staring… at the screen… and it was…” mortified into speechlessness, she covered her mouth and gave me the Big Eyes, unable to vocalize the horror: grown people enjoying digital entertainment. It's an image that will keep this bluehair awake for many nights; a traumatic vision, like catching your parents having sex or playing the new Sonic the Hedgehog.

Time to unleash my famous tact.

I said: "Don't you think it's presumptuous to judge a medium you have no firsthand experience with ?”

She heard: “Ktv'x ntr xlavh ax'e gfjersgxrtre xt wrkdj q sjkar ntr lqyj vt bafexlqvk jzgjfajvpj uaxl?”

This woman's alarm stemmed from the fact that she'd been alive when print was new. It wasn't just that she assumed all games are violent; it's that they're videogames. They're newfangled. She had to walk uphill through the snow both ways to get her dreary Precambrian entertainment, and by God, she liked it.

Arguments against new entertainment have always been the same. From novels to dancing to movies to telephones to comics to rock to video games, all new things are evil, all dangerous, all sharp spears of corruption pointed at the hearts of children, who are our “most precious resource” even though they're inherently replaceable. Alarmed oldsters who see their way of life exiting stage left have throughout human history opposed new pastimes through a sustained campaign of fearmongering and, occasionally, censorship. Neonatal entertainments cause youth to lead dissolute lives and threaten the human condition. Therefore they must be destroyed.

With games, though, there's a new wrinkle strengthening the opposition. It is that games are interactive: you are “doing” these things. And pundits use that to great effect with their two central arguments:

1. That interactivity alone, regardless of how mechanically dissimilar it is to the real act (of, say, shooting a gun) is enough to train you how to do it well
   
2. That repetition desensitizes players; that, essentially, people are so stupid that games wear away their ability to distinguish fantasy from reality

Meanwhile, we gamers all employ the same basic rebuttals, infused as they are with logic and common sense. Here are mine:

1. I've only ever fired an actual gun-with-bullets type gun once and I missed the paper target every time, despite years of practice mousing over targets' heads
   
2. I committed my first murder at five, bludgeoning Joe the Gravedigger to death with a shovel in Mystery House. I've since slaughtered my way through well over a billion virtual lives (it'd be lower but for Defcon, the power pellet of videogame violence). Yet I have never killed anyone really. Though there are times I'd love to, I deny myself that joy. Three decades of hardcore gaming and I can still distinguish between right and wrong

We haven't tried new responses because we're bewildered that the ones above don't work. Squeezing a controller is not like shooting a person. And given the millions who play and the relative paucity of murders, the claims about interactivity somehow making this medium more dangerous (than all the previous humanity-threatening entertainments, from raunchy cave paintings on till now) simply cannot hold up.

Interactivity is the core of the game experience, so there's no meeting the censors halfway. Games need to be interactive or else they'd just sit there. So how should we defend it?

We don't. You can't win against these people and it's becoming annoying to try, so revel in it. I don't even bother to defend gaming anymore. I just nod sagely and say “yup, games make kids shoot up their schools.” If I feel especially loquacious I might quote a remark Jim Gee made – that of the thousands of games released, nongamers have heard of one. Who's with me? The best defense is no defense. Screw it. Games are extra evil because they're interactive, and developers are going to cause the deaths of millions. We're probably communists too (that's always a good one). Viva la violence! You bet interactivity makes games deadlier than Batman or the tango. Jack Thompson, you're right.

Interactivity is a way of simulating reality so as to allow us to experience things we couldn't or wouldn't otherwise experience. Interactivity remains the only effective mechanism for abstract knowledge transfer. Interactivity is the heart of human exchange, and its presence in games is no more unnatural than the act of two friends conversing. How can a fundamental building block of our social reality somehow distance us from that reality?

Because they said so. Stop arguing. Yay evil interactivity! There are people out there who don't want to hear it and won't, no matter how many times it's proven. Let's surprise them by flatly agreeing.

You want to talk about inability to comprehend reality? There are parents afraid that the Wiimote will present a false impression of real-life competition. There are parents who want to ban tag because it causes children to fail in front of their peers. There are parents who shove an RFID up their kids and track their every move for fear that some DS-wielding child molester might fling himself out from the shadows. And there are politicians who want to legislate games while the arctic is melting and the world is tearing itself apart. These people's connection to reality is even more tenuous than that of Sony executives or the President of the United States. And they say gamers can't tell reality from fantasy?

Next time, instead of defending the art form, tell 'em to look in the mirror.