A response I made on the blagosphere

This is a very long response I posted on the latest entry of the www.game-ism.com blog. You can see the original here. Anyways, with something so long that I wrote on the internet, I thought it would be appropriate to talk about here.

***

What I’m personally afraid of is not the ignorance of people like Glenn Beck, but that even in their ignorance that they may be onto something that video game players have not fully explored. This isn’t to say that the guy is right, or that he’s justified at all in criticizing something he doesn’t understand, but I want to stop and slow down a bit about what you’d actually say if you did get to sit down and play some video games with this man. Now to be fair, I haven’t gotten my own hands on GTA4 yet, but I have played San Andreas and Vice City, so I’ll be using those as my main examples here.

I wouldn’t say that a game lacks any sort of rhetoric or ideology that carries a certain social message across; I think this is what people like Glenn Beck and ignorant parents are afraid of, but unfortunately they don’t have their head on right, so this whole issue gets dismissed prematurely. And it is incorrect to say that the medium (Video Games) triggers the behavior (violence). Television came under the same criticism, but both TV and VG critics miss something important: that these two media are polysemic, and WHAT is watched/played and HOW it is watched/played reveals the behavior of the individual. A video game like any of the new GTAs can be played “differently” for each person: one may rampage through the streets and create random mayhem, another may meticulously speed through each and every mission and follow the game’s story, and another may simply even cruise the streets taking the time to obey all traffic laws and be an obedient citizen for an hour or two, then shut off the game and throw a tea party afterwards. What is important though, is the algorithms that run the game structure each of these types of play. For example, Ian Bogost in his book “Persuasive Games” talks about GTA San Andreas’s food system and how it functions as social critique: As a poor black man, you need to eat but the only food available to you is fast food, which keeps knocking up your fat score. There is no alternative of “better food” offered, because (Ian Bogost feels) that this algorithmic representation actually is a statement about the reality of poor black people in LA. Now what I’d say is that the GTA games don’t cause violence like Glenn Beck says, because really it’s just in tune with all the other violence that’s already in our culture. The game ultimately is something of a “cinematic” game, and although you control Tommy, CJ, or whomever, you’re ultimately watching someone else create the carnage and deal the drugs (especially during the cutscenes). The effect is less of “you” killing people, but more like watching a Stallone movie where we spectate Tommy Vercetti killing people, and us both involved in the gameplay but also sitting back and enjoying the show to a degree. So yes, at least GTA Vice City (and probably also GTA 4) is as innocous as your usual rated R fare of action flick.

If you want to talk about violence in video games, then lets look at all those flag-waving patriotic military games that Glenn and others fail to let off the hook. The thing is that games like “America’s Army” are specifically designed to recruit and train soldiers for the army: it is a propaganda tool. Certainly many people who play the game realize this and still play because they think they are “safe” from the ideology once they realize this, but to these game players violence has in fact become “gamic” and “unreal”, such that when they enlist and are released on the field, the battlefield invokes the memory of the video game, not the other way around. Think about it: every military FPS advertises a new level of “realism”, either in graphics or physics or AI behavior. And to top it all off, these games are FIRST PERSON: You are not a player watching a soldier in war, but your perception is collapsed into that soldier’s - you are that soldier. At a certain point, the effect to the human being becomes reality mimicking the game. GTA games, on the other hand, have a certain level of “unrealism”, of playgroundness: Liberty City, Vice City, and San Andreas do not behave like the real world, nor are they literally meant to. GTA 4 may be advertised as “more realistic” (this is my own ignorance here, so please excuse me if I’m wrong about GTA4 specifically), but the GTA3 series as I understand it never really set out to “mimic” the real world, but create a fictional simulacrum of it, like an action movie. Hence the cinematic sequences, the 3rd person perspective where we “watch” Tommy Vercetti blow up cars and run over people, and this confusion between spectating and participating.

Check out Ian Bogost’s writings on Persuasive Gaming when you get the chance. You can find his blog here: http://www.bogost.com/ Also, another vital read you should consider is Mckenzie Wark’s writings on Gamer Theory, especially his chapter on gamespace entitled “Agony”. You can find the constantly updated book/text here: http://www.futureofthebook.org/gamertheory/