Dead Pixels has 41 chronicles

1. The Great Gaming Culture War
   

   Player Chronicle -- Posted on Sep 16 2009

   Dead Pixels
   9-14-09
   By Ryan M. Eft
   
   Out of all the entertainment mediums that have ever been a target for misinformed, misguided social crusaders, gaming may be the most unique, and the least understood. Most of the people who want censorship for games have never played one, and the few that have usually seem to go in determined to find something wrong.
   
   On the surface, we gamers know this is all quite ludicrous. With every passing year, gaming proves itself the most versatile of art forms. We forget that people always need something to be afraid of; it used to be rap music, and before that rock and before that television (I’m still afraid of TV, but that’s another topic). Hell, there was a time when people only read novels, those debasers of high culture, in secret. Games are just suffering a modern version of the Salem witch trials; it’s far easier to place the blame for society’s ills on an outside source than to even recognize, much less examine, the darkness inside ourselves.
   
   We cry out: why don’t these people just play the games they malign so? Then they would see they’re wrong.
   
   Well, of course they would. It would be obvious to anyone with any sense within minutes. Of course, they don’t spend any time with games for the same reason Inquisition officials never sat down and had tea with heretics. Deep down, they know games aren’t the problem any more than Chuck Berry was the problem. Ignorance, though, enables them to claim otherwise. This ignorance is entirely voluntary, a shield that enables our critics to safely place faults they do not want to face on games.
   
   Most of us assume logic will prevail. And if it doesn’t, the law of the land will. After all, the censorship of gaming is made a big no-no by the most basic principles of freedom. And in the past, every attempt to treat games differently from music, movies or anything else has been firmly slapped down.
   
   I worry, though, that most of us don’t understand the exact pitch of the battle being fought for gaming. What we assume is a natural process of unconstitutional challenges to gaming being devoured by the bigger, badder monster of the law is actually only made possible by advocates who aren’t famous and aren’t recognized, but who fight tirelessly for the rights of consumers and creative types.
   
   The October issue of Game Informer (with Crackdown 2 on the cover) features an opinion piece by Hal Halpin, President of the Entertainment Consumers Association. I’ll freely admit that I rarely give a thought to the people who make our creative freedoms possible. It isn’t that I’m not aware they’re there and fighting; it’s simply that day-to-day thoughts take precedence. I’m sure it’s the same for all my readers. Halpin addresses a number of topics we as a gaming nation don’t think about like we should, from digital distribution to net neutrality. If you don’t subscribe to GI, either start or pick up this issue. The article is on page 38, and everyone who really thinks of themselves as gamer ought to read it.
   
   I’m sure you’re wondering why I think this is so important. After all, didn’t I just point out that every challenge to gaming has been beaten back? Yes, I did. But there’s no reason to assume tomorrow will be the same as today. For being devotees of a medium that changes faster than literally any other, sometimes we fail to take an advanced view of things. Movies are something you absorb passively; they require no input or critical thought on the part of the viewer. Music requires no participation from the listener.
   
   These points could be argued on a more esoteric basis, but the fact is gaming is the only art form currently in existence that requires direct physical and mental participation on the part of the player. A fact that means endless possibilities of immersion and technological advancement to you and I simply represents a higher threat in the eyes of a certain portion of the population. The amount of non-gamers has shrunk considerably in recent years, but that only makes the hold-outs more vociferous. In the 80’s, when gaming basically involved bright colors and being told where to go and what to do, things were different. But gaming has become an octopus; it has many branches and facets and each and every one is an individual threat to what non-gamers think they know about the world. We’ve evolved from just another place on the toy shelves into a culture.
   
   If you need evidence that this culture isn’t always immediately inviting to outsiders, check out the kinds of people who just love Wii Sports. Chances are you’ll never get them to play Bioshock or even Zelda; those things are still part of a foreign world, one that we’ve lived in all our lives but that is still entirely alien to a lot of people. We’ve gotten used to our place in society, and tend to forget that not everyone is comfortable with us or our hobby.
   
   When games were still toys, they were safe. In some ways, we created trouble for ourselves by deciding games could also be art. Movies and music and books are safe because they have a definite message, a definite point, and if you don’t like the point you can just skip the container its in altogether. But with games like Grand Theft Auto IV and Fallout, both sides of the human coin are in full display, and you have to actively make a decision to be good when being bad might be more immediately tempting. Or you may have to do something bad in order to accomplish something good. That’s life. But people don’t want to think that life is that grey, and games increasingly remove the option of ignoring the darkness.
   
   Such a thing can only be described as a culture, for the people who are part of it inevitably develop a different outlook on the world. Sure, you can stock your shelves exclusively with games that aren’t part of this prevalent culture of choice, but it is so pervasive that soon out of sight will hardly mean out of mind.
   
   We think about these things, of course, but we don’t often think about them in terms of a culture. Gamer is still a title that carries a certain stigma if you aren’t one.
   
   This makes the constant attempts on the freedom of games into a culture war. In some ways in might be the most significant one since the ‘60’s. Interactivity with virtual worlds could be the future, and fear of the future makes for powerful and determined enemies. The difference now is that most of gaming’s foot soldiers, people like you and I, don’t realize we need to fight. We need to start realizing.
   
   And our challenges don’t just come from without. There are companies whose lust for money over advancement hinder our reputation and make it all that much more difficult for gaming to overcome. If we want to emerge with our rights as gamers intact, activism is not too strong a suggestion. It can be as simple as talking to people who don’t understand; sometimes that’s the magical solution.
   
   We think of games as entertainment, or art, but we should devote at least part of our thought toward how we can make them survive without being neutered. At this five seconds, we’re winning. But that’s only because people we do not see fight for us, the way they’ve been fighting for all consumers for years. If those people are defeated and we don’t step up, we could see gaming quickly lose as a major force. Whether we want to be a major force or an irrelevant sub-culture is up to us.

   
   

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Dead Pixels has 3 comment s on this chronicle.

1. Dead Pixels
   Posted On Sep 28 2009

   Sorry I'm late to comment...
   
   A-thon, my entire point is that it is not inevitable at all. Comics also never imagined all the regulation to begin with, and in their day they were uber-popular the way games are now. To beleive that if we just kick back and enjoy ourselves everything else will work itself out is a dangerous line of thought.

2. A-Thon X
   Posted On Sep 16 2009

   "This is a world you'll never understand. And you always fear what you don't understand.".
   Carmine Falcone:Batman Begins
   
   Although i think the comic book industry had it worse than video Games do. Comic books never did fully recover from the congresional hearings, But i think that becoming a gamer is inevitable, even if it is in just a casual way.

3. JackDaniels624
   Posted On Sep 14 2009

   Well done! I remember hearing about the ECA a few years go back, I like those fella's.