JOHN THE
OBSCURE ™
©
2007
‘Interactivity’:
The New ‘Jungle Music’
While fumbling toward a
critical theory of video games a couple of years ago, I tossed in a
footnote about movie reviewer Roger Ebert’s inane declaration that video games
aren’t art because they’re interactive. To Ebert, anything that descends so low
as to actively involve the peasants in its own audience lacks the magic stamp
of “authorial control.” (Who exactly is the author of a movie, which is
typically made by a cast, crew, studio staff, outside production house staff
and test-marketing teams collectively numbering in the hundreds, is a mystery
I’ll leave Rog to answer.)
What’s fascinating—and frightening—is
that would-be censors have been making exactly the same argument in legal
terms. Interactivity means that video games aren’t art, they say, so they’re
not protected by the First Amendment.
It’s no coincidence that Ebert’s
aesthetic argument and the censors’ legal argument are essentially the same.
Media censorship is always a reactionary aesthetic freak-out over the
lower-class rabble getting too noisy (particularly if the children can hear them). And the censorship always specifically
attacks and attempts to devalue the aspect of the art that is seen as the most
proletarian. As the African-American creators of jazz and rock were once
targeted by the racist firestorm over “jungle music,” so the (perceived)
social-misfit players of video games are now targeted by a disparaging usage of
“interactive.”
Courts have given the legal assaults an Ebertian thumbs-down, usually while expressing surprise
that nobody’s heard of the First Amendment. But such claims will continue until
all the old people die and the video game generation is fully in control of
presidencies, governorships and legislatures as the rock ’n’ roll generation is
now. That’s the pattern of all pop-culture-era censorship frenzies.
Indeed, so clear is this pattern that we
should be legislating against it, not
against video games. Any time an elected official promulgates an art censorship
law that is patently in violation of the First Amendment (including sales bans
and rating systems), they should be automatically
impeached for breaking their oath of office to uphold the Constitution. Sure,
freedom of speech usually wins out in the end, but always at great personal
cost to artists and significant financial cost to taxpayers.
Shooting down an obviously
unconstitutional video game sales ban in
While painting video games as
crime-creating cabinets of Dr. Caligari, the elected
officials behind these laws are the real criminals, knowingly breaking one of
our democracy’s most sacred precepts and freely wasting government funds for
short-term personal political gain. There should be a video game about them
called “Grand Theft Autocrat,” and it should be bloody.
Of course, what actually tends to happen
is that they carry on merrily like would-be 1980s rock censors Al and Tipper
Gore did, wrapped in the glory of protecting the youth that has sheltered
politicians ever since they executed Socrates.
So, despite nine censorship laws shot
down in the past six years, the assault on video games in general and their “interactivity”
in particular is likely to continue.1 Thus, let us know our enemy.
The interactivity of video games has been
generally demonized as a force uniquely suited to turn children into lust
murderers. Video game interactivity certainly is new and has a rich array of
psychological effects and curiosities.2 But censors, as they always
do, seize on it solely for its novelty, which to them is synonymous with
threatening. And yet, there’s nothing new about their pseudoscientific
arguments; they now say that the new powers of video games will make kids kill,
just like they used to say the new powers of movies will make kids kill, or the
unique powers of comic books will turn kids into juvenile delinquents, or the
unique powers of heavy metal records will turn kids into suicidal Satanists.3
The “threat” is always new; the mistrust of our own kids is always old.
In 2000,
“Maybe video games are different. They
are, after all, interactive,” Posner wrote. “But this point is superficial, in
fact erroneous. All literature (here broadly defined to include movies,
television, and the other photographic media, and popular as well as highbrow
literature) is interactive; the better it is, the more interactive. Literature
when it is successful draws the reader into the story, makes him identify with
the characters, invites him to judge them and quarrel with them, to experience
their joys and sufferings as the reader’s own. Protests from readers caused
Dickens to revise ‘Great Expectations’ to give it a happy ending, and tourists
visit sites in
OK, so it’s not great as art theory and
makes it pretty clear that Posner never actually played a video game. But it’s
a great legal argument: If you want to demonize interactivity, good luck doing
so in a way that isn’t unconstitutionally vague and overbroad.
In 2005, the state of
The suit was founded on the same old
superstition that interactivity is a homicide-maker. But it also apparently
pioneered the legal version of Ebert’s argument that interactivity means games
aren’t art, and thus aren’t speech, and thus can be censored.
District Court Judge George Steeh was kind enough to articulate the defendants’ own
argument: “The defendant concedes that the First Amendment fully protects the
expressive element in video games [the story, art, music and other
traditionally accepted artistic elements] but argues that the interactive
functional element, which is not present in other forms of electronic media,
can be distinguished and should not be considered protected speech.”
In other words, the state argued that
interactivity—the ability to play the game—is not part of the artform but more like a TV remote control. It can therefore
be regulated like a tool. Of course, if that is so, then interactivity has no
psychological content or effect, and there’s no reason for the ban in the first
place. Whoopsie!
But Steeh
didn’t make that argument. He did much better. He said that not only is
interactivity art, but it may in fact privilege the video game medium above
others rather than denigrate it into something worthless and evil.5
“The interactive, or functional aspect,
in video games can be said to enhance the expressive elements even more than
other media by drawing the player closer to the characters and becoming more
involved in the plot of the game than by simply watching a movie or television
show,” Steeh wrote. “In video games, it is the player
who controls the actions of the character and often determines the outcome of
the game. With the rapid advancements of video game technology and new
innovations, such as online gaming, video games are becoming more open ended
with more possibilities to interact with other players and control the fate of
the characters and the worlds they inhabit. It would be impossible to separate
the functional aspects of a video game from the expressive, inasmuch as they
are so closely intertwined and dependant on each other in creating the virtual
experience.”
That a jurist is a better art critic than
one of our most famous movie reviewers is a symptom of a culture that greets
all exciting new artforms with superstitious
hostility and legal bullying. Steeh pegged that, too,
emphasizing that the
So it always is. “Jungle music” went from
bans and riots to a semi-hallowed Hall of Fame. Video games will follow a
similar path, and these court cases ironically prove they’re well on their way.
To quote new video
game culture hero Curt Schilling (himself apparently paraphrasing Gandhi),
“First they ignore you, then they mock you, then they fight you, then you win.”6
1 Information
about the court cases involving video game ban attempts, including some
excerpts from the language of the decisions, was provided to me by Dan Hewitt,
director of media relations for the Entertainment Software Association (ESA),
an industry lobby.
2 At least in my case, I can specify that some of
these effects are socially positive. Self-understanding is one such benefit
(common to all art, of course); for example, strategy games startled me with
the revelation that I greatly prefer offense to defense. No surprise to any of
my readers, I’m sure, nor to anyone who might recall my high-school motto,
“Live to offend.” But I had always viewed myself as more shy and defensive.
More Puritanically, the challenges of video games
always result in concrete rewards and have thus encouraged me to become more
tenacious in seeing things through and overcoming my tendency toward rapid
frustration. Video games have truly changed my life in that way, and are in no
small part responsible for the existence of this very column.
3 The censorship of video games is now being
retroactively applied the old bogeyman of comic books; the exact same rating
system used on video games is now appearing on some comic books (starting in
late 2007 or early 2008). Government and industry will say that rating systems
are informational, not censorship; but it is clear from movie and comic books
that rating systems always result in direct censorship of content and entire
themes. (It is also self-censorship, which is worse than government censorship,
because there’s no samizdat fighting of it.) Comic books were crippled for
decades by the “comics code” before finally giving it
up—virtually overnight, comic books became a relevant, moving, beautiful, adult
medium again. The poison of the movie rating system spread first to pop records
(I still await a violent, rape-filled opera to bear a “Parental Advisory”
sticker), then to TV, then to video games, and now back to the comics. Fasten
your seat belts and prepare for many things to deeply suck. A government-imposed
rating system would have zero chance of surviving a constitutional challenge;
if I was a player in any of these industries, I would dare the government to do
its worst and leave their stupid little number systems and naive fantasies of what
kids are like off my art. But industries go along with this because government
officials are free to slander and libel anyone with impunity, which in turn can
affect sales anyway. I have a better legislative solution: remove government
officials’ immunity from slander and libel suits regarding artistic products
only. (In an amusing side note, I originally wrote “Parental Lyrics” in the
previous sentence, an unconscious reference to a joke warning label I once
created that read, “Explicit Advisory: Parental Lyrics,” a foretelling of the
censored future.)
4 The lack of an appeal is according to Hewitt. ESA
was the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit that overturned the ban.
5 I would add that interactivity is the core
art-within-the-art of video games, much like editing arguably is in film.
Incidentally, editing is actually quite interactive, as its meaning on the
screen is mentally distilled by the viewer from both physical/optical and
cultural cues.
6 On his blog at http://38pitches.com/2007/03/25/q-a-viii-short-one/
and in reference to an enemy newspaper columnist, not to video game lawsuits.
But right now I’m looking for any excuse to name-drop Schilling.
A
significant source not cited in the text or footnotes is
www.findlaw.com.
Posted May 4, 2007. Updated May 17, 2007, May 11, 2008
and July 26 and Oct. 24, 2009.