In Part II of our interview with Game Developers Conference executive director Jamil Moledina, he talked about why this year's keynotes might be more to Level Up's liking and why publishers and developers were taking more of an interest in GDC as a place to get exposure for both new and previously announced games in the wake of the original E3's collapse. In today's final installment, the Slamdance Film Festival's decision to pull Super Columbine Massacre RPG! from competition serves as a jumping-off point for a discussion of artistic freedom and responsibility; the prospects of videogames reaching their true potential as an art form; and whether game developers and gamers themselves might be the biggest obstacle to games breaking free from their childish origins. Plus, the longest statement-question in Level Up's brief history! (To help illustrate the issues discussed in this post, take a look at this award-winning European TV ad from 1999, "Double Life," which we believe speaks to the potential of this medium far more eloquently than we ever could. Enjoy.)

I wrote about the Super Columbine Massacre RPG! controversy shortly after Brian Crecente's original Kotaku post went up. I saw some of the comments that you made in his follow-up. Now being a journalist, I fully realize that you probably said many things in your interview with Crecente, and most of it wasn't used. But what you were quoted as saying was "We in the game industry love to compare films to games but the analogy is not 100 percent complete....Games are [an] interactive medium. There is this kind of grey area here. We need to be careful and not automatically fall for that analogy." I was wondering what you meant by that--

Yes.

--because in the context of Super Columbine Massacre RPG! being accepted to the festival and then removed from the festival--first, for what we were led to believe was pressure from sponsors, but in fact turns out to have had more to do with festival director Peter Baxter's personal feelings about the game's content--I felt that while there are differences between games and movies, that in this specific instance they were precisely the same. I question whether Baxter would have pulled "Elephant" or "Bowling for Columbine" from the festival for the same stated reasons that he pulled Super Columbine Massacre RPG!. So I was wondering what you meant by what you said to Kotaku.

I'm glad you asked that, because a lot of what I said didn't get in there. The one controversial thing I said, did. I've actually had some experience with film festivals. I used to be a supporter in very many ways of the San Francisco International Film Festival, I was on the programming committee of the San Francisco International South Asian Film Festival, and we encountered these kinds of issues. We had a very controversial film in the South Asian festival called "A World Without Women." It involved rape, it involved absolute depravity of males in terms of what they might do if they were deprived of women. I strongly backed the inclusion of that film. I pretty much talked the organizer into letting it be presented. We screened the film, and people walked out. I mean, 30 people walked out, and the organizers tried to have a Q&A at the end to kind of calm everybody down.

If we don't have these kinds of expressions at all in our culture, then we may not have the discussion. We may not have the debate. We cut ourselves off. Art is the premier form of cultural expression that we have as civilization. I don't think it's really worthwhile to curtail the venue. What we have the ability to do is as viewers and players, we have the right to walk out of the movie theater. We have the right not to download or play the game. We have the right to debate and say "That movie sucked," or "That game was terrible." That's where the debate happens. Not at the threshold level of whether or not an art form gets onto the docket.

I've been discussing this with a lot of people and some folks were saying that it doesn't have a chilling effect. I think it absolutely has a chilling effect. Developers that I've spoken to are a little more timid. It doesn't matter whether this is a really good game or not. What matters is the ability of the entire artistic community to have a venue to show something. The question of merit is for the public to decide. It seems to me to be one of the basic principles of our society.

There was a paragraph that I thought about writing in my original post about the Super Columbine Massacre RPG! controversy that I left out, because I tend to be a little verbose on my blog, and I said to myself, "I don't know that this needs to be any longer--I just need to get it out and let people respond to it." And the part I left out ended up being proven correct by some of the debates that I saw ensuing on various message boards and the comments on my own blog. What I was going to write was this: That in the battle for videogame makers to seize the same rights and responsibilities as in other art forms and to push themselves onto the same level as other media, some of the harshest critics and toughest obstacles are going to be game players and other game makers who don't really look at this as an artistic rights issue, but as a matter of personal taste that they would happily proscribe for other people. The idea that Super Columbine Massacre RPG! was a priori offensive, wrong and should never have been made--I saw that come up a number of times. And there was a part of me that was really surprised.

I wonder if it might have to do in part with the origins of games. Videogames became a commercial medium pretty early on, and so the arbiter, in a way, for what is moral and what is not in games tends to be the ESRB ratings, as opposed to the actual content of the games. I mean, these are people that might not see anything offensive in the historical representation in a game like Novalogic's Black Hawk Down, in which you as the player mow down hundreds of Somalian so-called "skinnies"--that's fine. Yet at the same time, here you have Danny Ledonne, who--whether or not it's well-done artistically--is trying in some way to address Columbine in a videogame, and people are saying, "It's off-limits. You can't do that." And so I had people posting comments on my blog who were very upset, who felt that this event was somehow sacrosanct and couldn't be addressed by a game in any way, shape or form.

That is where my quote came in. Because I think the comparison has been made between Super Columbine Massacre RPG!, the game and "Bowling for Columbine," the film. My point was that out of one half of our mouths, we celebrate the fact that games are interactive, that they are uniquely different from any other form of artistic expression that has existed in the history of mankind. Or humankind, I should say--I'm reading a book, "The God Delusion," and [Richard] Dawkins makes a very strong point about that, so from now on I'm going to say "humankind." We talk about the 21st century art form as being interactive and allowing the audience, the gamer, to play a collaborative role in creating the narrative of the story, which has never been enabled through any other storytelling medium. We tout these extraordinary abilities borne from interactivity, and I think we also have to acknowledge that interactivity when we compare our art form to other art forms, and take that into account. A film like "Bowling for Columbine," or a film like "Saving Private Ryan" has you observing, you still have the distance to form your own judgements and make a different decision from what you see on the screen. Whereas if you're playing the game of Columbine Massacre, you are playing the role of the killer, and so as the player, your distance is taken away. You almost feel that the perspective of the killer has to be yours. Now the interesting thing from interactivity is that at the endpoint of this particular game, the killers end up in hell, so there is a direct visceral consequence to all of their actions. This is the triumph of interactivity, if you can say so.

This is all of course independent of mine or anybody else's personal opinion of the game, of it's value, or what have you. However, it does illustrate the point that we are subtly different as a game industry from the film industry, and all I was actually trying to say was that we need to recognize that. Because by not recognizing it, we lose half the audience. Most people, most regular Americans reading your column are going to say, "Well, games are different from films. I no longer believe anything else this person is saying, because they're starting from a premise that is obviously flawed."

Now the ESRB as the arbiter of morality--now, this is an interesting question, because the ESRB doesn't actually govern independent games. This is something I encountered first-hand when visiting with them recently. After the Serious Games summit in D.C., I spent a lot of time with them because they were interested in figuring out ways to provide counter-examples to the bad press that some mainstream publishers' games receive. Since they don't directly work with independent games, they didn't have the wealth of serious games examples that showcase how valuable and important the game paradigm can be for the culture at large. I mean, the MPAA has their ratings system, and I'm not sure that they necessarily become the arbiter of morality. It becomes more like--

Well, with the MPAA, if you're a signatory, you have to abide by the ratings system, and if you're an independent, you can opt to go without a rating--

But it's the kiss of death if you don't get [a rating.] No one will present your film if you don't have it.

You're right; we can't pretend that games aren't interactive. At the same time, the one thing that games have in common with movies and will have in common all the way up to and including either the holodeck or the Matrix--let's actually take the Matrix as an example, because with the holodeck you're dealing with solid light holograms--is that it's all still taking place in your head.

Yes.

It's still imaginary.

Yes.

It's not real.

Yes.

You're pushing the analog sticks. You're pressing the buttons. If it's a light gun, you're pulling a trigger. If it's a Wii, you're swinging the remote. If it's the Sixaxis, you're swooping and pretending you're holding onto the reins of a dragon. If it's the 360, the controller is rumbling as you get shot. But you're not being shot. You're not holding a dragon's reins. You're not swinging Link's sword. It's not real. Yet there's still this feeling among people who aren't gamers and among some who are, who grew up on the Marios and other less violent, less provocative, less extreme games, who feel that that's where they should remain. They say, "Why do you want to bring all of that ugliness and explore those things?"

There was a phrase that [former Microsoft Games Studios chief] Ed Fries liked to use when talking about games. It was somewhat self-serving and somewhat interesting. The line was that "Nintendo sees games as toys, Sony sees games as entertainment and Microsoft sees games as art." Setting aside--well, setting aside none of it--what's interesting about that is that if you view games as toys--and my post was titled "Slamdance Backers to Game Makers--Your Work Is Still Just for Kids"--that are solely intended for children, then it is pretty messed-up to put out a "toy" that is basically the killers from the Columbine school shootings.

If someone had approached this game as entertainment, you might instead have had a game where Bruce Willis is trapped in a school with teenaged killers, and he takes them down and saves the day. In that instance, you address those issues only peripherally, much as does "Die Hard" where we're led to believe that Hans Gruber is a freedom fighter/terrorist, but is later revealed to be solely out for money. There, the conventional hero is foregrounded. But if you go with the art metaphor, then you get all the way over to something like "Bowling for Columbine," which is a documentary-style investigation, or "Elephant," which is an artistic exploration involved in an incident like the one at Columbine High School. The metaphor that I like to use--and I know that I'm sort of rambling on--we "see" games with our hands, and there are many people who because they don't know how to play games, they can't see what games really are, they can't see what games have the potential to become. So they're locked into the mindset that games are toys, and they're like, "Why would you put this filth in the hands of our kids?" But games are so much more than that.

I was actually going to respond to one of your earlier points with that point, which was that you were questioning why developers are kind of not allowing this debate to flourish, why they're heading it off at the pass before it gets to the point of mainstream discussion. I would say it's because developers themselves are also having trouble with determining where on the continuum games stopped being toys and became an art form. A lot of people don't really see that. Mainstream readers of your magazine are probably going to be thinking, "Wait a minute. The last time I played a game, it was Pong." Or, "I play Tetris on my phone," or something to that effect. So they're coming to the debate of whether games are toys or art fairly late in the game.

A lot of developers who came up creating more puzzle-style games, or who had their formative development period earlier and are now executives probably have this idea that games are toys. Whether or not there's a clear delineation among platforms--I think [Fries' statement] is kind of cute, actually--it is an ongoing internal discussion. And it doesn't help that we'll still produce very simple puzzle games that could be considered toy-like, while we're producing these massive epic games that force you to think about what you're doing and what the consequences of your actions are. It's still a fairly broad continuum, and so that maps to the confusion that we have in our own industry, let alone the public at large, over whether games are toys or art. Yet legally--thankfully--they are considered an art form every time this goes to court.

I think we'll stop there. Thanks very much for your time.

You're welcome.