Danny Ledonne's Super Columbine Massacre RPG!
Does reading Level Up sometimes feel like drinking water from a
fire hose? Or surfing a tsunami? Does it ever give you the sensation
that you've been buried under an avalanche of words, words, words? Yes,
we know that the dizzying length of certain Level Up posts can read
more like a manifesto or a jeremiad than a blog entry. For you, we
offer the occasional feature "Things You May Have Missed," which will cull compelling excerpts from our more voluminous posts.
Yesterday, we wrote about our appearance of last week on CNN's "American Morning"
to discuss Rockstar Games' forthcoming Manhunt 2. In that post, we
discussed the host's repeated invocation of the word "kids" as part of
an inadvertent but nonetheless pernicious assumption that all
videogames are toys aimed at children rather than entertainment for a
wide range of different audiences, of which children are simply one of
many. Today, we revisit our Q&A with Game Developers Conference executive director Jamil Moledina,
in which we discussed the Slamdance Film Festival's decision to pull
Super Columbine Massacre RPG! from its videogame competition, and more
specifically, the idea held my many gamers and non-gamers alike, that
videogames are ultimately toys for tots. Read on.
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.
Here endeth our summary. To read the entire section of our Q&A with Moledina from which this excerpt was drawn, click here.
