Fun Inc. (7 page)

In a sense, given the increasing ubiquity of video game-playing and the sheer diversity of games out there, what’s surprising is not so much that people play games for many different reasons as the fact that many of these reasons are so fundamentally interconnected or even identical. As Lazzaro has observed, taking pleasure in feelings of challenge and absorption is pretty much universal. So, too, is the capacity of games to relax and to remove gamers from many real world concerns and, in Bartle’s terms, to take them in each other’s company along a path of self-expression and experiential thrills that no other recreation offers to anything like the same degree. Then there’s also the symbolic, even atavistic, pull of many aspects of games: our innate yearnings, manifesting themselves in these marvellously clever, intense miniature worlds. These are places able to offer a purity and intensity of order and reward that is both lifelike and something life itself cannot habitually deliver in the same degree of concentration.

As I’ll be exploring in the next two chapters, in all of these aspects lie both real and imagined dangers for the increasingly substantial percentage of humanity who class themselves as gamers. There’s something else, too, that perhaps comes closer to the idea of art than any other kind of satisfaction it’s possible for games to offer: the sheer, changeless otherness of gaming, and its strange relationship with passing time. To enter into the world of a game is to visit somewhere unfallen and ageless, where what you do and experience seems to occupy a special, separate kind of temporality; and where the passage of time in your own life leaves no mark. This is true of all art and media to some extent. Yet returning to a favourite book, piece of music or even film brings with it to some extent the changed context of the world and reshapes what you feel on each viewing. The world of a video game, in contrast, is its own context, and is uniquely transporting – one of the reasons why the video game nostalgia industry is already a vast industry all on its own just a few decades on from the birth of the medium itself.

Games are not just other worlds. They can also be, in their way, little Edens; and the incremental thrill of coming to know and to master one has a compelling counterpart in this – the fact that one solved, minute part of the universe will always be there, should you wish to experience it again. It’s at once regressive and wonderfully enabling. For many people, as they get older and find that the world around them is increasingly complicated and packed with uncertainties, the existence of some other place over which they have complete control and to which they can always return is one of the most powerful motivators of all.

C
HAPTER
5

Dangerous playground

For about as long as new media for communication and representation have been coming into existence, people have been worrying about their impact on both mental and physical health. And they’ve been doing so for centuries in quite astonishingly similar ways. Compare and contrast, for example, the following three critiques. Number one:

It gives its disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing.

Number two:

It is a pastime of illiterate, wretched creatures who are stupefied by their daily jobs, a machine of mindlessness and dissolution. It requires no effort, raises no ideas, raises no questions …

And number three:

They become like blinking lizards, motionless, absorbed, only the twitching of their hands showing they are still conscious. [It] teaches them nothing. It stimulates no ratiocination, discovery or feat of memory.

Each new medium is being criticised for encouraging various kinds of intellectual laziness. It is also being criticised for doing so in people other than the complainant: each author is concerned with the mental health of ‘them’, a more vulnerable order of person than they themselves; the new medium seems in each case to offer ‘them’ a perilous, even sinful, amount of ease. There is an appealing ‘semblance’ of something meaningful; but underneath that glistening surface there is no real content and nothing of value. There is no ‘wisdom’ or ‘ratiocination’ to be found within.

The authors of these critiques are separated by over 2,000 years. The first is from ancient Greece, and is taken from Plato’s
Phaedrus
, written around the fourth century BC. In this passage, the character of Socrates is explaining why the written word is dangerously inferior to the practice of spoken debate with another person – because it encourages mere knowledge without understanding. The second critique was published in 1930, and comes from the cantankerous pen of the French author Georges Duhamel, who argued in his book,
Scenes from the Life of the Future
, against the evils of the new medium of film. And the third comes from a British politician, the Conservative Member of Parliament and current Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, who used his column in the
Daily Telegraph
in December 2006 to highlight the menace of video games. He went on to explain that they were ‘a cause of ignorance and underachievement’ because they distracted modern youth from productive activities like reading, turning them instead into ‘blinking lizards’.

It’s useful to begin with opinions rather than with hard statistics because the two often have very little to do with each other. As is always the case with something disturbingly new, many of the greatest objections to video games as a medium are moral and philosophical rather than simply pragmatic. This isn’t to say that these objections are wrong or without a basis in reality, but it does mean that they are likely to be confused and based on incomplete information. This chapter, then, aims to disentangle some of the fears, facts and possibilities surrounding video games. It’s not a question of whitewashing them beyond criticism, but it is about the fact that many conventional fears surrounding games are misguided – and that games can also be dangerous in ways that don’t tend to make headlines.

Video games are powerful: considerably more so in many ways than either television or film, although not as transforming as the written word. Nevertheless, games have conquered the world much faster than any of these earlier media. Print has been around for a good 560 years, and the written word for 5,000 or so; cinema and recorded music for around 100 years, radio broadcasts for 75 years and television for 50 years. Video games have barely four serious decades on the clock, yet they are already sweeping towards a position of dominance, both financially and in terms of attention and influence.

We should acknowledge that the speed of this transition could itself be dangerous. One of the most obvious points to make about any medium is that it should be used responsibly. Games, in particular, are a kind of playground for the mind, and even among adult users it is important to be able to match safety provisions to the kind of equipment that is being used – a precaution that’s doubly true when it comes to children and the young. With video games, as with other areas of life, parents should be aware of and understand what their children are doing. Similarly, the population at large should be educated about this arena’s nature and possibilities; and there should be an open and well-informed discussion among policy-makers, consumers and those within the industry, leading to sensible forms of legislation and regulation.

With games, the sheer pace at which the medium has developed has stopped much of this from happening. Things are – gradually – changing, but until recently most parents had little or no idea what was going on when their children played a video game. Equally, those in government and the media had little sense of what a game was like to play, rather than to watch from a distance, and those within the industry felt, rightly enough, that they were operating within a field more or less sealed off from mainstream discourse, where the only meaningful thing to do was to keep their heads down and go on making their products.

All of this has provided both the ideal breeding ground for moral panic and for the widening of the divide between those who play and those who don’t. It’s a division that is still largely generational. When a medium as new and as rapidly evolving as video games first arrives, there is little ability for different generations to share or learn lessons from one another. On top of this, there’s the nature of gaming itself. Even television began as a family medium – something that could be shared. Games, however, began as a relatively esoteric, individual activity: a pursuit where there was no experience to share or advice to pass on. That alienation and incomprehension on both sides should remain comes as no surprise. Perhaps at no other point in peacetime history have an older generation seen their experience and knowledge so decisively outdated within their own lifetimes, and while this is a larger phenomenon, games are an increasingly integral part of it.

It’s especially troubling because many of the most profound questions video games raise have yet to be addressed. There is, for instance, the growing problem of how to determine the legal status of actions and transactions within virtual worlds. In some ways, the kinds of legal and ethical questions raised here resemble those seen in medical science. Stem cell research, for instance, is a field where what is technically possible has evolved faster than the growth of the legal and philosophical framework addressing it. What are the ethics of creating, destroying and using human embryos in potentially life-saving medical treatments?

The questions thrown up by games may be considerably less challenging ethically, but they too confront our current laws and cultural frameworks with possibilities far outside the imaginations of legislators even half a century ago. For instance, who owns a character or the objects created by a player within a virtual game world? The answer at the moment is the company hosting the game – yet players are now trading virtual goods for thousands, or even tens of thousands, of real dollars. How can this be regulated, taxed or even legally acknowledged? Intellectual property, similarly, is becoming a tricky issue when players are busily innovating within games in ways that may have substantial external applications: in devising, for example, mathematical systems for the fair division of rewards between a large team of cooperating players; or even when the in-game objects they create start to be treated as works of art, or as informal businesses in their own right (selling virtual in-game items for real money is now a multibillion-dollar global industry). And then there’s the question of how ‘wrongdoing’ within a game can be punished or identified. Virtual theft, deception, exploitation and abuse are exceptionally difficult to prove and can be almost impossible for existing legal systems to punish, especially given the permeability of virtual worlds across national borders. Yet some kind of framework is needed. In the most notorious case to come to light, there has already been a murder in China as the result of an in-game theft. In 2005, one player in Shanghai sold on eBay a virtual sword he had been lent by another (to be precise, it was a ‘dragon sabre’ from the hugely popular online game
The Legend of Mir 3
). When it transpired that there was no legal basis for the recovery of the item, its original ‘owner’ took the law into his own hands, confronted the thief, and stabbed him to death for real. Such violence is freakishly rare, but the underlying challenges are not, and the increasing value attached to all manner of objects that simply do not exist in the conventional sense is a destabilising development whose effects have only just begun to be felt.

There is, however, some good news to counterbalance the disturbing notion of video games as a force of disruption and alienation – and this is that the notion of games as something generationally isolating and divisive is rapidly becoming less and less true. Consider demographics: where once gaming was the preserve of adolescent males, players increasingly come from all age groups and from both sexes. According to the Entertainment Software Association of America, the world’s largest gaming association, the average American video game player is now thirty-five years old and has been playing games for twelve years, while the average frequent buyer of games is thirty-nine. Moreover, 40 per cent of all players are women, with women over eighteen representing a far greater portion of the game-playing population (34 per cent) than boys aged seventeen or younger (18 per cent).

Much of the recent growth in the value of the gaming industry, too, has been driven by the increased diversity and affluence of its consumer base. The agenda, in other words, is increasingly being set by the concerns of mainstream consumers – what they consider acceptable for their children, what they want to play together, and how they want to play across generations. It’s something those predicting a bottomless downward spiral of self-isolating gamers should bear in mind. The generation who first encountered games as children in the 1970s and 1980s are now having children themselves, with whom they wish to play games. Already, there are grandparents playing video games with their grandchildren, a scenario that still sounds mildly outlandish, but that will inevitably become commonplace in years to come.

Arguably the greatest lesson the video games industry has learned over the last decade, in fact, is that its biggest potential for growth lies in games designed not for the kinds of players who comprised the bulk of the market in the 1980s and 1990s – self-identified ‘gamers’, usually male, who wanted hard-core action and equally hard-core kinds of strategy – but for a far larger emerging market of players for whom gaming means a variety of very different interactive experiences that often resemble nothing so much as a traditional board game or a school sports day.

In practical terms, this has been reflected by the industry very rapidly getting its act together on what must be the least debatable part of the debate on games and safety: the need to protect children, and the regulation of violent content within games. Since its introduction in 2003, a ratings system known as the Pan European Game Information System (PEGI) has been adopted by thirty-two European countries and seems likely to spread still further; while in America a similar system run by the Entertainment Software Rating Board has been in operation since 1994. Most media observers would agree that it has taken some time for these bodies to establish themselves and gain the support of the industry. In this respect, however, increasingly vocal media concerns over the content of games have been a blessing in disguise: gaming has made substantial advances in recent years in ensuring that every major title released is rated, that most retailers will not stock unrated titles, and that advertising is also subject to rating controls. A 2008 Nielsen Games study of gaming in Europe suggested that the ratings are now recognised by over 90 per cent of game consumers.