Videogames and Censorship
As extensions of the popular response to the workaday stress,games become faithful models of a culture. They incorporate both the action and the reaction of whole populations in a single dynamic image... The games of a people reveal a great deal about them.
Marshal McLuhan's 1968 book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man
In computer games, imagery and sound can be experienced by the player in a number of ways. Things change with the decisions of the player. The sequence of pictures and sound in film and television though are frozen by the editor and director in the final cut.
The classification codes currently used by the Federal Government to label games with rating stickers reflect the suitability of 'content' for 'audiences'. But how appropriate is this? A video game player is not, in the strictest sense, an audience member at all. Playing a computer game is a participatory experience, like using the phone, or playing with a train set. In fact, the first video games were an after-hours hobby of the model train society at Massachusetts Institute of Technology!!
Seeing and hearing every bit of 'content' in a video game for classification would take many many hours, even days and weeks. In games, the use of narrative is different. Like life itself, many branching paths can lead the player to different outcomes. You can't just cut a video game. A game's technical construction resembles a house of cards, take one element of code out, and the whole structure is affected. Even small refinements in software involve a lot more than the quick cut of the moving picture and sound editor.
Even if they are strategically harder to assess for censors, games put a strong onus on the consumer directly to 'deal with' what is on the screen and judge it actively, through play. Like the model train enthusiast and his track switching decisions, a game player has some complicity in the action. Games which use actors in video sequences seem to reinforce a sense of the moral 'responsibility' of the player, even though the actual choices made available are no broader than those offered by a jukebox or a soft drink vending machine. You hit the button, you get a single prepackaged result. But the player alone does indeed decide the when, where and how of that selection.
Should the video sequences in a game using live actors be classified differently to similar sequences for use in non interactive media? Surely what is under contention here is not the potential of the imagery itself to offend, or cause harm, but rather the relationship of that imagery to the role of the player? Video material, for being made interactive should certainly not attract a harsher set of classification standards than the same material for use in film or television, rather it should be judged in the context of its function in a game.
The video death of a girl in Sega's "Night Trap" was widely reported (mistakenly) to be the actual goal of the game. Instead, the sequence signalled the game's end where the player's role was to prevent this outcome. Thus difficulty, achievement, choice and skill play a part, as do notions of success and failure. The classification system thus needs to reflect an understanding of a player's engagement in process. Pinball machines, automobiles, telephones and video games require that the user embrace active involvement, feel responsible for outcomes. This responsibility is heightened when the player is online, playing against a real life complete stranger.
Most players of modem based games understand that while online in Cyberspace, one's words and actions are one's own. If a 20 year old really wants to rebel against status quo today, he/she can use a personal computer to cut some amazing code. The results might resemble 'Doom', that interactive notorious knowing blend of horror movie and comic book carnage. In youth culture, the measure of a title's success might be the extent it can offend the oldies.
Games are the rock 'n' roll of the '90s. As most would agree, few media ever actually benefited from prohibition. The majority of the censors I have spoken to see themselves as a means by which the public can make informed consumer decisions about entertainment media. The classifiers are not arbiters of public taste, nor should they be. It is the media watchdog groups who lay such a dubious claim to a superior moral authority.
This article is copyright of David Cox and Mind Shadow Media, and may be reproduced as long as this copyright notice remain intact.