So I got a twitter from tinymantis (aka Tommy) while I was teaching my weekly game design class at Mercy College.   Apparently, Utah just passed another law banning sales of M rated games to minors.  Score one for the busy bodies.  I guess it’s nothing I’ve not heard before, you see I live close enough to Park Slope to feel the runoff of neurotic, over-mothering liberalism.  The kind that suffocates you, the kind that’s just as crazy and soul crushing as social conservatism.

While having lunch in the Slope, a friend  introduced my wife and me to some friends,  a couple with children.  Upon finding out what I do for a living, the wife’s face turned white as she told me that I was “The Enemy”.  Apparently, it was a constant battle to keep her kids from playing video games.  I did my best to exasperate this lady (why is it always a lady?) All the while, I had to endure listening to her 10 year old boy whine and complain about how he wanted a Game Boy, poor thing didn’t realize DS had been out for years.

Another time, I got a similar dressing down from some lady at a lesbian party in the Slope.  This one claimed that she loved video games, translation, she played Centipede back in the day.  Nonetheless, according to this woman those old games were OK.  However, these new games, they’re BAAAAAAD. She was making the same old argument about how  games are more “realistic” and therefore had some evil magical power over the minds of our zombie like children.

Hell, I even get it from the kids in this crazy neighborhood.  One child told me that she goes to her friend’s house to play Wii but that she treats it like a “book” and then kept telling me how much she loved books. Guess what? I love books too! yay! reading is awesome…  this kid had been made to feel so guilty about playing Nintendogs or whatever  for an hour that she felt the overwhelming desire to cover it up with some nonsense that she felt would appease a grown up, which she sadly mistook me for.

The prejudice even invades the industry internally.  When making games for big media giants, like Nickelodeon or Cartoon Network or even Adult Swim, there is a double standard.  You can say and do things on TV that just will not pass in a game funded by the same organization.  We are self hating that way, or maybe its just our lawyers.

My students play a lot of games, they’ve literally killed millions of monsters, enemy soldiers, gangsters and bosses in their short but ludic lives.  To the best of my knowledge none of them would hurt a fly. I recently asked one of my students what his favorite game was.  He said it was Call of Duty because it was “so realistic”.  I then asked him if he ever felt guilty about killing people in the game.  He didn’t really know how to respond to the question it seemed so preposterous. I asked him how it compared to watching men die in Saving Private Ryan.  He said the movie made him cry.  Though it was difficult for him to express, he intrinsically understood that the digital actors he was killing in Call of Duty represented tokens in a game system, where as the real life actors in Saving Private Ryan were representing actual people, with actual lives even if the characters were fictional.

The problem lies in the observer.  Parents and other do-gooders see what their kids are playing as observers, or worse yet described to them by the mass media.  They  judge the experience from what Nick Fortugno recently called an Apollonian perspective.  On the other hand, the player views the game from the inside, what Nick referred to as the Dionysian perspective.  The terms come from The Birth of Tragedy by Nietzche and to summarize Apollonian art is the kind you experience as an observer like going to the ballet, where Dionysian art is the kind you experience as a participant like dancing drunk.  To the dancer it’s a little piece of heaven. To the observer who’s never had the joy of dancing drunk,  it’s obscene and should be banned.

I’m not saying games aren’t powerful, and I’m not saying games can’t make you feel.  They can make you feel a lot of things, fear, excitement, a sense of adventure, mastery, accomplishment, these feelings games do well.  Love, regret, sorrow, not so much.  There’s reasons for that, I don’t ever recall crying when I captured someone’s queen in chess, didn’t feel sorry for her one bit.  As a game player I understand that characters in a video game, no matter how “realistic”  are just fancier versions of that queen.  Are there exceptions? Sure, Shadow of the Colossus will make you feel for the giants, as you try to save your dead lover at their expense.  The game achieves this by breaking all the game design rules.

So, do I think 10 year olds should be playing M rated games, probably not.  Do I think 10 year olds want to play an M rated game… probably not.  I also think they probably would rather read Harry Potter than they would Lolita.  Do we actually need to regulate what is already a pretty internally regulated industry? of course not.  Does it make sense that stuff that would pass muster on prime time TV gets the dreaded M rating? of course not. Does it makes parents feel warm and fuzzy when lawmakers “do something about it”? Does it win votes?  You betcha.  Does all this nonsense bother me? No.  In the long run, it makes no difference, the demographics bear that out.  The next generation of parents will be a million times more savvy about games than this one, because they will have grown up on games.  A generation of drunken dancers… sounds great! I can’t wait!

Tags: adult swim, Harry Potter, Mass media, Saving Private Ryan, Shadow of Colossus, Television, Video game