Do video games have a politics? I ask this in multiple senses of the word in light of an editorial from the GamesFirst!, which excoriated the mainstream gaming press for its absence at the National Summit on Video Games, Youth and Public Policy, sponsored by Iowa State University and the National Institute on Media and the Family.
I’m somewhat unsure what the author, Aaron Stanton, actually takes umbrage with. It strikes me as nonsensical for gaming outlets, even those with lavish expense accounts, to send reporters to an event sponsored by an organization whose founder cleverly devised the neologism “killographic” (as in pornographic) in reference to video games. Based on Stanton’s choice to attack the gaming media rather than discuss the conference, I’m guessing nothing particularly pressing or new was said, or he would have written about that — and the conference probably would have garnered the widespread media attention he so desperately craves. Granted, as Stanton says, my summation is based on my “best guess,” and, unlike him, I do not “know what was said and with accurate intent,” (whatever that means) so he can feel free to correct me.
He seems to worry that a lack of intense attention focused on the “pro-family” lobby and the mainstream attention it drums up on occasion will result in a fascist sweep of legally enforced censorship across the industry. In truth, the acts floating through Congress that he worries will have dire consequences are irrelevant — last year’s Family Entertainment Protection Act failed miserably to go anywhere in the Senate, and I don’t see the Truth in Video Gaming Ratings Act going any further than its predecessor. If it stood half a chance, the gaming media would indeed jump all over it. Or, more consequentially, the industry itself would. Hard-hitting lobbying goes much further than half-assed grassroots activism — look, for instance, at how far the net neutrality issue has gone despite extensive coverage in the tech press. (Not far.) It’s amazing to see how quickly the grip of a culture warrior on “the ear of the policymaker” slips away when that ear hears a wallet opening. Even in the worst case scenario, if something did somehow manage to pass, like so many other laws that attempt stringent enforcement of some vague standard, it would have as much bite as your 90-year-old grandmother who can’t find her dentures.
To get back to the original question, TV, it seems, has a politics: it unites. Everyone views the same thing, and until recently, at the same time (time zones notwithstanding). The internet and related digital technologies have a politics, too: they fragment, scramble and recombine, possibly uniting, but in unpredictable ways. They lack a clear delineation of time and place. Like other previous media, they purport to seriously contribute to society and culture — functionally, artistically, or both.
There is an ambivalence built into videogames that distorts both time and authorship. Who authorship lies with is essentially negotiable and rests on a tension between gamer and game maker with regards to responsibility for the former’s experience. That is, it’s a question of who is more responsible for a gamer’s experience on an ontological level. Put yet another way, if we see the real world as designed like a world within a video game, would we say that that designer has greater authorial control over our lives than we do? Subsequently, time is also negotiable — a television show ends in thirty minutes, but a game can go on however long the player chooses to run in circles, go on raids, or shoot at people. When authorial presence is uncertain, so is the object’s ontological status as an art form. The voice to call itself art, in other words, maybe nothing more than a ghost in the machine, even as distinctly as auteurs like Hideo Kojima mark their work. Whether or not videogames are art is a point I don’t wish to argue, but, more importantly, few others have attempted to — at least seriously, publicly, or with any force. It stands to reason, therefore, that an industry unable to articulate the cultural force that it is necessarily cannot formulate a politics to be grounded in.
I’m not saying that the formulation of a politics stemming from self-awareness as an art form isn’t possible. Or even that it necessarily doesn’t have a politics now. Rather, I’m simply saying the former in any fully developed sense simply requires the latter, which seems to be, at best, nascent.
I suppose the larger question is in fact “do we want games to have a politics?” But I’m not sure we have a choice, to be honest. The role of gaming as a serious cultural force with massive potential has been increasingly obvious, to the point that the industry seems to have little recourse but to wake up, bringing the rest of the public with it. Left to us, I think, is not whether gaming will possess a politics, but what kind it will, since we are, after all, the ones playing them.
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