Video games are the dominant medium of our civilization. So why are they not taken seriously?

Video games are the most popular medium we have. BBC audience research shows that 59% of the UK’s residents play video games regularly – and that’s across all ages. For those under 30, it’s closer to 100%.

As David Hayward of Pixel-Lab pointed out, video games are more popular than football in the UK:

“Only around 30% of the UK population watch the big international matches involving a UK team on TV, and for smaller international matches with no UK teams that figure drops to around 13%. Nonetheless it commands a huge amount of cultural attention and media clout. It’s more popular than cinema, with only 37.5% of people in the UK visiting the cinema once a month or more.”

Video games are commerically the most sucessful medium, as proven by the release of Grand Theft Auto IV, the most commercially sucessful cultural artefact ever published, in the history of everything.

And video games are the most powerful medium we have, as this story proves. Short version: last November a kid in Sweden bought a copy of the Wrath of the Lich King expansion for World of Warcraft. He took it home and played it. For hours. And hours. And hours. He didn’t eat or sleep. He played for over 24 hours straight, until he collapsed in a an apparent epileptic fit and had to be rushed from hospital. (He recovered.)

The take-home lesson from that one is that video games are so powerful, so engaging a medium that people will forget to eat or sleep while playing them. We need to use this power for good.

Games, the Dirty Word

And yet, there’s a widespread notion that video games are ‘just’ video games, that they trivialise and sensationalise everything, that they’re not capable of exploring serious issues in a meaningful way.

What utter tosh.

Exhibit A: Six Days in Fallujah.

Six Days in Fallujah is a third-person shooter game now in development at Atomic Games.  It’s about the battle of Fallujah in 2004, and it’s designed to be an accurate recreation of the event. In fact, when the developers officially announced the game in April they called it a ‘gameamentary’ about the battle.

Then a storm of controversy was unleashed, its opponents saying its very existence as a game belittles the sacrifice of those who died there.

Let me say here that I have the greatest respect for those who serve in the armed forces and protect the rest of us. Two of my closest friends are in the Canadian army and I think the work they’re doing is important and invaluable.

But that’s why we need to understand it more. Games are an excellent way to do that.

There’s a prejudice against games as a medium for significant content. I concede that the prejudice is reinforced by the fact that many video games are violent, sensational, visceral fun.

But then again – so are most movies.

Most movies are sensational, entertaining. But that doesn’t mean they’re incapable of significant communication. I think most of us would agree that there’s a way to make movies about difficult subjects sensitively and appropriately. For example: United 93, Generation Kill, Schindler’s List . . . need I go on?

So – why can’t we treat video games the same way?

I think Six Days in Fallujah is a great example of a game that tackles a difficult, important subject in an appropriate way.  Let’s look at it in some more detail.

Know Thine Enemy

Like many unjust prejudices, the prejudice against video games is founded on a lack of understanding.

Dan Ephron writes in the latest issue of Newsweek:

“Efforts to document war in new ways have always garnered skepticism and controversy. The first published photographs of dead American servicemen—including a 1943 shot showing three bodies sprawled out on Buna Beach in New Guinea—prompted a public outcry. The effect of television footage beamed from Vietnam directly to the living rooms of Americans was hotly debated throughout the war.”

This same prejudice is back, and it has crystallized around Six Days in Fallujah. Opponents say the game is trivializing and disrespectful by its very nature as a game.

But let’s look at the way the game was made:

“Peter Tamte [head of Atomic Games, Six Days' developer] says he got the idea to make a videogame of the Fallujah battle from Marines who fought there. Starting in 2003, he worked closely with members of the Third Battalion, First Marine Regiment, to make training simulators based on games he’d helped develop. A year later, those same Marines ended up at the center of the Fallujah battle, code-named Operation Phantom Fury. When they came home, Tamte says, several were already contemplating how they could turn their experience into the kind of game they themselves would want to play.”

So the very origin of this idea came from the men who fought and lost friends there. If soldiers wanted to write a book or film a movie about their experiences we wouldn’t bat an eyelid. Why should we dismiss their desire to tell their stroy just because it is in a new medium?

From an editorial perspective, Atomic’s commitment to accuracy is impressive:

“Capt. Read Omohundro, who led a Marine company in Fallujah and lost 13 men there, acts as a kind of quality-control manager for Six Days. “I’ll say to them, no, that guy has to be facing the other way. This piece of ammunition doesn’t blow up so fast, it only detonates this much. You can’t be standing next to it when it goes off or you’ll become a casualty.”

The game’s makers also appear to have treated the dead with respect, by not including any dead Marines in in-game cinematics.

Hell, Abstracted

Six Days in Fallujah is just one example. And even in this post, I’ve committed the cardinal sin of video game commentary: not having played the game. In this case that’s not even possible, because it’s not out yet, but that’s a pervasive problem with controversies about video games. Typically, when people are angry at a game they perceive as damaging the moral fabric of our society, they haven’t actually played it – or, often, any video game. this is nothing short of intellectual laziness.

Video games are popular, they’re powerful, they’re capable of a great variety of expression. We need to treat them with the seriousness they deserve.

p.s. The rest of Ephron’s article makes for interesting reading and is well worth a read.

Philip Trippenbach is a freelance video game and social media designer working for BBC Current Affairs. He blogs at Just Another Meme Vector.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.