Seductive To The Innocent
The games industry moves at a breakneck pace so when a story hits, one must be quick to jump on its rapidly cooling corpse and hump away, before the journos pick its bones clean. These past few weeks have seen a fair amount of incorrect information disseminated by the so-called mainstream media concerning the content of Mass Effect starting with a small time journalist and continuing into the hallowed halls of that bastion of calm, serene, credibility that is Fox News.
To hear it told, as you have no doubt heard it told countless times by now becoming, quite swiftly, an epic tale of good vanquishing evil; an army of valiant defenders riding to meet the insidious claims of full frontal nudity and rampant, unprotected space bestiality. Needless to say that the story drew a fair amount of slathering outrage from the gaming community who have chosen, as Qais pointed out, to focus their attentions on the uninformed Cooper Lawrence, raining down upon her book a deluge of one star reviews complete with snarky comments on Amazon. Mrs. Lawrence has since rescinded the statements she made on the show in an article from the New York Times but her credibility with gamers, no doubt a significant chunk of her intended audience, has been irreparably damaged. At this time Fox News itself, unsurprisingly, has not issued any kind of correction choosing instead to invite representatives from EA to appear on the cable news channel to attempt to set the record straight.
By now the willingness of mainstream media outlets to stir up a firestorm of controversy with uninformed and spurious claims about videogames is old hat. The response from gamers, as well, has changed little, even as the games themselves evolve. Indeed, the gaming community’s reaction is indicative of many forms of entertainment as they struggle for the illusive label of relevance. That is to say that gaming, in general, has responded to such claims by almost instantaneously and unequivocally pointing the finger at someone else. It is a reaction that underscores quite well the form’s relative youth. The issue here is that, contrary to what gamers may think, the fault lies, not with mass media, but with gaming.
Games are mostly portrayed as having their closest analog in film but, in my mind, comic books are a much better comparison in their struggle to be taken seriously. Already this may seem like a derogatory claim using, as it does, the suspicious and condescending qualifier of “serious” and far be it from me to seemingly side with the likes of Roger Ebert, another of games’s newly minted demons, but, in effect, games have given no reason for themselves to be taken as anything other than a vapid, childish distraction.
Comics found themselves in an equally dire situation in 1954 with the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency. The main detractor of comic books at the time was psychiatrist Fredric Wertham who had written extensively on the subject as he saw it in his book, Seduction of the Innocent. Wertham’s contention is nearly a mirror image of the argument currently facing games: they desensitize children to violence, obscure their ability to distinguish between fantasy and reality, and, of course, twist and subvert their delicate young minds into the scarred, lascivious brains of perverts and rapists.
The outcome of all of this outraged, verbal gesticulation was the formation of the Comics Code Authority, an advisory board that passed judgment on the content of comics and makes the ESRB look like an orgy of hedonistic omnisexuals. The Code sanitized comics into shallow, whitewashed morality tales and effectively halted the medium’s growth for decades. Graphic violence, drug use, adult language, nudity and references to sex of any kind were strictly verboten and the major players in the industry, DC and Marvel, were forced to accept either the new CCA or closure. Needless to say they chose profits, and while there were examples to be found of the Big Two bucking the trend and printing a handful of issues without the CCA’s seal of approval, the renaissance of comic books would not begin until decades later, truly coming to fruition in 1992, when Art Spiegelman’s Maus won the Pulitzer Prize.
The parallels here are significant. Like comics, games’s attempts to legitimize the medium have mostly revolved around the idea that if content is suited for a mature audience; it therefore must contain adult themes. Comics underwent the same growing pains in the 1980s. The argument that “Comics aren’t just for kids anymore.” was not so much led by the likes of V For Vendetta and its complex and intricately structured take on government oppression and the role of the individual, but by the likes of Dark Knight Returns whose dark cynicism and morose atmosphere was considered an intellectualizing of one of DC’s major franchises. It was into this vacuum that Maus reached national attention, and it was by dint of its distance from the tropes of sex and violence that it did so.
The importance of Maus, for better or for worse, isn’t necessarily what it accomplished but what it was perceived to have accomplished and it did so by using the medium of sequential art as the means to an end and not an end in and of itself. That is to say that the public, having read Maus, did not read it so much as a comic but as a novel that happened to tell its story with the aide of pictures. His father’s tale of Holocaust survival could easily have been told in the form of a novel, but by using art to differentiate nationalities and peoples in the story Spiegelman uses comics as a tool to augment his story and, in doing so, inextricably links the telling of an emotionally complex narrative with comic books. It can be argued that Maus had the advantage of revolving around one of the darkest events in modern human history, but Vladek Spiegelman’s tale has no meaning were it not for the complex relationship he shares with his son so late in his life. It is this interaction that lends the events of the past such a personal and enduring resonance.
It is this that convinced literary critics, and the media at large, that sequential art was “valid”, that it could raise itself above its original, seemingly childish intent and, as such, it appeared to be a book that a child would not necessarily choose to read. Here then was a comic book written for adults. It held no allure for anyone who was not emotionally and intellectually mature enough to understand its subject matter, nor did it attempt to explain itself.
This is the facet of the argument that the gaming community has yet to grasp. Educating people on the intricacies of games will do nothing to dispel the rhetoric currently facing them. The dominant view is that games are marketed to children because, in a sense, they are and there are no examples to the contrary. The problem, then, is not that the industry is producing games aimed at adults but marketed towards children; the problem is that the industry has yet to make a game that children do not want to play.
Next Week: Part 2 “Hey Kids, Who Wants To Play The Unbearable Lightness of Being?”
