And Now, In This Corner... Mainstream Media Vs. Gaming. Fight!

Let's not talk about Jack Thompson. Enough is enough. He's had his time in the sun, and if we're lucky, he's been discredited so thoroughly that we no longer have to see his face on television or on Digg. He was a dangerous man in his early days, when the specter of GTA-inspired violence and porn rock threatened the purity of the nations youth, but his time has passed. Another attention whore crucified on his own self-righteous rhetoric.

Let's talk, instead, about the relationship between the media and that most savage beast, the Hardcore Gamer.

I'm always interested in how popular media covers games(Lately, the tide has been turning toward a more even keeled approach, but historically games and gaming culture have gotten the greasy end of the stick). Even more interesting to yours truly is how gamers themselves respond to the attention. I've noticed that more and more, the focus of mainstream media's gaming coverage is the business side of things: how much money is being made and spent, lines of faithful gamers waiting to buy the newest games and consoles on release day, World of Warcraft of course, and how much more money games are making than Hollywood. That's all well and good, but it ignores a legacy of slander and misinformation that's left scars on the psyche of gaming culture. And without sounding too melodramatic, those scars may take a long time to heal.

Earlier this year, a trailer for Resident Evil 5 was called out for presenting itself in a racist light. Gamers exploded in a storm of self-righteous rage, accusing those reporting the story of having an anti-gaming bias. Forums blew the Hell up. Enthusiast sites talked about it endlessly. Capcom, the makers of the game, responded with a press release and with interviews, denying that their game was racist. Those of us in the hardcore gaming scene thought it was the end of the world.

When the dust settled though, the joke was on us. None of the usual detractors had bothered to show up; not even Jack. We, ourselves, had created a veritable tempest in a teapot, and the few intelligent, well-spoken folk in the press who were trying to open an honest to goodness dialogue about the subject had been entirely drowned out by the waves.

N'Gai Croal of Newsweek was a sane and intelligent voice in the midst of all the hyperbole and vitriol. He wrote an excellent article that illustrated better than any other why the trailer was controversial. In a nutshell, He suggested not that the game was racist, but that the imagery presented in the trailer had some serious psychological and historical baggage attached to it. As an african american, he couldn't help but be affected by the image of a huge white guy shooting up a crowd of black africans. It didn't help that the trailer was devoid of context; to those who were not already familiar with the series, it would be even more jarring. Whether or not the development team had intended for the viewer to interpret the trailer in that manner was irrelevant. the imagery would speak for itself.

It was a well-reasoned and insightful argument, but it went unheard amongst the furious typing of ten thousand angry gamers telling the internet just how insane people were for condemning yet another innocent video game for a crime it didn't commit. To the gamers, it was Hot Coffee and Manhunt 2 all over again. Reason didn't factor into it; we were under attack, and we responded with ridicule, rhetoric, and empty threats. It was embarrassing.

Just as Mr. Croal highlighted how he was conditioned to react to the imagery present in the offending trailer in a certain way, so did gamers illustrate how they had been conditioned to react when they perceived their hobby to be under attack. And the resulting picture disturbed me greatly.

New media has always come under attack by those who didn't understand it. When Stravinsky premiered his Rite of Spring, it was uniformly panned by critics and actually started a bonafide riot. A book on the corrupting influence of comic books in the fifties actually contributed to a congressional hearing on morality and ethics in the medium. Midnight Cowboy was slapped with an 'X' rating in the time of it's theatrical release, though the movie barely rates a PG-13 in modern times. I mean, compare Midnight Cowboy to Saw. Which one was rated 'X' again?

And that right there is the answer to our problem: familiarity eventually breeds understanding.

Also contempt. But that's for a different post.

People like Jack Thompson, Joe Lieberman, and all the other people crusading for the regulation of games are simply repeating history. It should be noted that the Rite of Spring is now considered a masterpiece, and that your mom probably does aerobics to Prince and Guns N' Roses. For every reporter who writes a condescending article on video games, there's an N'Gai Croal or Jon Davison trying to educate and inform an ignorant population about what games actually are. For every Cooper Lawrence, a Leigh Alexander. We should remember that we have friends, too, and that as gaming grows to be more and more integrated into popular culture, the outcry and controversies will eventually be replaced by a calmer dialogue, just as it always has in the past. This too shall pass, and when it does, we'll all be able to laugh about it over a game of Halo 6 or Guitar Hero 315 Remix. It's practically in the cards.

We gamers should remember that the next time someone points out something controversial in a video game. If gaming is going to grow up to be a relevant part of our culture, there will sometimes be criticism and slander. Film and literature aren't exempt from that; why should video games be?

Media is subjective. Scars only heal if you learn to stop picking at them. Meaningful discussion sometimes comes from the most surprising places. The mainstream media has cautiously started to embrace the idea that, hey, video games... There might be something to them. We should try and view that as the tentative first steps toward something greater.