When a Subculture Becomes a Culture
No, I’m not actually decorating my house. I’m playing a video game.
Maxis’s The Sims, released in January of 2000, to be precise. This game, designed by the perennial genius behind the classic SimCity series, puts the player in control of nearly every aspect of a virtual person (a “Sim”)’s life. There are no scripts in this game, no storyline to be rigidly adhered to, only the occasional random event designed to further mimic real life: burglaries, bank errors, and of course, taxes. There is no literal objective for the game, only fairly arbitrary goals such as furthering your Sim’s career, improving your house with art and decorations, and, of course, making friends.
This game is just one part of the recent trend in the industry to add more artistic and personal flair to an artistic genre that many have previously written off as a childish distraction.
“I think in video games right now we don’t have that cultural credibility,” says Doug Lowenstein of the Entertainment Software Association[1]. However, he says, “Whatever you think of movies, they have been accepted in the culture as culturally credible.” [ibid.] Lowenstein’s organization is part of the lengthy political entanglement over whether not only are video games art or not, but whether they are actually dangerous to society.
One man who knows a lot about art – and violence – in video games is American McGee [yes, his first name is American], the brain behind iD software’s bar-setting 1993 gore-fest, Doom. Since his days on the production of the supposed inspiration for the Columbine school shooting massacre [but then, why didn’t all of Doom‘s millions of players go on rampages…], McGee has turned his creative eyes elsewhere. One of his latest games, aptly titled American McGee’s Alice, is about a nightmarish romp back into Lewis Carroll’s timeless classic Alice in Wonderland, except this time, from the perspective of an Alice who is confined in a mental institution.
Rather than have the focus of the game’s development being on the potential violence [“Off with her head!!”] or deviance-appealing drug use [the caterpillar with his hookah, the clearly on-something Mad Hatter, et al.] the game is actually a rather stunning visual masterpiece. It showcases exactly the sort of twisted phantasmagoria one would expect from the already rather unusual world of Lewis Carroll exasperated by mental illness: deformed creatures of all kinds, a Mad Hatter with a shotgun, and the oppressive regime of the Red Queen. But the developmental focus of the game is on its visual appeal. Twisted, inelegant Gothic-style artwork defines the setting of the game, taking the Victorian origins of the story and churning them into a nightmarish world that would do Salvador Dali proud.
The imprecise elegance of Alice is but one aspect of McGee’s talent for evolving his profession beyond the mere need to sell violence. His latest game, Bad Day L.A., is indeed very violent, but, he says, violent with a purpose. He explains in a June 8 interview with PC Games that Bad Day L.A. is meant to come off as a commentary on the “fear culture” of America today:
“…there was the infamous Sunset Blvd billboard from the Department of Homeland Security: “Bio-chemical terror attack! Are you prepared?… For me, that billboard was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. Suddenly, I felt an overwhelming urge to do something about this issue. ” [2]
Through his new game, which focuses on a trigger-happy, out-of-control, homeless-by-choice Frustrated American Everyman character a la Falling Down, McGee says he hopes to comment on the preposterous preponderance of violence and fear in American culture today. Through the use of ludicrous objectives and comical storyline events combined with deliberately gratuitous violence, McGee means to make a deliberate, socially important message about the culture that we live in today. This is a far cry from the sensationalist, dangerous violence that some politicians today use as a rallying cry to ban video games, which they ridiculously claim are integral causes of violence, because, as we all know, nobody ever stole a car before Grand Theft Auto was released, there was no such thing as a terrorist before Counter-Strike came out, and certainly nobody knew how to aim or fire a gun before Doom hit the shelves.
While other political messages appear throughout the interactive entertainment industry, from the unionization/organized labor themes of the 1998 game Free Enterprise to the 2005 devoutly anti-Israel Wild West Bank, one of the optimizing social commentaries in video games appears in the 2000 Ion Storm game Deus Ex.
Taking place before the events of September 11th, Deus Ex presents the player with an eerie portrayal of the future: a devastating terrorist attack causes a clamp-down on civil liberties and the government is usurped by a militaristic faction of international corporations bent on a one-world government. Containing commentaries on consolidation [the use of taxes to weaken individuals and strengthen corporations], militarism, and the problems of using fear for political ends, Deus Ex also uses a hypothetical mega-plague called the “Gray Death” to represent the growing HIV pandemic in terms of a disease in which the government has no vested interest in a cure due to the fact that only poor, mostly non-voting citizens are affected by it. Its accuracy in showing the end result of the slow decline of our civil rights today is astounding, and the warning it shows us is an important call to be headed.
Video games today are more that simply the cultural detritus portrayed in the upscale, popular media that can’t get over accusations like the one that says that, because two of Doom’s estimated fifteen million players went on a violent rampage, all video games must cause violence. This important cultural and social medium has long been neglected, even attacked, by misunderstanding political grandstanders who would cull votes out of the banning of certain forms of entertainment on imprecise, careless grounds. Video games, today threatened by bans on the same grounds as books and movies were once exposed to, must be protected and understood as the important tools of art that they actually are.
