Comment: Liam Fox needs to play more video games
Liam Fox's angry rant against Medal of Honour demonstrates how little politicians understand about an important creative industry.
By Ian Dunt
Organising liberals is like herding cats, but there used to be one thing they could agree on: don't demand that a movie be banned until you've seen it. It was our little periodic controversy and we all used to feel a little better for it. Every couple of years, a film would come out, like A Clockwork Orange or Crash (the earlier one), that made the Daily Mail angry. A journalist would demand a ban before it even hit cinemas and the liberal world would reply as one: 'don't judge it until you've seen it'.
Apparently that doesn't count for video games, which now create far more controversy than cinema. In the last couple of years the only really controversial movies to earn the kind of tabloid indignation which properly puts bums on seats were Antichrist and Michael Winterbottom's The Killer Inside Me. Video games, however, have been front and centre. Manhunt 2 was temporarily banned on the Wii, Resistance: Fall of Man earned criticism for featuring a (very good) set piece in Manchester Cathedral, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 caused an enormous storm by featuring a scene in which civilians can be killed in an airport, and now, finally, the new Medal of Honour game looks like it's in the spotlight too.
At no point have its detractors actually played the game, or even sat with someone playing it for them, which would itself be a poor substitute, because it only comes out in October. For Fox to attack it so savagely therefore seems a little premature. Some video games are of questionable taste and some should even be banned. But the only way to come to a considered view on that is to actually experience it. So where are the liberals? Why aren't they defending video games in the same way they defend film? Because they don't play them.
"It is shocking that someone would think it acceptable to recreate the acts of the Taliban," Fox told the Sunday Times. "I am disgusted and angry. It's hard to believe that any citizen of our country would wish to buy such a thoroughly un-British game. I would urge retailers to show their support for our armed forces and ban this tasteless product."
Fox's reaction, which is only marginally sane, reveals a fundamental lack of understanding for how video games work. It's not particularly his fault. It's the fault of the media for considering itself a suitable moral arbiter on a digital culture of which it understands nothing. The thought that seems to have set Fox off is that players can play as a Taliban fighter. You can just imagine the conversation now: seasoned hack calls defence secretary, tells him a video game allows player to become Taliban fighters and earn points for successful missions, defence secretary erupts into spasm of incandescent rage, complete with excess saliva around the corners of the mouth.
None of this will register with anyone who has experience with video games. Multiplayer war games allow users to play as either side. It's all in the name, you see: multiplayer. That is one of the defining characteristics of the genre, in much the same way as the horrible things happen to people in horror movies. For years – I think possibly decades, although my video game history isn't up to much – players have been able to play as Nazi soldiers, as well as a Brits or Americans, in World War Two games. This was apparently acceptable by virtue of temporal placement, unless Liam Fox is suggesting that the Taliban are morally worse than the Nazis. That seems a strange and pointless debate to have.
The key phrase in all these controversies is "play as" – as in "play as a serial killer, play as a terrorist, play as a Taliban fighter etc". To a non-player, this phrase suggests an emotionally connective, voyeuristic experience with strongly vicarious overtones. It's a phrase which is starting to define a specific culture chasm. Non-gamers hear it and believe it implies an emotional or causal relationship. Gamers hear it and think literally nothing of it, because all games ask you to play as something, be it a blue hedge hog or a well-developed human with thousands of joints and facial expressions. Playing 'as something' is to video games what hearing is to music.
Britain is ranked third in the world in terms of developer success and hardware and software sales. It is a major player, although the government's refusal to back the industry is seeing France and Canada catch up rapidly. More importantly, it is a major creative influence on young people. It doesn't always look that way, with their wide eyes staring vacantly into the middle distance while their thumbs move in a sort of proto-robotic blur. But like it or not, video games are using up much of their time, and they're not as simplistic or depraved as you might think.
Many news games, such as the recent Heavy Rain, demand quick moral choices from the user, an experience which no other form of entertainment can offer. Games are advancing at a remarkable speed, as complex characterisation and moral decision-making are wrapped around their unique selling point: interaction. Unfortunately, the generational divide that afflicts the debate over video games risks leaving that artistic development in its own cultural ghetto.
Fox's comments are evidence of how utterly divided and incomprehensible we have become to each other when discussing video games culture. Liberals and conservatives alike are startled by the moral implications of video game controversies because they don't have any experience of the cultural background within which it takes place. It's like judging a person's character on one sentence they uttered, taken completely out of context.
It's foolish – but it is also tremendously irritating. The only way to fix it is to get stuck in. Someone get the defence secretary a Wii.
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