Game Theory: Challenging the Industry

Helen,

Back in March, I had a chat with Jade Raymond, the leader of the mega-publisher Ubisoft's Toronto studio. I've interviewed her on and off for several years as she's moved from project to project. Her current gig involves overseeing the creation of a new Splinter Cell game. Splinter Cells are Tom Clancy games that let you control a stealthy agent through a series of sneaking, neck-snapping missions that tend to involve some shooting, some hiding in the shadows and the occasional violations of the Geneva Conventions.

Ms. Raymond seemed bothered by something one of the younger developers had said to her recently before quitting her studio. It's something she was hearing from other younger developers as well. “They don't like the idea that every game is a war game, that we're reinforcing this,” she said. And she added this curious observation: “A lot of the younger people who are in the industry, one of the things that really matters to them, is they d on't want to feel like they're making games …” I headlined that interview, “What if the next generation thinks video games are stupid?”

That interview and that line about what feels like a game stuck with me all year. We know what she meant, right?

I don't think she meant that any of her uneasy developers were worried that what they were making felt too much like chess or poker or even Pac-Man or Angry Birds. If only more modern video games felt more like games and less like wannabe movies!

Ms. Raymond was sharing a more pressing concern: creators of gaming blockbusters have so frequently clothed their work in the garments of power fantasy and virtual bloodlust that they too often feel like propaganda for a militaristic or at least antagonistic way of life. That howl from within is as crucial a concern for diversity i n gaming as there's ever been. It's an urgent call not only for diversity among game creators and game characters but also among the themes that games are about.

Ms. Raymond's interview raised the prospect that younger people would look at big-studio development and throw up their hands, declaring it a homogenous, retrograde factory for lowest-common-denominator projects that are out of touch with a modern, socially engaged society. In other words, they'll look at Big Video Games and call it Hollywood.

The game designer and author Anna Anthropy, whose Dys4ia I praised on Monday as one of the year's finest games, wrote the year's most important book about video games. It's about this very thing. Magnificently titled “Rise of the Videogame Zinesters: How Freaks, Normals, Amateurs, Artists, Dreamers, Drop-outs, Queers, Housewives, and People Like You Are T aking Back an Art Form,” the book gives me more hope for the future of games than anything I played in 2012.

The march toward better, smarter games will be a stumbling one.

Who really trusts corporate video game designers to explore complex themes in their action-packed games? The level of action needed to make a game pleasurable to interact with is already an obstruction to the calm that might help explore a more complex idea. But there's also the lack of experience among big-time game creators of deftly making complex work. Instead they too often exhibit knee-jerk defensiveness. They routinely express an aversion to controversy or even thematic complexity that assumes a level of intelligence and curiosity among players somewhere south of seventh grade. How else to take that Tomb Raider “rape” controversy that swirled out of an interview that we publish ed on Kotaku? The game's creators said that a scene in their coming game involving a man sliding his hand down the side of a bound, struggling woman before tackling her to the ground was “incorrectly … referred to as an ‘attempted rape' “ despite my reporter's revealing that he had one of the game's creators on tape using just those words. (Watch the scene yourself, at 2:15, and make of it what you will.)

Not to worry, the game's creators said. “Sexual assault of any kind is categorically not a theme that we cover in this game.”

Which might compel some of us out there to say: Why not?

And others to say: Maybe it's time a major game did cover that.

But would a game like that - a Tomb Raider that addresses the trauma of sexual assault - be fun? Probably not. Doesn't a video game need to be fun?

T hese are tough questions and the kind of questions that, hopefully, more smart forward-thinking people will get into gaming in order to answer.

-Stephen

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