I should be writing a paper, not blogging!

Dec ´05
07 11:34 pm
  • Posted by: Bryan-Mitchell Young
  • Category: general

So I should totally be writing a paper right now, but I’m taking the night off. I have to write about 20 pages, do some heavy revision on one paper, and probably interview someone for that paper before Monday. So of course, I’m taking the night off. I’m ever so tired!

Writing a paper about legal systems that influence gaming on campus. Hope is that it will be a dissertation chapter.

Also writing a paper about videogame commercials. Back in the Atari games they used to have tons of people in the commercials playing the games. Now, if they are featuring the latest FPS or whatever, they rarely have the players. In the Atari days they didn’t show the games very much. Now, the game itself is nearly all they show. Watching some old commercials I notice that in some they even show people actually plugging the console in so that people would know that it took electricity.

Regarding Roger Ebert, it is nice to see that Mia Consalvo has my back. It’s glad to know that I’m not the only one who isn’t interested in videogames as art! In all these conversations people mention Myst as an art game. Are there really that many hardcore gamers that would rather play Myst again than Doom? Don’t get me wrong, I like Myst a lot back in the day. I bought Riven as soon as it came out. However, since they came out, I haven’t had the urge to play them again. Not even once!

Last night IU had a preview of Grandma’s Boy. It is a film about a 36 year old videogame tester who gets evicted and has to move in with his grandmother and her friends. It’s produced by Adam Sandler’s production company and so, even though he doesn’t appear in it, it could easily be one of his early films. As I said in an email to one of my friends, it was the best movie about a videogame tester I’ve ever seen. It is also, coincidentally, the only film about a videogame tester I’ve seen. If it wasn’t about videogames, I wouldn’t have bothered seeing it. Basically, there’s some There’s Something About Mary-style humor about bodily fluids, some pot jokes, some intergenerational partying, a couple predictable hook-ups, a bad guy who tries to do something bad to the hero, and a grandma who saves the day. I wrote a haiku about it:

Office Space was good
I also liked Golden Girls
This is both of them.

There are some good jokes. There is also some objectification of women which I found oddly out of place. I give it only 4 thumbs up. (Remember I gave Doom 7 thumbs up. And of course my bastardization of what is surely a registered trademark of a certain movie critic adds to my delight!)

Finally, it looks like I’m going to be heading off to Vancouver again next year. This time for the SCMS conference in early March. I’m convinced that the only reason I got in is that I’m giving a paper with a sexy title of, “Post-Colonialism in Civilization“. Then in April it looks like I’m going to the CSA in Washington D.C. I’m convinced that I only got into that one because of the stellar efforts of the other people on the panel we put together. But I’ll be talking about professional wrestling, and not videogames, so I won’t be talking about that paper here. But you will respect the verbal artistry of professional wrestling or I’ll kick your ass! (Which just so happens to be the title of the paper I’ll be presenting at the CSA!)

Now it is time for sleep.

About Bryan-Mitchell Young

On Art and Violence

Now that the semester is winding down I’ve got a bit of time to blog (and write my last couple dissertation chapters and then revise all of them and write the intro and conclusion chapters…). A couple things have happened (and are in the process of happening) that have the gaming world buzzing: Roger Ebert wrote about videogames again and the Supreme Court is taking up the case of California’s law forbidding the sale of videogames to minors.

Regarding Ebert, he ends by asking, “Why are gamers so intensely concerned, anyway, that games be defined as art?” which echoes my own call for all of us to stop caring about “art.” Tons and tons of people have tried to convince him he’s wrong — so many in fact that I don’t even want to bother hunting down links to some of the stories that do it. I’m not interested in arguing with him because I don’t really care if he thinks games are art or not.

However, it is very disconcerting that he seems to think that he can judge games by looking at screenshots. Would he write a review of a film based on the text on the back of the dvd box? That’s pretty ignorant to think that he can judge games in that manner.

Unfortunately, this is just the top of the iceberg because look at the picture at the top of his post. Now I have no idea if he picked that picture or not. I would say that he probably didn’t but he did pick the rest of the pictures in the post so perhaps he did. Regardless, the picture didn’t just appear by itself. Someone chose that picture. What is in that picture? A kid. So someone whether it was Ebert of just some random web guy, wanted to pick a picture of a gamer and they picked a kid — once again perpetuating the stereotype that games are for kids and in this instance also seemingly indicating that games are in and of themselves childish. Wow. That’s pretty sad.

OK, now onto the Supreme Court…

I’m pretty confident that the Supreme Court will say this law is unconstitutional not only because lower courts have consistently ruled that laws regulating videogame sales are unconstitutional but also because of the recent Supreme Court decision declaring a law banning animal cruelty videos unconstitutional.

Today the Diane Rehm Show had a segment on the Supreme Court taking on the Videogame law regulating videogame sales and had Leland Yee, the California politician behind the bill, Craig Anderson, the guy who has never met a form of media that didn’t cause aggression, and a couple other people I don’t remember. Now, I’ve previously criticized Anderson’s vague use of the term “aggression” so I was pleasantly surprised that Diane Rehm’s first question to him was “what is the difference between agression and violence?” Anderson initially tried to avoid answering the question but then Rehm re-asked the question and Anderson admitted that while violence is generally understood as an extreme form of aggression, it is very rare for aggression to actually turn into violence. I think that it really key because in that statement Anderson (who also in this CNN video says that videogame-caused “aggression” isn’t really any worse than film or television-causes “aggression” ) says that videogames don’t really make kids violent.

If the most well known person who thinks videogames cause aggression doesn’t think they make you violent then that makes the case that they are so bad that we need laws against selling them much harder to prove.

Personally, I look forward to the SCOTUS shutting down these kinds of laws once and for all.

…well that and Jack Thompson getting involved and saying some crazy things…

Movies can be scary too…

Allow me a non-videogame-related rant here… It is still about moral panics surrounding children and media though so it could easily have been about videogames instead of movies.

I caught a story on the local NPR station last night about someone threatening a lawsuit against Redbox because they sell “R-rated” movies. I searched for something about the story and apparently it got picked up by a few local news outlets including the Indianapolis Fox Affiliate and the Louisville ABC Affiliate. According to stories the whole thing is being stirred up by Vanderburgh Country Prosecutor Stan Levco.

Of course there’s two little details that neither of the two stories linked to above or any of the other stories I saw seemed to mention: First, The MPAA rating system “is a voluntary system” and the ratings are not legally enforced. The only possible grounds for a lawsuit that there would be would be under obscenity or pornography laws. Levco almost certainly knows this. So why is he causing a stir? That leads to the second missing detail: Levco is running for re-election.

So this is just a ploy to get into the headlines so that Levco can say he is “fighting for families” and concerned about “family values” without having to do anything. The minute I heard this story I immediately wondered if the guy was up for re-election because that’s the only time public officials try to start legal proceedings related to media. I guess Levco couldn’t find any easy videogame targets.

Heaven forbid that any of the media outlets that aired this story would take two minutes to wonder why Levco was doing this or anything… That’s some good reportering there…

1 Comments Showing 50 most recent
  1. meredith

    As a fellow panelist at CSA, I have to say that I also thought I got in on the merits of the other papers. Either we both have low self-esteem or we’re both being carried!