For a long time, many gamers have felt poorly represented by such reports, even if (as in the case of Custer’s Revenge) the complaints were probably justifiable. But in the scheme of things, are videogames really that controversial?
Grand Theft Auto, the pin-up boy for videogame controversy.
In 1913, Igor Stravinsky’s ballet, The Rite of Spring was premiered in Paris. The piece was incredibly musically and thematically challenging for the time, with discordant music accompanying dance steps depicting fertility rites. The result was something of myth - there was chaos. Audience members started with catcalls and jeers, and ended with violent rioting. London’s Musical Times said “To say that much of it is hideous as sound is a mild description … Practically it has no relation to music at all as most of us understand the word.” Stravinsky left the premiere in tears (though it has since become an undisputed masterpiece).
To think of attendees to orchestral performances or the ballet today is to think of smartly-dressed, middle-to-upper class citizens, possibly the aged, or at least the ‘educated’. It is safe to say that it is not to think of those with a penchant for violence. Yet to listen to The Rite of Spring today, even with our comfort with the discordance and aggressiveness of modern musical genres, is to still hear harsh dissonance and generally uncomfortable sounds.
We might think that videogame censorship in Australia is bad, but not only was D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover banned for decades, but the book describing the (unsuccessful) British Obscenity Trial, Lady Chatterley’s Trial, was also banned in the ‘60s, causing a national scandal. Blasphemy is also no stranger to the world of literature: Salmon Rushdie notoriously received a fatwah requiring his execution from the Ayatollah Khomeini for his 1988 book, The Satanic Verses.
More recently, we’ve had a very public moral panic as a result of Bill Henson’s photographs of naked children. The Prime Minster, Kevin Rudd, was moved so far as to comment that he “found them absolutely revolting.” This most recent controversy is perhaps the most telling, as it happened within weeks of a very concrete act of censorship: the refusal of classification for Fallout 3. And yet, there was seldom an eyebrow raised within the mainstream about this issue, unless you count this farce.
We might now think this art-form is mild-mannered, but appearances can be deceiving.
The fact that we’ve not yet had riots, obscenity trials or death threats (at least, no serious ones) for videogames is both a relief - for obvious reasons - and a telling point about the cultural status of the medium. Games might serve well as a by-word for all that is wrong with today’s youth for unscrupulous journalists and public figures, but they’ve yet to truly excite the general public in a way that literature, music and film have. We might often see condemnations of the medium, but so far, they’ve been largely limited to those uniformed about the medium. Stravinsky caused a riot not because his audience didn’t understand orchestral music - it was because they understood it all too well. They realised that his obtuse orchestrations, his arrhythmic and dissonant composition represented a slap in the face of all music that had come before, and was a true marker of the future. So far, the niche controversies surrounding videogames reflect their niche status as an entertainment medium. In a sense, we won’t know the medium has hit the big time until we have people who know about games in the streets, protesting and baying for the blood of a particularly offensive developer.
There is a positive, though. Stravinsky did not set out to offend at all. Challenge, yes, almost certainly, but by all reports he was distraught by the reaction he had caused. The problem was that there was a music intelligentsia - one could argue there still is - that represented the maintainers of the status quo, and who felt they had reason to be upset when someone broke their rules of correctness. At this stage in videogaming, there are still very few rules about what you can and can’t do in this medium. We can still have our flOws, hell, even our Wii Fits that challenge the very definition of gaming without many people even batting an eyelid in distress. Cherish it while it lasts.
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