Playing games with free speech

At one point in Ion Storm's Deus Ex, the player (you are an American counterterrorist agent) must acquire important information from a Hong Kong bartender to progress further in the game. To talk with him, you're presented with a conversation tree -- a series of statements the player can make in the dialogue. (A common interface in gaming.) The bartender has a decidedly leftist bent, and he's not buying the player's naive faith in the Constitution. Accordingly, your options in the conversation tree are now: "I'll take a drink," "I'll get a drink later" and "The separation of powers acknowledges the petty ambitions of individuals; that's its strength."

In Lionhead Studios' Black & White, the player takes on the role of a god, who must care for the needs of his worshipful tribe. But as the game goes on, these needs expand, forcing the player to micromanage his or her everyday wants ever more attentively. According to Richard Evans, the game's artificial intelligence programmer -- who based much of it on concepts he learned while he was a philosophy student at Cambridge -- this was entirely intended by Peter Molyneux, the game's lead designer.

"Peter wanted the villagers to be increasingly reliant," Evans once told me, "so that the more you helped them, the less self-sufficient they are, so that you are drawn into a spiral of dependency. He was trying to make a point about human nature."

In Electronic Arts' "Majestic," the player must unearth a decades-old conspiracy by uncovering clues found in e-mails, instant messages and other media. Early on, you receive a fax, detailing one character's personal background -- whose motives up until then seem entirely benign. The fax reveals that he was actually the founder of a crack cocaine distribution network in the '80s, set up to funnel drug profits for financing the Contra rebellion in Nicaragua. Important to the game, the original author of this element meant to dramatize the controversial but important allegations that the civil war against Nicaragua's Sandinista government was partially financed by crack dealing in Los Angeles -- which the CIA possibly suspected, but did little to interdict. (I should know: I'm the one who wrote the fax.)

Similar examples of gameplay designed to function as social commentary are evident in "Max Payne," "The Sims" and "State of Emergency," to name a few more. (And with the possible exception of "The Sims," all contain violence graphic enough to run afoul of the St. Louis ordinance.) And contrary to Limbaugh's views, the expressions are not inconsequential, but are inextricably woven into the experience of the game itself.

And at least one of them confounds Limbaugh's cheeky comparison of video games with traditional games like backgammon, or baseball. In The Sims, there are no discrete conditions for "winning" or "losing" the game; the only goal is what you choose to do with your Sims, and the narratives you construct for them -- which vary wildly from player to player. (This is sometimes referred to in the industry as a "sandbox" game, and it's also a strong aspect to Black & White.)

The pity is, we can name only a few more. Because as it happens, Limbaugh is pretty much right that most speech in games really is inconsequential, with characters and plots that are largely an artifact of marketing, more than anything else, derived from the shuffling about of recycled archetypes with the necessary Q-rating. (In this game, you're a warrior/wizard/officer/king/commander, and you're the only one who can stop/escape/surpass/overrun/destroy an evil race/army/mysterious entity/monstrous horde/dictator that threatens your self/society/kingdom/planet/entire known universe.)

The industry has largely let itself decay to this state, while many in it seem oblivious of the larger stakes. In an apparent slam at fellow developers who strive for something higher, for example, "Doom" co-creator John Carmack recently announced, "We're doing entertainment. Saying it's art is a kind of sophistry from people who want to aggrandize our industry."

He's ignorant of at least one more motive: building a shield to protect the industry from oncoming waves of regulation-minded civic leaders, still unaware that games contain meaningful speech. (And who can really blame them, when they're asked to find the meaning in games like, well, "Doom"?)

"The computer and video game industry is in a transitional state," says MIT's Henry Jenkins, "finding their vocabulary, beginning to develop more aesthetic and thematic ambition. ... It is at such moments of transition that the First Amendment protections are perhaps most important."

The judiciary is not Jenkins' main concern. "This judge was simply off the mark and is likely to be overturned. ... Politicians are going to be a tougher sell because they really aren't interested in finding out the truth. They don't hold hearings; they hold show trials." And they'll hold them, until a generational shift kicks in: "until there is a significant portion of the public who grew up playing games and who are now part of the voting population."

But what to do, during the 10 or 20 years before that happens? Jenkins himself runs a program aimed at expanding the power of games as an instructional tool, while the nonprofit International Game Developers Association has launched an effort to create a dialogue between game developers and academia. Both highly laudable -- but, again, their main yield comes in the long term, with no immediate plan against these constant incursions.

But there is an opportunity for another approach. In old Hollywood, the studios regularly produced a few films every year whose main intent was to dramatize social issues and give their more ambitious artists room to breathe. Profit was secondary (but hardly impossible, especially when Oscar dividends kicked in).

Imagine what could happen if the game industry followed this example. Successful game publishers could invest a portion of their profits into games conceived with explicit social and artistic goals in mind. The ideas are out there, nurtured by designers aching for the chance to develop them, but fairly certain that their employers would never risk the investment on something so incomprehensible as having something important to say. The obstacles are steep, even for seasoned developers: Despite his stellar track record, Will Wright had to fight executives to secure financing for "The Sims." "They were all sure," he once noted, "that it would suck." (This, for a title that's become the most popular computer game of all time.)

Is something like this happening now? Jason Della Rocca, program director for the IGDA, can't come up with a single example.

"Sadly, I am not aware of any publisher that dedicates resources to these types of agendas. ... In the end," he suggests, "it comes down to economic and prestige factors. If our media was more critical and there was a demand for such content, we would certainly see more of it."

But as a recent Los Angeles Times article makes clear (if a much earlier Salon story had not), the gaming press is too beholden to game publishers, too cowed by their largesse to offer much objection when the curtain is parted on yet another iteration of an expansion pack to a sequel from a series of a genre that hasn't strayed outside its preconceived borders in years.

I'd love to be proved wrong. Because until the industry is willing to make those risks, we're doomed to flounder on the ramp, while the Judge Limbaughs of the world peer down at us through their gun sights, and slam the hammer back.

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