Escapism and Maturity in Video Games

(Note: This post is one of two posts that were originally posted three days prior on The Voice of Heard. I reposted them here as start-up entries and as an attempt to make them accessible to a wider audience with The Escapist's Realm.)

Every day, we all go through some form of daily routine in our lives, which include taking responsibilities for ourselves. We work at our jobs to make a living; we support our families by buying food for the table, paying our taxes, etc; we spend our mornings, afternoons, and sometimes evenings studying in school; at home, we clean our rooms, our cars, and sometimes our whole houses; we work on assignments for the schools we study in and/or the jobs we work in, which is also usually at home; the list of our responsibilities goes on and varies from individual to individual. Once we get those responsibilities done, and until we would inevitably have to deal with more, we have a few hours or more to ourselves; we would have a break from our routines, a moment to unwind and have some peace of mind. Many would call this leisure, spare time in which we could do anything for our pleasure and to relieve ourselves of the stress that results from the responsibilities had to deal with. We could spend that time doing anything that suits our interests, like reading a book (such as a work of nonfiction, novel, comic book, etc.), watching TV (be it something on broadcast or on a DVD or Blu-Ray, like a TV series or a movie), or playing a video game. By doing activities like these, we immerse ourselves in other worlds we could find enjoyable to observe or interact in. Some of those worlds are similar to the one we live and breathe in but are not entirely real while others are, for lack of better words, entirely made up. This sort of activity is an escape from the responsibilities and routines of our everyday lives; in short, it is escapism, the subject of this entry.

The idea of writing this entry on this subject came from a short Facebook conversation I had on August 28. It started when I shared a Gamespot article that discussed how a video game developer's frustration with the video game industry for not embracing more mature material due to what he termed 'Peter Pan syndrome,' which is basically a reluctance to grow up as embodied by a classic fairy tale character aka "The Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up." Curious as to what some people I know might say about this, I posted the article on Facebook. Shortly after that, one of my relatives argued that video games are not bought by grown men who are in a hurry to deal with adult life. What that argument implies to me is that video games are little more than immature escapist fantasy (in short, pure kids stuff) no matter how they are made. As an adult, I find that statement a bit offensive because I am aware of the responsibilities that come as an adult and I am being prepared to deal with them in the not-too-distant future. As a gamer, I find it insulting because I play video games on a regular basis (5-8 hours a week, to be more specific) yet I am not undergoing some sort of state of arrested development because of it. Before I go on, I would like to go over what escapism is.

Generally speaking, escapism is typically defined as a tendency to escape from reality as well as the responsibilities and routine of real life by unrealistic imaginative activity. Such activity usually consists of playing video games; watching movies and TV shows; and reading comic strips, comic books, and novels. Now I must ask a few questions: how much is great responsibility and repetitive routine too much for the human psyche? Is there not a moment while you are among a crowd of people; during your work shift; and even as you unwind at home, either alone or among members of your family, in which you feel empty on the inside even though you seem to be doing well on the outside? That's something we all refer to as boredom, you say, which is typical of life. I'm not just referring to boredom here. I am referring to a sort of malnourishment of the soul, which is where the subject of art comes in. As I understand as an art student, art can be an expression of ideas, emotions, and awareness of things outside an individual. I believe that escapism can serve as a vehicle for such expressions and not just be merely a marketable product in which nearly all aspects that make up reality can be (at least for a time) discarded. There is a good deal of art and media that supports this idea, examples of which I will be showing here.

During the Great Depression, the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a federal work-relief program designed to help Americans survive one of the worst economic disasters in history, sponsored the Fine Arts Program in which artists created murals and canvas buildings that were used to decorate public buildings. One of the best known of these artists was Jose Clemente Orozco. By creating the mural titled Epic of American Civilization: Hispano-America, Orozco expressed, and sought to bring attention to, what he perceived to be financial and military injustices imposed on the peasants of his native country of Mexico.

When he wrote the novel 1984, author George Orwell has expressed the seemingly tempting appeal of totalitarianism in the post-World War II era, the worst possible abuse of power by governments, and the dangerous potential of such governments to destroy the human spirit such as by making people to believe and accept that black is white, two plus two equals five, war is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength.

During the early 1950s, EC Comics sought to defy the cultural correctness of Cold War America with its horror, science fiction, crime, and war comic books before the highly publicized Senate juvenile delinquency hearings and the business-instituted Comics Code Authority hammered down on them. The social issues such comic books have brought up at the time include but were not limited to racial segregation, anticommunist hysteria, the half-truths of America's perceived history, the alienation of young people, and the arrogance of American triumphalism.

In 1991, Shirow Masamune's The Ghost in the Shell, one of the most famous mangas (Japanese comics) of all time, was published in Japan. Since then, it has seen international acclaim as well as numerous successful anime adaptations. From Masamune's original work to the anime adaptations, the series has raised philosophical issues regarding rapid technological advances and the meaning of life in the age of cyberspace and cybernetics as well as numerous sociological issues regarding human rights versus high consumer demands. Perhaps to average manga and anime fans, the philosophical nature just happened to help the sci-fi political action thriller stand out.
In 2004, a trilogy of crime mystery novels called The Millennium, written by the late Swedish author and journalist Stieg Larsson, were published and were later adopted into a trilogy of films, all with critical acclaim. Both the novels and the films are statements regarding violence against women, the sex industry, and neo-Nazism, particularly Larsson's home country of Sweden.

With numerous other examples of paintings, films, novels, and comic books capable of artistic expression and exploring mature themes out there, who is to say the same cannot be said of video games? While there are numerous articles regarding video games as an art form throughout the Internet, I'm not going to dwell on it here since it is a separate subject which I will have to discuss at another time. What I would like to go over here is the one aspect of video games that David Cage, the game developer at Quantic Dreams the company that released the PS3 exclusive Heavy Rain and the up-coming Beyond: Two Souls who called on games to "grow up" had brought up: maturity. Compared to other forms of media, video games are technically the youngest and they have come a long way since their inception in the form of William Higinbotham's Tennis for Two from 1958 and their birth as an industry over 30 years ago. Within that time frame, much has changed in technology, gameplay, character, and storytelling in video games. The problem with the issue of maturity lies in the dominant perception that video games are little more than "kids' stuff geared towards immature minds and designed to induce such minds with addictive escapist fantasies." With games like Heavy Rain and Beyond: Two Souls, Cage seeks to change that perception. He is by far not the only developer with such an ambition. Warren Specter, the creatier of the PC sci-fi RPG classic Deus Ex, suggested at the recent DICE convention that game designers and executives stop thinking about audiences in terms of teenage mentality and start thinking about things that are relevant to normal people if games are going to reach a broader audience. Hideo Kojima, the mastermind of the Metal Gear franchise, has stated that his latest project, Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes, may be too risky as it focuses on "mature and taboo themes [that] may make it controversial to sell, even if it does see release," a risk he is willing to take. He also stated that video games haven't matured much and still have a long way to go in that regard. Despite what Cage, Specter, and Kojima may believe, I will have to disagree with them because video games have already been growing up. As you may have already guessed where I am going with this, I am not referring to the amount of violence, blood, gore, drug references, nudity, strong language, and sexual content present that warrants an M-rating when I speak of maturity in video games. I am talking about going beyond adolescent heterosexual male power fantasies and exploring real-world subject matter, which is what Cage, Specter, and Kojima meant by 'growing up.' Among the massive library of video games ranging from Tennis for Two (the world's first video game dating back to the late 1950s) to the massive multiplayer competitive shooters for the 21st century is a fairly large category of games that attempted to 'grow up.' I possess a few of such games from that category which I will use as examples.

The early installments of the Resident Evil franchise made attempts to explore corporate power and the human lust for power. In my educated opinion, they carried potential to explore the placement of special interests above the common good and the ethical standards of the biological sciences. If corporations become powerful enough to manipulate public opinion, have government officials on their payroll, and be able to defy established laws and ethics as they see fit in secret (such as by covertly developing of biological weapons and selling them to the highest bidder), who would be able to oppose them and bring them down?

Kojima's Metal Gear series has been known to explore the effects of war, political manipulation, and the military industrial complex. From his point of view, there are those who intend to fan the fires of war by any means necessary to suit their interests and peace is an unnatural state that is extremely difficult to obtain yet is worth fighting for regardless of the odds. He also accepts the fact that while rapid advancments in technology and science can greatly benefit the world at large, it is inevitably that the enablers of war will use such advancements for their own ends. In the case of the spin-off Metal Gear Rising: Revengence, its the use of cyborg technology by PMCs (private military companies or contractors) to convert children into efficient soldiers and effective killers like Raiden, the game's main protagonist, once was in his life as a child soldier known as Jack the Ripper.

Bioshock, the critically acclaimed sci-fi first-person shooter series, took place in Rapture, a 1950s underwater utopia in which laissez faire capitalism, the idea that private companies should be allowed to do as they choose to run and conduct business, is taken to an ultimate extreme. Following an ideal that's loosely based on Objectivism, the individualistic philosophy of Ayn Rand (whom Andrew Ryan, one of the main antagonists in Bioshock, is named after), all of the ethical and legal constraints established by the surface world's societies, governments, and religions (referred to as "parasites" by Ryan) have been removed in the pursuit of free market prosperity, innovation, and man's own interests, which ended up leading to Rapture's violent downfall. I should also mention that the soon-to-be-released Bioshock: Infinite explores American exceptionalism, historical revisionism, xenophobia, religious nationalism (the unity of religion and state in which the U.S. Constitution was first drafted to avoid), and institutionalized racism, all while taking place in Columbia, a floating metropolis in the early 20th century.

As I said before, the video games I have just mentioned are just examples of video games growing up beyond mere power fantasies and taking on real-world subject matters we are currently facing in the real world with maturity. While they may still be generally considered escapism, the video game community and industry is experiencing what I would call an evolution from the Peter Pan-type of escapism to a more sophisticated form of escapism in which ideas and artistic expressions are being shared with communities and society at large. From my perspective as a gamer, this is a great thing as long as it does not hinder the one key feature that separates video games as a medium from television, film, paintings, statues, etc.; that is only possible in video games: interactivity. Having firmly established my stance on escapism and maturity in video games, do you know of any video games that have grown beyond a "Neverland" kind of fantasy? If so, how have they grown up and what subject matter did they attempt to tackle? Feel free to share any and all examples in the comment section below.