Cyberjack: Political, Social, and Moral Ideology vs. the Video Game Industry and Community

From top-left to bottom right: Jack Thompson , Leland Yee, Ronnie Lamb, Anita Sarkeesian, and Joseph Lieberman

I'll start off by saying I am completely open to diversity in video games. Depending on the quality, I'm willing to play any game made in North America, Japan, Europe, and even Africa. During my years as a gamer, I have enjoyed playing a number of genres, including First-Person Shooters (FPS), Role Playing Games (RPGs), Beat'em-Ups, fighting games, hack-and-slash action, survival horror, platformers, turn-based strategies, real-time strategies, and the occasional point-and-click adventure. In those games, I've played the role of a variety of characters ranging from cyber-enhanced supersoldiers and supernaturally augmented demon hunters to medieval knights and ordinary people in bizarre circumstances. Overall, I've had a blast with them regardless of their gender, race, creed, and nationality. And I'm willing to spend my hard-earned money on more diverse games as long as they are well-made, well-designed, and deemed to be overall fun. In all the time I've spent playing video games, I have never developed any thoughts of committing suicide, sexual assaults, or public shooting sprees in any way; for that matter, my sense of reality and morality has never diminished and never will. Yet, this is exactly what's been implied by over-protective parents, politicians, social scientists, and pop culture critics when they bring video games into the mass media spotlight and propose various forms of legal restrictions, content regulation, and implementing their agenda in the development and production process based mainly on misinformation and cultural bias.

Since the beginning of the video game industry, outsiders have suspected video games of causing harmful effects in players, mainly young people. Such effects include increased aggressive behavior, decreased empathy, anti-social behavior, and misogyny towards women. Some social scientists have published studies claiming a direct link between playing games and said harmful effects, like when Craig A. Anderson published a study claiming a direct link between playing violent video games and aggressive behavior in players. These claims tend to be made whenever a tragic event like a mass shooting appears in the news or when someone seeks an explanation for a cultural shift which he or she perceived as negative. For gamers, developers, and publishers already familiar with these accusations, this sort of thing is nothing new. To put this in perspective, I will briefly discuss five people who made attempts to regulate and influence the way video games are made and distributed; or just ban them outright.

In the early 1980s, a president of the Long Island Parent Teacher Association (PTA) and mother of two named Ronnie Lamb (or Lamm, depending on the source) launched a campaign to ban arcades. Her relentlessness and public appearances on TV shows like The Phil Donahue Show and The MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour helped further increase negative public opinion on video games which were generally associated with vices like dimly lit pool halls and backwater arcades. That perception contributed to the industry's decline in addition to an over-saturated market with low quality titles like the infamous adaptation of E.T. on the Atari 2600 and the various pornographic games made by Mystique for that console.

In the early 1990s, Joseph Lieberman, then a senator of Connecticut and chairman of the Subcommittee on Regulation and Government Information, became concerned about violent video games being sold to children after seeing Mortal Kombat and Night Trap. To address these concerns, he, along with Herb Kohl, then a senator of Wisconsin and chairman of the Subcommittee on Juvenile Justice, started a series of hearings on December 9, 1993 consisting of two panels. One panel consisted of experts in education and child psychology whose testimonies were based on limited research on the effects of violent video games on children, their own cultural biases, and the fact that they never played video games. The second consisted of industry representatives seeking to stave of negative publicity, including those from Nintendo and Sega. Those hearings led to the formation of the Entertainment Software Ratings Board (ESRB), an organization that rates games based on their content (T for Teen and M for Mature, for examples) and continues to do so to this day.

From 1999 to the early 2000s, a Florida-based attorney named Jack Thompson conducted a crusade to ban the sale of violent video games by filing multi-million-dollar lawsuits against video game companies; he made mass media headlines when he attempted to sue Rockstar Games and Take-Two Interactive for development and distribution of the Grand Theft Auto series. He had earned notoriety not only for the absurdness of the lawsuits but also for the way he deems violent video games to be "defective products" and "murder simulators." He was eventually disbarred in 2008 on charges of professional misconduct, effectively revoking his right to practice law. But apparently that has not stopped his crusade as he threatened Valve CEO Game Newell over a mod for Half-Life 2 called School Shooter: North American Tour 2012 in 2011 (no consequences were mentioned) and left a voicemail message to ECA (Entertainment Consumers Association) president Hal Halpin with a sort of "I-told-you-so" tone regarding the 2012 school shooting in Newton, Connecticut.

In 2005, Leland Yee, a child psychologist turned assemblyman from California, wrote a legal bill which would restrict the distribution and sale of "ultra-violent" games to minors in the state with a civil fine up to $1,000 on any person distributing such games without including a label mentioning that it was for those aged 18 and over, or for selling or renting them to minors. In October 7th of that year, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger (who was, ironically, an actor who starred in some of the most critically acclaimed and violent films in history like The Terminator series) signed the bill into state law but it was blocked from going into effect by a federal court injunction. From August 2007 June 27, 2011, the bill moved from the U.S. District Court to the U.S. Supreme Court, which struck it down as unconstitutional. On March 26, 2014, Yee was arrested by the F.B.I. as part of an undercover investigation of political corruption in Sacramento spanning five-years. Charged with bribery, corruption, and racketeering, Yee was sentenced to five years in prison on February 24, 2016. In the end of that story, the case regarding his law costed California tax payers $1.327 million dollars. (On a side note, Arnold Schwarzenegger left his post in early 2011 with a 22% approval rating and eventually returned to acting.)

On June 16, 2012, pop culture critic Anita Sarkeesian and her non-profit organization Feminist Frequency released Tropes vs. Women in Video Games, a Kickstarter-funded video series that would "explore, analyze and deconstruct some of the most common tropes and stereotypes of female characters in games [while also] highlight[ing] the larger recurring patterns and conventions used within the gaming industry rather than just focusing on the worst offenders." Since then, it played a significant role in sweeping up the video game industry and community in a media firestorm regarding women in the industry, cyberbullying, gaming culture, and gaming journalism ethics. Thanks to that, Sarkeesian and Feminist Frequency have, in a nutshell, dominated the discussion of gender and social politics. The resulting influence on the video game design, development, and production process is less than constructive, to say the least. As much as I would like to go over this issue in more detail, I'm going to save it for another time because it's too complicated for this post.

Before I draw my conclusion here, I would like to state the fact that the way some people go after video games is similar to the way people went after any new form of media that appears, including movies and comic books. In the early days of cinema, it was feared, by mostly Catholic and other religious groups, that moviegoers were becoming cruel, violent, and morbid after seeing the movies which contained unrestrained degrees of sex and violence. The resulting bad publicity, coupled with the threat of Catholic-led boycotts and and censorship from state governments, prompted Hollywood to form a self-regulatory agency called the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA, predecessor of the Motion Picture Association of America, or MPAA) in 1922, with Will H. Hays, a former member of President Warren G. Harding's cabinet, in charge. A set of content guideline called the Motion Picture Production Code was written in 1930, but it did not become entirely mandatory until the MPPDA formed the Production Code Administration (PCA) in 1934 and appointed Joseph Breen, a former journalist, diplomat, and a strict Catholic, as its head. Under Breen's leadership, the PCA strictly enforced the Code and held tight control over the Hollywood film making process for over 20 years.

During the late 1940s and early 1950s, some people were afraid that comic books, particularly crime and horror comics, were causing juvenile delinquency; in his now-infamous book Seduction of the Innocent, a German psychiatrist named Dr. Fredrick Wertham claimed that reading comic books were psychologically damaging to readers of all ages by inducing unhealthy behaviors like violence, fascism, sadism, and homoeroticism. Upon the televised hearings held by the Senate Subcommittee on Investigating Juvenile Delinquency in 1954, comic book industry leaders formed the Comics Code Authority (CCA) to put tight regulations on how comic books were drawn and written. Since then, several writers and artists lost their jobs; some ended up homeless while others committed suicide out of guilt and desperation.

Based on these patterns of attempts to bring new forms of media under control, it is clear to me that whenever a new form of media enters the public conscience without restriction, people of older generations view them as a threat to their culture, social structure, and established moral worldview or what they might call the "natural order." To the common folk unfamiliar with the new media, they are a nuisance; worthless junk that is of no benefit to them. To those in positions of social, economic, and political power, they are a threat to the public good or opportunities to uphold, gain, and/or reinforce their positions. By rallying former against the new media and with enough support, the latter would be able to force the new media to adjust itself in order to conform with the most common values established by the majority of society, otherwise known as the masses or mainstream society. The creators and distributors of the new media were now forced to make one of two choices: create content that conforms to the values of the majority or be out of a job.

Back to the topic of video games, suppose the campaigns against them by people like the ones I've just described were successful. With the publicity turned against video games, industry leaders would be forced to write up strict content regulation guidelines to control what content gets put into games similar to the way PCA and CCA did with movies and comic books respectively; and then appoint representatives of the mainstream establishment to enforce them. With those guidelines dictating game design, development, production, and distribution, the variety and quality of game titles would plummet. There would no longer be any games like, just to name a few, DOOM, Metal Gear Solid, Mortal Kombat, Final Fantasy, Street Fighter, Halo, or God of War. Stores like GameStop, Best Buy, Wal-Mart, and Target would not have many games to sell. Online outlets like Amazon, Xbox Live, the Playstation Network, the Nintendo eShop, and Steam would not do so well either. Without much games to sell, job opportunities for video game designers, programmers, writers, artists, sound designers, producers, and more would decline and become less profitable. For those who would have had those jobs, they would lose them and be looked upon as deviants and criminals. There would not be any video game curriculums offered by colleges like Becker College and the Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI). There would be no indie developers using Unreal, Unity, GameMaker: Studio, Clickteam Fusion 2.5, RPG Maker, and other game development software right now. Upon reading this paragraph right now, it should be obvious that this situation is not desirable, especially if you are a gamer (casual or hardcore), a student studying to become a game designer, programmer, and developer, a graduate looking for an internship or a part-time job somewhere in the game industry, and someone already inside the industry for a good number of years as either an indie developer or someone working in a AAA game company.

As a lot of you know by now, video games are recognized as a form of free speech and expression here in America just like all the plays, novels, movies, TV shows, comic books, paintings, and statues. There are people who seek to jeopardize that freedom by branding video games as "murder simulators," "menaces to society," and "corruptive influences" that must be controlled or banned in the name of the greater good. Some of would use them as scapegoats in the wake of tragedies like Columbine, Newport, and Virginia Tech if it suits their agenda. Others would take some video game content out of context in order to make their arguments more valid than they actually are. For gamers and developers like you and me, video games are our hobby, our passion, and our livelihood. To protect them, we must be vigilant; we must remain aware of those who would destroy video games and tear our communities apart in the process; and above all, we must uphold our right to make and play our games as we see fit.

Update: As proof that the video game community is not the collection of basement-dwelling anti-social hermits as some people believe, I would like to present a few pictures I have taken at this year's PAX East that basically proves the contrary: