Ben Gonshaw: Digital Media Theorist & Game Design Consultant
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WHAT'S IN A NAME?

23rd January 2007

The main thrust of the musings and rants on this site has been to ponder the creation of a framework that would support interactive story telling so that deep issues can be brought to games. The ins and outs have been discussed in different places on the site, but this has been brought into sharp relief by recent events.   The Slamdance festival, the bastion of independent movies and more recently games too, has withdrawn a game about the Columbine murders. On the surface this does not seem too surprising, after all it was supposedly an addiction to the ‘murder simulator’ Doom that created these two monsters in the first instance.   Most people I have told this news to meet it with a Daily Mail ‘and so it should be, how disgusting, a game where you play the murderers. It should be banned’, and it is exactly this kind of knee-jerk reaction that the press and public at large have been exhibiting.

However, the sensitivity and depth of research that went into creating the game, (creator Danny LeDonne used the experience to try to come to terms with the event and to understand what could make two people, similar to himself, snap) elevates the work to a comment on the topic as valid as (the vastly overrated Michael Bore vehicle) ‘Bowling for Columbine’ or the many literary tomes written about the pair of teenagers who armed themselves to the teeth and stormed their school, killing 12 pupils and a teacher before turning the guns on themselves. In fact the ‘game’ includes the two lead characters performing that same, final act.

What this shows is that the perception of games has not progressed with the medium itself. As discussed in this 2004 piece, people are not yet ready to view games as a medium with anything to say. To the world at large games are visceral experiences devoid of meaning. Leave your brain at the door, there's nothing here beyond a simple adrenaline feedback loop of twitching thumbs and flickering screen.   Several other games, Sony’s PS3 darling Fl0w amongst them, have withdrawn from Slamdance in protest at their decision. Slamdance had a real opportunity to put forward the case for mature gaming and to help to change the uneducated views of the mass media. Unfortunately they lack the money and legal resources to respond to the inevitable slew of civil actions and fear that it might topple the entire festival, now and for ever and have withdrawn the game. This means the case for mature videogaming will be on hold for a while longer.

Perhaps this has something to do with the term ‘game’. Whenever I mention making a game about The Holocaust, a project that will one day come to fruition, people are horrified. Here I discuss whether the term game is applicable to such an experience. I suggest that it’s not, although to all intents and purposes it uses exactly the same technologies and skill sets to create it.   Perhaps someone will coin a great term that can be applied to these experiences that will distance them from games. I’m sure that there’s something out there more suitable and catchy that will be coined when a body of mature work hits critical mass. For me that’s just a DREAM, a Digitally Realised Experience At Most.

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