I love politics, I live and breathe it. I’ve got a degree in political science, I’m a card carrying member of a party, I’ve worked on a few campaigns and I get giddy at the thought of the coming election season here in Canada. With all that said, it’s hard, even for me, to explain to outsiders the political awakening that’s occurring in the world of video games. Make no mistake, politics has always had an effect on gaming, but this influence has always come primarily from the outside. It’s only recently that game makers and game players have engaged in significant political discourse. If you’re a video game enthusiast you’ve probably heard of people like Anita Sarkeesian or of movements like GamerGate and you’ve likely engaged in one of the many “games as art” debates. Ideas and ideologies like journalistic integrity, high art, feminism, capitalism, and censorship saturate discussions about games and for the first time ever it’s gamers doing all that talking, not law-makers, not crusading lawyers. In the end, it all boils down to the idea that games and the community that surround them need to be a certain way. Twenty years ago, that was decided for us. “What are video games?” was a simple question with a simple answer; Video games were toys for children. Today, we aren’t children anymore and we haven’t put the “toys” away, so that definition has become inadequate. Gaming has reached adulthood alongside us, and like any adult, gamers seek to define themselves and their hobby. This is where the conflict begins and conflict is political by it’s very nature.
I’ll try to remain neutral (though my bias may show). This article is not necessarily about whether one side of an argument is right, wrong or whatever, it’s about how we’ve come here and what it means for the future of the medium. It is true that for a long time, video games were enjoyed primarily by and produced primarily for children but the choice that those children made to grow up with the medium also required the industry to be on board. In other words, the games themselves had to “grow up” as well. Whether they knew it at the time or not, the first company that really drove this idea of growing up with the player was SEGA. In the height of the NES era, SEGA was an also ran in the world of video games. Their obscure Master System console was barely an afterthought to most gamers in a world where Nintendo wasn’t so much “king” but “god”. Nintendo controlled all aspects of console gaming, especially within North America. It decided who could publish games on its system, how many games they could publish a year, its censors decided what was acceptable and what wasn’t and it even had an iron hold on retailers by refusing to do business with them if they stocked competing platforms or unlicensed NES software. When the inevitable transition from 8-bit to 16-bit consoles occurred it was SEGA that first pulled the trigger. When its brand new Genesis console debuted in 1989, SEGA of America ruthlessly courted a demographic Nintendo no longer had a tight grip on, 12 to 15 year olds that had grew up on NES but were beginning to see themselves as older and more “sophisticated.” SEGA’s marketers seized the opportunity to label the aging NES as an obsolete relic and its games as juvenile. All of a sudden, SEGA was the epitome of “cool” and “edgy”. For Nintendo it was as if the Barbarians had reached the gates of Rome. By the time Nintendo released the Super Nintendo (SNES) in 1991, its monopoly in North America was no more and the most bitter rivalry in the history of the business was set to change games and how we view them.
While no longer a monopoly, Nintendo did very little to ease many of its draconian doctrine from the NES era. This was especially true regarding censorship of games on its platforms. Throughout the SNES years games were altered or denied a licence due to material Nintendo of America found objectionable. Themes and references to drugs, alcohol, sex and religion were removed or heavily altered, blood and gore was forbidden and political commentary was also not permissible. SEGA used this to their advantage, allowing game makers nearly free reign to do what they pleased as a way to court Genesis third party development. The Genesis hosted games that were forbidden fruit to SNES players such as the ultra violent Splatterhouse series, Eternal Champions, Time Killers and uncut versions of The Immortal and Mortal Kombat. Of these, the Genesis version of Mortal Kombat is most notable. While the SNES version replaced blood with sweat and greatly altered the game’s signature “fatalities,” the Genesis version kept every gushing geyser of blood and disembowelment unaltered. Many parents were outraged by Mortal Kombat and games of its ilk but SEGA’s decision proved to be the better business choice as sales of Mortal Kombat were far greater on the Genesis, cementing the console’s reputation as “edgy” and for older players. But Mortal Kombat had set off a political firestorm around gaming. Games were still for children in the minds of most and children needed to be protected from violence and adult themes they weren’t ready for. By 1994 several notable politicians such as Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman were spearheading initiatives to regulate the content of video games in the United States. Nintendo’s Howard Lincoln famously laid the blame on SEGA for allowing games like Mortal Kombat to flourish but with the impending peril of government censorship upon them both Nintendo and SEGA, along with major third party publishers formed the ESA (Entertainment Software Association) to lobby government against regulation. The ESA assured politicians that it would be capable of self regulation with the creation of the ESRB (Entertainment Software Rating Board). The creation of the ESRB removed many of the responsibilities platform holders had when curating software on their consoles as that responsibility was now downloaded to parents.
So why is all this important? Because we’re in a similar transitional phase today. While the 90s saw the development of the gaming population from childhood to adolescence, this decade marks the tipping point of its transition from adolescence into early adulthood. While a new generation of tweens and teens may still be titillated by the thought of Mortal Kombat’s fatalities, games like that no longer mark the line that needs crossing. Those adolescents that grew up with the first Mortal Kombat on Genesis are grown adults now. They have adult concerns and adult lives and have begun to gravitate toward games that address those features of their lives. One of those adult concerns is politics.
There are a lot of people out there who think they’re apolitical or apathetic about politics, but being truly apolitical is not possible unless you live alone on an uncharted island. We are all political and we all carry our politics with us wherever we go. Our political beliefs are one of the components that literally shapes how we see and interact with the world around us and the people in it. Unless they live in some type of Lord of the Flies dystopia, children don’t usually concern themselves with the political. Their parents, guardians or adult mentors are their connections and representatives to the rest of the adult world. That’s exactly who fought our political battles in the 90s. Joe Lieberman, congress and the ESA, they were the adults deciding for “us” what we thought and how we progressed. But now gamers are adults themselves and they bring with them their own political beliefs about a whole host of issues and the ESA and congress don’t fight our battles anymore. When women or the LGBTQ community, for example, bring forth their concerns its only because, like everyone else, they are political and part of that is the desire to see yourself and your ideas reflected in the world around you. At the same time, politically dominate groups who do see themselves and their own political worldview represented see this as a threat and fight against it. This is the climate that makes something like GamerGate inevitable. GamerGate is a backlash against worldviews that have been politically marginalized within the gaming community but have recently begun to reshape the industry and the conversion around it. Many of Gamergate’s proponent’s stress that the movement is only concerned about integrity within gaming media but the fact that the scandal that sparked this debate revolves around fairly prominent feminist commentators and that critique is mostly made using common anti-feminist rhetoric implies otherwise. Journalistic integrity is indeed a serious issue in games media but if this were purely about journalistic integrity the movement would be targeting media outlets with serious conflicts of interest like the Gamestop/EB Games operated “Game Informer” or people like Geoff Keighley who infamously reported on Halo 4 while surrounded by bags of Doritos and cans of Mountain Dew, the game’s official sponsors.
Many others claim that gaming should stay apolitical; they lament this recent politicization of the medium and would just like everyone to “shut up and play the game.” To those people I say, the ship has sailed and Frodo and the Elves ain’t coming back to Middle-Earth. To ask gamers to not be political is a lost cause, you may as well ask the straight to be gay and the gay to be straight, it isn’t happening. In fact, if you find yourself in this group, know that you yourself are fighting an ironic political struggle. The belief that games should be apolitical is a political belief itself and only makes you a “conservative” in the new gaming political spectrum. It’s a new dawn in the video game world, where everything’s going to offend someone and everybody’s got a bone to pick and a thing to say and you know what? I’m excited, because now games will address the things that really matter to people, like how it is to be a woman in a man’s world, to be queer or questioning when it isn’t deemed the norm, why the poor suffer when the rich get richer and why the world is the way it is. Growing up means discovering how we fit into the world, a process that continues until the day we die, and I want video games to be a part of it.
