Transcript
Video Games
September 13, 2002
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Last spring a St. Louis judge ruled that video games should not be protected under the First Amendment. He said they have more in common with sports or board games than they do with speech. But Clive Thompson disagrees. He has found a number of video games on line and he noted recently in Slate.com that they often convey potent, sometimes political messages. Clive, thanks for coming on!
CLIVE THOMPSON: It's nice to be here.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Could you make a distinction between the on line games that we'll be discussing now and the first person shooters and the other purchasable games that have attracted so much negative press.
CLIVE THOMPSON: Sure. Most of the games you hear about are things that you buy in a store in a box. They're about 30 bucks. They might have cost millions of dollars to produce. The games we're talking about here are little games that are designed by one person in their basement using software for web design, and they put them on a web site, and they let anyone play them for free - and they're usually very simple. They're not big and complex the way that one of the games that you'd buy in a store are.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Let's just take a quickly technological detour. There are new technologies that seem to have made animation more accessible to everybody called Flash and Shock Wave. What's been the role of those technologies?
CLIVE THOMPSON: Well they were introduced several years ago, and what they've done is they've taken animation and turned it from something that only professionals could do in well-funded animation studios and turned it into something that almost anyone with a little bit of web savvy can do sitting at their computer for a few hundred dollars -- which is what the software costs. You could actually compare it to a certain extent -- what's happened with on line games -- with what the photocopier did for publishing. Suddenly you had all sorts of weird little people coming out of the closet with their strange ideas that they would photocopy into little magazines and distribute at strange book stores or even to hand out free on the street.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Let's talk about a few of these. Let's begin with New York Defender. Now there's one that seems to be designed to make you feel helpless.
CLIVE THOMPSON: Absolutely. The way the game works is you open up the game and you're looking at a, a little cartoon-y skyline of New York -- the World Trade Centers are there -- and you can sort of hear in the background a sort of sound of, I guess, plane engines and sort of whooshing-- [WHOOSHING PLANE ENGINES SOUND] and then suddenly a plane starts flying out of the corners of the screen and heading towards a tower, and you're trying to zap them before they get to the towers. [WHOOSHING PLANE ENGINES SOUND LOUDER] Eventually, after really only about 30 seconds or a minute though, the, the planes start flying so frequently towards the towers that it's basically impossible for almost anyone to knock them all out, and they eventually hit the towers, and the towers crumble. [SOUND OF DESTRUCTION]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So the point isn't to win that game; the point is to make you feel something.
CLIVE THOMPSON:That's right. It's to sort of freak you out and make you think -- to a certain extent --about the inevitability or the -- how hard it is to defend against surprise attacks. And that kind of interests me, because clearly what the game-makers realized was that the first time you play the game you experience what New York experienced the first time through -- which is that they didn't know what was going to happen, and so everything happened very quickly and there was no defense. And then you play the game a few more times, and you begin to experience what the military is experiencing now -- that it's possible to get some of the - some of the threats taken care of, but if they start coming too fast and frequently, you have to figure out a different strategy. You can't win that way.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And Enduring Freedom, another game, is kind of similar and yet more specific in its message.
CLIVE THOMPSON:That's right. The way that game works is you are flying a fighter pilot bomber jet over Afghanistan and trying to bomb Taliban installations while not bombing-- supposedly peaceful Afghani villages.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Now I played this game, and-- you're there in the bomber, and you can aim and, and the little settlements are going by so quickly --some have a mosque -- you skip those, cause you know those are civilian -- but a lot of them come by so fast you don't know what you're blasting at and, and the point of the game is to take out the Al Qaeda sites - the Taliban sites - and, and leave the civilian sites alone! And, and ultimately that's a game you can't win either!
CLIVE THOMPSON: Well certainly because when you're sort of rushing by, you can't necessarily tell -whoops - I thought I - I thought it shot at a-- at a landing field; I actually destroyed an innocent village -- and I mean in one sense--that sort of neatly encapsulates the whole video game nature of war. It becomes increasingly harder not to have collateral damage, and that's essentially the point of that game.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:And there's another one -- we'll talk about one more called War on Terrorism; I guess it's a series of games. One of them is Osama bin Laden just sitting there, broadly cartoony-sketched - a pig in a poke - and there are a couple of boxing gloves and all you do is pummel him until he dies. [LOUD SOUNDS OF PUMMELING BIN LADEN]
GAME ANNOUNCER: Mission accomplished.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: There's no way you can lose that game.
CLIVE THOMPSON: It is pretty much just a nakedly open invocation to vent your frustration.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Well when you've got a series of games that either you can't win or you can't lose, I have to wonder whether the word "game" is a misnomer. It seems that these are interactive editorials or on line therapy!
CLIVE THOMPSON: It's more like someone creating little visual metaphors and letting you romp around in them. They essentially take something that you might think about politically -- you know, the nature of "enemies" -- your relationship to them -- and then use the physics of a game -things colliding - things bouncing - you shooting at things -- to make their point. It's, it's very unusual. It -- I don't like throwing around these words very often, but it's reasonably unprecedented in the way we communicate. I think it's sort of a-- a, a new form of rhetoric.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Okay. Thank you very much!
CLIVE THOMPSON: Thank you.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Clive Thompson is starting a technology journalism fellowship at MIT and Harvard. [MUSIC UP AND UNDER] You can find his column about on line games at Slate.com. And you can find some links to those games on our site at onthemedia.org.
BOB GARFIELD:That's it for this week's show. On the Media was produced by Janeen Price and Katya Rogers with Megan Ryan; engineered by Dylan Keefe, Rob Weisberg and George Edwards, and edited--by Brooke. Our webmaster is Amy Pearl.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Mike Pesca is our producer at large, Arun Rath our senior producer and Dean Capello our executive producer. Bassist/composer Ben Allison wrote our theme. This is On the Media from NPR. I'm Brooke Gladstone.
BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield. [LOUD SOUND OF ONE BIG PUMMELING PUNCH]
GAME ANNOUNCER: Mission accomplished. [MUSIC TAG] [FUNDING CREDITS] ************