The Pathology of Game Design

As EA temporarily suspends Manhunt 2, an argument in favor of genuine creative expression in game design

by Eric-Jon Rossel Waugh

As I entered adolescence, my mother decided in her wisdom that I was destined to be an actor. That I showed no particular enthusiasm or indeed talent did not dampen this enterprise for years to follow. One summer, between calls for music videos and hypothetical summer blockbusters, I chanced into a tryout for a hypothetical Blockbuster ad. To the best I can recollect, the company was adding Genesis and Super Nintendo games to its rental library, and to demonstrate the premise was sending out a net for the archetypal game-playing teenager.

Thus I found myself lost across a desk from a pockmarked man with a mustache. When the man asked me to show him my "videogame" acting, I hunched over and concentrated at a spot a few yards ahead of me, miming my button presses with an imagined precision. I knotted my brow, maybe gritted my teeth or moved my lips as if to mutter. You can imagine where the scene goes from here. The director keeps asking for "more", growing frustrated in proportion to my unease. He wants me to thrash in my chair, slam the buttons like a jackhammer, contort my face, and show him my best Beverly Hills orgasm. I am amazed; he patronizes me; I get to go home. Later I met the man they cast as the teenager; he was in his late twenties and had a habit of performing rude gestures to passers-by.

Fifteen years later, despite what seem obvious advances in technology and design, people don't really see videogames any differently. They're seen as a little more dangerous than in Nintendo's halcyon days. Still, reaction to today's post-Columbine hot coffee murder simulation is pretty similar to what happened in the early '90s with Night Trap—and arguably less damning than the early '80s assumption that arcades were little more than glorified drug dens. The "adult content" issue is more of a grace note on top of a deeply catchy melody: videogames are a waste of time. Worse than that, they're addictive—and they're alienating.

Alone and Twitching

Videogames compel children to isolate themselves in the middle of a family space, and to stare at the television, gawk-jawed, for hours on end, jerking around unintelligibly, achieving nothing of obvious value. Even if parents could figure out how to play, few games allow for more than a single player, and the movement on-screen means little to an observer. And when you try to pull the kids away, they resist! It's always "just let me finish this level" or "just let me find a place to save", as if any of that mattered, in the face of dinner and homework! It's not even real!

You can judge the current climate by the tone of the mainstream praise for the Wii. It's not amazing for the ideas it puts forward for future game design; it's amazing because it gets people off the couch. If the blasted things don't stimulate the kids creatively or intellectually, then at least they can do it physically. And hey, maybe socially, if the family can play together—which it often can. That's not so bad. Maybe even better than Monopoly!

The violence debate has to be viewed in the same context. "Adult content" is not interpreted in terms of what it adds or fails to add to game design; nobody cares about quality of design, as that's not what parents see; all they see is the way their children behave in response. Videogames are a big mystery stimulus, impenetrable to the average parent yet clear in the response they see. For a parent, videogames are all about psychology. About what part the games play in their children's (and by extension their own) lives.

In February, director Michel Gondry commented during promotion for his movie The Science of Sleep that he had "banned" his son from playing videogames, in that they gave the child a false sense of achievement—compared to painting or making a film, or other constructive activity. After playing a game for forty hours, what do you get? A month earlier British MP Boris Johnson wrote an essay entitled "Computer Games Rot the Brain", in which he blamed the "hypnotic" quality of videogames for a recent dip in literacy.