Sleaze

The worst consequence of the domination of the games industry by young males has been the steady descent of aesthetic standards. In the early Atari days, games were meant to be family fun clean, upbeat, even cute. There were, of course, always those who sought to make money by appealing to the more sordid interests. One of the first of these was a videogame for the Atari 2600 entitled Custer's Revenge. In this sublime work of art, the player as General George Custer must cross the playfield, avoiding a snowstorm of thorny tumbleweeds that threaten to injure his exposed and erect member. On the opposite side of the screen waits an Indian maiden tied to a post. A successful traversal yields the rewarding opportunity to rape said maiden with a series of upward thrusts with the joystick. The storm of outrage generated by this deliberately provocative "game" played right into the hands of its sleazy purveyor.

Such games were surprising exceptions to a prevailing attitude that games should provide happy, clean fun. Nintendo reinforced this attitude with its early enforcement of "family values" in games for its platform.

The first-person shooters broke the dam. The very first, Castle Wolfenstein, copped a nasty attitude with its deliberately glorified killing. Victims cried out "Meine Liebe!" as they died; blood spattered as they fell. The lead designer, John Romero, continued to develop this vicious style with the enormously successful Doom and its many sequels. Each game showed more gore more realistically. One hit game of the early 90s, Mortal Kombat, seemed to take special pleasure in gore, concluding each victory with the yanking out of the loser's spine. The material accompanying the games reeked of an ugly nihilistic attitude toward killing. All this was, of course, billed as satire or pure fantasy, but the bloody-minded style took hold of the industry. I recall an ad for a game in the mid-90s featuring a man holding a gun lying in a bathtub full of blood. Smelling the scent, the industry advanced the cause with more blood-soaked shooters like Half-Life and Grand Theft Auto. The third installment in the latter series boasted an especially vicious style, offering players the opportunity to hire and then murder a prostitute. As I write this, the newest sleaze game, BMX XXX, is generating plenty of consternation among industry outsiders, intense jealousy among competitors, and even greater anticipation among players.

Compounding the problem is the approbation that the industry bestows upon such products. A prudent industry would treat sleazy products with harsh disdain, but the games industry cannot conceal its delight in sleaze. Grand Theft Auto III won industry awards despite the damage it did to the industry image.

Industry insiders protest that they are merely offering the players what they want; they are not imposing values on players but responding to values already inculcated in youths by a sick society. This is self-serving circumlocution. The games industry is not passively responding to values imposed upon it by a ruthless marketplace; it has selected its own audience, driving away most who do not revel in blood-soaked killing. By offering such games, the industry has attracted the kind of audience that demands them thereby reinforcing the cycle.

The result of this profound strategic marketing blunder is an industry that is steadily descending into ever-deeper sleaze. The only solution is to take a deep breath, devote a large amount of money to breaking out of this self-imposed pit, and pay the price of developing a healthier marketplace.