I was casting about for a good topic to write about in this month’s installment of Culture Clash, my montly column for the International Game Developers Association, and this one fell into my lap. It is, after all, American Politics Season – and a completely irrelevant race in the state of Maine got my attention. Topic discovered!
In other news, this is actually the second time I’ve used a play on World of Warcraft in my title- wait… third time? I’ll have to check. In any case it’s not the first. Originality and me, we’re not always, you know, together. Enjoy!
World of Wonkcraft
By Matthew Sakey
Originally published by the International Game Developers Association
By the time you read this, the U.S. Presidential election will be less than a month off. That’s the big event, though CNN’s exuberantly complex infographics and Wolf Blitzer’s ability to speak breathlessly for minutes at a time without actually reporting any news will ensure that at least some of the hundreds of subordinate local and state races get a bit of coverage.
Presidential candidates don’t talk about games except in sound bites. It kind of makes me shrivel a little when they do. I’ll never waver in my support for Obama, but I do despise that “turn off the Playstation” crack of his. It’s just so ignorant and so… beneath such an otherwise savvy person. To his credit I haven’t heard it in this current race. Maybe he’s saving it for the Inauguration. But in general the people campaigning for the highest office, at least in the United States, are for some reason “above” serious talk about the fastest-growing leisure sector in the world.
Not so for the bevy of Drain Commissioner, Dog Catcher, and City Comptroller candidates at the local level who will also be elected in November. These individuals could be divided into two general categories: people who play or at least understand games, and people who make damning observations about their ruinous effect on the youth. Occasionally they clash, as in the instance of the Republican party and Colleen Lachowicz, the Democratic candidate for a seat on the Maine State Senate.
Lachowicz plays a little World of Warcraft. Learning this, opponents spun up the smear machine, with a web page and a nasty mailer about the candidate’s “online fantasy world.” Republican spokesman David Sorenson said that her gaming “says something about her work ethic and… immaturity.”
The candidate’s WoW hobby isn’t being attacked by her opponent, Republican Tom Martin; he actually seemed seemed a little sheepish about the whole thing. It’s his party’s machinery that’s behind the attack. Lachowicz’s response to the affair probably marked the last we’ll hear of it – Maine State Senate races could be aptly compared to what goes on in The Casual Vacancy, which is to say they’re hugely interesting only for those directly involved and practically nonexistent for everyone else.
Even if more coverage materializes, it won’t be useful or constructive, choosing to focus on mudslinging in politics, or possibly to present Wolf Blitzer with an opportunity to ruminate in ill-researched generalities on the pastime. I assure you that it wouldn’t ask the question the news doesn’t seem to ask: what’s wrong with a politician playing a video game? The woman has a hobby. If her hobby was gardening, consuming her evenings and Saturday afternoons with weeding and watering, so what? No one’s attacked Vice Presidential candidate Paul Ryan for exercising two hours a day (I can’t imagine Lachowicz gets more WoW time than that). Those are hours he could have spent learning about the economy, after all, something he very clearly needs to do.
The Lachowicz story is a comic example of how misguided, disingenuous, and occasionally downright strange American politics can get, that something like this is even a… a thing. If this is “cutthroat politics,” we’ve sunk pretty far. Back in the day our politicians would engage in pistols at dawn from time to time. That’s good watching.
But even more curious than what’s wrong with a politician playing games, I wonder why more politicians don’t play games. Any assertion that they’re lazy, childish, dangerous, or pointless is demonstrably ignorant – gaming is no different than watching Monday Night Football, or reading books. The worst anyone could say about gaming is that it’s kind of a sedentary hobby, but so are the two I mention above. From a politician’s point of view, modern games seem like they’d be a godsend. A game is a simulation; a “series of interesting choices,” if you will. It allows the player to experiment with decisions and consequences in a safe environment. Seems to me that as long as you’re able to make the cognitive transference from the game experience to the real one, you could learn quite a bit about governance from games.
Not sold? I’m not sure if any cognitive studies have been done on this, but after chillaxing with a game for an hour or two, I sometimes discover I’ve spontaneously come up with solutions to completely unrelated challenges. Possibly because taking your mind off something often helps, but it seems equally plausible that while the brain’s problem-solving machinery is working to succeed in a game, it is simultaneously and unconsciously multitasking on other dilemmas. Could Obama and Boehner prevent the looming Sequestration if their meetings included regular Darksiders 2 breaks?
Or let’s consider the connect-with-a-constituency tack: a national politician who goes on Kimmel or something and speaks knowledgeably about, say, his or her Call of Duty skillz is going to get some votes out of it. Most people vote on the issues, but not all. George W. Bush spent eight years tainting the White House in no small part due to the votes of imbeciles who based their choice on the sense that he was “someone you could have a beer with,” imbecile-speak for “I don’t want someone who’s intelligent or qualified, I want someone who’s an imbecile like me.” That he’s a teetotaler demonstrates how qualified those people are to have an opinion, but hey. In any case, I bet imbeciles of another kind might head off to the polls if they hear from a politician who shares their hobby, and for no other reason than that.
The news cycle has already moved beyond the tiny blip of Colleen Lachowicz and her World of Warcraft fun. Heck, I only heard about it myself because I got an outraged e-squawk from the Video Game Voters Network and saw a piece in GamePolitics. The mainstream media barely mentioned it at all. A stupid conflict between nonentities in an insignificant race is most interesting for the corollary questions it raises.
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I will avoid the ample opportunity to bemoan the state of American politics in general, and the American election system in particular, because I think it’s all been said and would come as no surprise to anyone. So…games.
Obviously, the political mudslinging potential here comes from the rift between the gamers and the non-gamers in (at least American) society; a lot of that’s a generational gap, I think, and when you consider that most of our top representatives in government are fiftyish at the low end, that means they didn’t grow up with video games at all (unless they were nerds). My parents, when they were my age, would occasionally have crazy Intellivision parties, or so I’m told, and despite that have never taken much interest in or nurtured much understanding of the video games of the post-arcade era. Save for an erstwhile Tetris addiction, they really don’t touch native video games at all. (They do play a fair number of board games on their iPads, though I think this is because of the greater convenience versus the actual game.)
Now, I find the Monday Night Football comparison apt because, while both are physically sedentary, research has shown (and continues to show) that there are many benefits of playing video games: greater dexterity, improved problem-solving skills, and so on. While arguably knowledge of sports gives you certain social advantages, I doubt sitting on your couch regularly to watch whatever athletic competition you prefer holds a considerable chance of personal improvement.
But, of course, our minds work in such a way that it will twist perception to preserve our beliefs, however unfounded. In a very internal way, we dislike being proven wrong. Which is to say that I don’t see this perception changing until more and more of the adult population grew up with video games.
I like to look at the history of comics for an example of the social progression video games need to go through, though so far video games have dodged a bullet comics did not. Though the history of the comic form stretches back a bit farther, the comic book took off – and entered popular culture in a significant way – in the 1930s. They remained relatively unmolested for two decades or so, easily relegated to being inconsequential or kids’ stuff or whatever – we could compare this to the first twenty years or so of video games, say, the ’70s through the mid-to-late ’90s.
At about that point in their histories, both forms came under fire because of the nature of their content. Comics, by then, included many crime and horror titles, which were very popular, moreso than the superheroes we mostly associate with the medium. In 1954, psychologist Fredric Wertham published his book Seduction of the Innocent and set off a firestorm. He proposed (without much evidence, mind) that the depiction of violence in comics caused juvenile delinquency – and a lot of people bought into this. He set off a nationwide fervor surrounding comics, up to and including book burnings across the country and a US Senate inquiry into the matter.
I think we can all recall the not so long ago time when games were under similar scrutiny all the time for what they depicted. With games, as with comics, some particularly extreme examples that did probably cross some line somewhere got a lot of people who didn’t know anything about the form or the other things in it to assume that the entire medium was like that. Arguably, we are still in this period in the development of video games as a medium, but violence has been more generally replaced with addiction.
The place where the story diverges for these two media is in what happened after. For comics, Wertham’s crusade resulted in the Comics Code Authority, perhaps the most stifling censorship system in American history. (No joke.) Many, many things were no longer allowed, including many things that were still kosher in films or television at the time. Crime and horror comics went extinct because their genres were basically forbidden. Arguably, the CCA is to blame for the reinvigoration of the superhero, because there was only so much else you could do under the limitations the Code imposed. (The Code notoriously went so far as to restrict the race of characters in comics, amongst other things.)
Now, even if video games are still in their “Seduction of the Innocent phase,” nothing has reached the extreme levels of Wertham’s crusade and its results. Communities haven’t been treating “cartridge burnings” as a righteous outing to save all of our kids from debauchery and a life of crime. But, we could point out, not for lack of trying. For a while there, it looked like Jack Thompson might become video games’ Wertham. Video games aren’t without their opponents, obviously, and for a large number of them there’s nothing we can really do to change that. The stigma, once created, is difficult to dispel, regardless of how reasonable it was in the first place.
Comics lost this battle, and I think you could make the argument that the medium continues to suffer for it, half a century later. I tend to think video games have already won. But there will always be resistance.
I think the answer for why we don’t hear about many politicians calling themselves gamers today is twofold. We still are in a bit of a generational divide with gaming, and since most politicians are the over 50 crowd, that could explain a bit. Also, I think that there might be a personality explanation. I think the general personality profile that (generally speaking) politicians have does not exactly mesh with a videogamer. This will change as more gaming is being done online and is socially integrated more and more.
The nice coda to all this is that she won her seat.