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Converging: An Interview With Henry Jenkins
Yes, absolutely. Every artform, every storytelling tradition needs the ability to represent violence because aggression, trauma, and loss are a fundamental aspect of the human condition. The idea that game violence is in and of itself bad is an absurdity. At the end of the day, I might push further and say that there is no such thing as game violence - at least the way that it is understood in the popular press. Game violence is not one unified thing which we can label, count, and study in the laboratory. There are various representations of violence in specific games. The issue shouldn't be how much violence is in the game but rather what the violence in a game means. I am not opposed to game violence per se but I would like to see game designers make more meaningful choices about how they represent violence through their games. There is too much repetitive, banal, thoughtless violence which exists simply because people think it will sell more units. There is not enough violence which has been thought through, which is part of the logic of the game, which makes some kind of statement. You can't really call it gratuitous when the whole purpose of some games is to display violence, but it is certainly a wasted opportunity. Game violence is often so formulaic that it betrays the medium within which these designers are working. Game designers need to stop thinking about violence as an ethical lapse and start thinking about it as a creative challenge. What can we do that will get designers and players to really think about the role of violence in their work? It is easy enough to defend the role of violence in the work of Scorsese or Tarantino. It is much harder to defend the role of violence in most video games. But this goes hand and hand with what we have been saying about game as art: with creative freedom must come creative responsibility. GS: We're seeing a lot of coverage of Second Life, but how important do you think The Linden's project really is? HJ: I think what is going on in Second Life is profoundly important on several levels. At the most basic level, it probably represents the furthest the game industry has gone in the direction of user-generated content. It is utterly fascinating to see what people are choosing to do within the context it provides for them to create stuff, make stuff happen, and share stuff with other people. (I am using stuff here because it signals just how diverse the range of materials and activities these communities are generating are.) Second Life ranks alongside YouTube as perhaps the most
visible example of the kinds of participatory culture I discuss
in my new book, Convergence Culture. It is a powerful example of
consumers taking media in their own hands. Will every person want
to build things? No - most of us don't build things in real life.
But a world where any one of us could potentially build something
and get it into cultural distribution feels different than one
where creativity rests in the hands of a talented few and the power
of distribution And like YouTube, Second Life represents a meeting point between different subcultural communities - and now, increasingly, commercial, educational, nonprofit, and governmental institutions as well. Last week, I participated in a major press conference hosted by the MacArthur Foundation. On one hand, we were speaking to key civic leaders from the Manhattan area - directors of school systems, museums, libraries, and other public institutions - inside the Museum of Natural History. On the other hand, we were speaking to people who levitated or had feathers growing out of their heads who were listening to the event via Second Life. All kinds of groups are using Second Life as a platform for what one might call thought experiments - trying things out in a virtual world that they would not be able to do in the real world - and as this happens, we are seeing Harvard try to teach law courses, therapists doing group sessions, advertisers testing brand strategies, and sexual minorities trying new kinds of practices, all in the confines of this virtual world. Some of the things people are doing right now will turn out to be dead-ends, but I love the generative nature of Second Life and I am convinced that some major discoveries will emerge through this outburst of bottom-up energy. GS: Do you think that preconceptions about 'gaming' are hindering the development of online worlds into a genuine of a 3D-web or 'metaverse'? (I'm thinking about Prokofy Neva's comments in this comments thread): HJ: I have long felt that the term, game, is both enabling and crippling. We have a tendency right now to describe all forms of digital entertainment as games. In the real world, we might maintain meaningful distinctions between games, sports, toys, playgrounds, theaters, artistic tools, community halls, and so forth, all of them become games when computers are involved. This can be seen in an elastic sense - the word just keeps expanding to include all new play experiences - but it can also be done in a very constricting sense - creating a hierarchy of experiences based on how much they do or do not look like a prototypical game. So, the argument that "this isn't really a game" gets used to shut down games for girls or educational games or serious games or anything that doesn't look like something a hardcore gamer might want to play. I think it is unfortunate that these online worlds are being hijacked by the term, game, so that we are now hearing Second Life isn't really a game - as if this is a bad thing - and there are people out there who don't play games who won't visit Second Life because they think it is a game. Part of the problem is that we go to games expecting to be entertained, anticipating predetermined roles and goals and rules and all of that stuff, and that may or may not be the best way to think about how a metaverse might work. There are things designers of online worlds can learn from games but there are also things they should be learning from MUDS or chat rooms or all kinds of other communities online and off. |
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