Video Game Tests the Limits. The Limits Win.

From the New York Times-

Video Game Tests the Limits. The Limits Win.
http://tinyurl.com/2y8enw
By HEATHER CHAPLIN
Published: January 28, 2007

AS director of the 13-year-old Slamdance film festival, the indier-than-thou alternative to the Sundance Film Festival that concludes here Sunday, Peter Baxter has dedicated a good portion of his career to showcasing the work of artists toiling outside the mainstream. Three years ago, in that same anti-establishment spirit, he broadened the festival’s boundaries to include the Guerrilla Gamemaking Competition, a forum for independent video-game makers to do what their counterparts in film get to do every winter up the street: show their work, make deals and rub elbows.

Considering how few places independent game makers have for this sort of interaction, perhaps it’s not surprising that the mood the previous two years approached euphoria. “We felt proud just to be associated with Slamdance,” said Andrew Stern, who, along with his partner, Michael Mateas, took home the grand jury prize last year for their game Façade, an interactive drama about a marital crisis inspired by Ingmar’s Bergman’s “Scenes From a Marriage” and Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’ ”

Tracy Fullerton, a professor of game design at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts, was so impressed by what she encountered last year that she persuaded U.S.C.’s Interactive Media Division to sponsor the 2007 competition by offering two six-week student fellowships at the school’s Interactive Media Lab.

But this year that euphoria was nowhere in sight. An entrant called Super Columbine Massacre Role Playing Game! made it to the finals, and in the process attracted complaints about its provocative content. So Mr. Baxter reluctantly opted to withdraw it from the competition. But the anger over his decision has dwarfed the original objections, and many entrants have chosen to leave the festival altogether.

The game in question combines real video images of the 1999 Columbine High School killers and snippets of their conversation with intentionally low-resolution 2-D graphics meant to replicate the look of an early-1990s Nintendo-style role-playing game. To its champions the game is a landmark example of how video games can explore deeply disturbing material, and a powerful condemnation of the culture that produced the Columbine tragedy. To its detractors it’s a study in appallingly bad taste, a horrid trivialization of a tragic event.

The controversy highlights the questions that experimental game makers face as they seek to evolve from a loose conglomeration of people with similar interests into a full-fledged movement. What will it take for their medium to be considered a legitimate art form? And should games even try to address painful or distasteful subject matter?
The game room at the Treasure Mountain Inn here this month was filled with the same red beanbags chairs as last year, but the crowd of 20 or so game designers had withered to half that number, and what had been a ring of more than a dozen humming computer terminals was now a handful of monitors. The rows of folding chairs set up for presentations were half empty, and where last year there was excited chatter on all sides, this year an uncomfortable quiet permeated the room.

The story of how this once-electric gathering lost its luster began with a phone call earlier this month by Mr. Baxter to Danny Ledonne, a 25-year-old Colorado filmmaker and the creator of Super Columbine. Overriding the panel of the judges who had included the game among the 14 finalists, Mr. Baxter told Mr. Ledonne that he had decided to withdraw his game because of outraged phone calls and e-mail messages he’d been receiving from Utah residents and family members associated with the Columbine shooting. He was also acting on the advice of lawyers who warned him of the threat of civil suits if he showed the game.

“I personally don’t find the game immoral, because an artist has a right to create whatever he wants, whether a filmmaker or a game maker,” Mr. Baxter said. “But when you’re responsible for presenting that work to the public, it becomes more complicated.”

Mr. Ledonne, who lives with his parents and had never made a video game before Super Columbine, said he could sympathize with Mr. Baxter’s predicament. “I knew right away what he was going to say,” Mr. Ledonne explained, “so I was just thinking, are they going to reimburse me for my air fare?“ He said he had received multiple death threats since he posted Super Columbine on his Web site in April 2005. “I’ve learned that games are expected to be for children, and when you create a game that’s not, people get very upset,” he said.

“I’m not really a provocateur in person,” he continued. “I inherited this society, which I truly feel is moribund and completely unsustainable. To me the Columbine shootings was like the canary in a coal mine.”

When word of Mr. Baxter’s decision found its way to the Internet, it set off a hailstorm of pent-up anger and indignation among independent game designers. The decision also prompted a flurry of open letters to Slamdance asking for Super Columbine Massacre to be reinstated. One by one over a period of about a week, 7 out of the remaining 13 finalists withdrew their games in protest, an act of solidarity almost unheard of among a group of people known more for working long hours in isolation than participating in group action. (One game, Toblo, made by a group of students at the DigiPen Institute of Technology in Redmond, Wash., was reinstated by the college, which owns the rights.)

A few days later Mr. Baxter heard from Ms. Fullerton at U.S.C. “We became sponsors because we wanted to be part of a contest that stood for certain values having to do with freedom of expression and creativity,” she said. “And when it didn’t anymore, we had to pull our support.”
Kellee Santiago, part of the U.S.C. team that made flOw, a sort of New Age Pac-Man that was among those pulled from the competition, said: “It’s hard not to come to the conclusion that games still are not considered a valid creative medium. It’s like saying that games aren’t allowed to cover serious subjects, and if you do, you must be doing something tasteless.”

To Mr. Baxter, though, it’s not that simple. “Games really are potentially a far more powerful medium that film, aren’t they?” he said while sitting at the Morning Ray Cafe just a few feet from the underpopulated gaming room. “In films you play a more passive role. You’re sitting back looking at something. Because of the role-playing aspect, games literally take the level of our participation to a whole other level. You are actively engaged in the outcome of your actions. Games are going to affect us in different ways, in ways we don’t fully understand yet.”
As he sipped his coffee, Mr. Baxter then said exactly what he had studiously avoided saying for two weeks: “Absolutely, games should be judged by a different criteria than film. I just don’t accept a direct comparison.”

To many of today’s independent game designers, the commercial video-game industry has become stagnant and intolerably risk-averse as game budgets reach tens of millions of dollars and design teams swell into the hundreds. But the advent of digital distribution and affordable game-building tools from companies like GarageGames has allowed them to create a broad spectrum of unconventional games.

Ian Bogost, an assistant professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology and co-founder of the game-development company Persuasive Games (whose slogan is: “Think games are just for fun? Think again”), was a finalist at the past two Slamdance competitions. One of his recent games is Bacteria Salad, in which the player’s goal is to harvest cheap produce and sell it for as much profit as possible. Another is Oil God, where the goal is to double consumer prices in five years: “Wreak havoc on the world’s oil supplies by unleashing war and disaster!”
In another recent game, Darkgame, designed by Eddo Stern, a Los Angeles artist, players wear a device on their heads that translates the game’s visuals into physical pulses. At different points in the game the senses of sight, sound and touch are stimulated, which Mr. Stern hopes will create feelings of claustrophobia and anxiety as well as the usual feelings of wonder and excitement players expect from games.

Sam Roberts, the game director of Slamdance, was visibly pained by the withdrawal of so many intriguing entries this year. “The game competition is here to pay attention to new young artists who have great ideas,” he said. “My biggest disappointment is that six fantastic games weren’t here to take advantage of that.”

Acknowledging that the event was seriously compromised, Mr. Roberts let the attendees vote on whether to award any prizes at all at this year’s competition. On Monday evening they decided not to.

Nonetheless Mr. Roberts said he was optimistic about the future of the event. “These are issues that we can’t avoid as we push the boundaries of what games can be,” he said. “In the end all this debate ended up sparking a lot of discussion and opening a lot of people’s eyes to that fact that there are artistically inclined games out there. And that’s a good thing.”