Geocultural Sensitivity and The Art of Video Games

This post is out there a bit, but humor me.

An interesting man named Tom Edwards stopped by Google today to give a talk about “Geocultural Intelligence and Global Business”.  A geographer and designer by training, he spent thirteen years at Microsoft as a Geopolitical Strategist, vetting products before they launched to be sure that they would not raise any ill feelings — or outright outrage — among foreign governments or other constituencies.  He’s since gone on to found Englobe, a consultancy that expands his work to a broader platform.

To give you an idea of what I’m talking about, I’ll give you a few examples that he shared with us.  Did you know, for example, that Windows 95 was temporarily prevented from being sold in India because the borders of the Kashmir region were not drawn to the government’s liking in the time zone settings (yes, that tiny 1.5×4″ map!)?  Or that several video games have been recalled from, delayed, or outright canceled in some countries because their soundtracks included chanted prayers from the Qu’ran, or because they featured radioactive two-headed Brahman cows that were… edible during gameplay?  Or that Turkey blocks a majority of YouTube traffic in its borders because of videos critical of Ataturk?

At Englobe, Tom’s adapted the idea of “geopolitical” to “geocultural“, and for good reason.  Samuel Huntington proposed back in the 1990s that the powderkegs of the post-Cold War era would not explode primarily over traditional political or military disputes, but rather over cultural and religious conflicts.  It’s certainly hard to argue that this hypothesis is not well on its way to proving true.  This shifting dynamic is not limited to the realm of geopolitics, however.  In the business world, too, we increasingly see the importance of national boundaries fading as so many diverse markets begin to merge into a truly global one.  While governments will still often be the official agents for expressing concern or taking action regarding geocultural issues, the issue goes much beyond the political realm.

I don’t want to rehash Tom’s talk or dive too deep into the details, but I wanted to toss out a thought, which I also posed to him in a question at the end of the talk.  To many people — and especially to developers themselves — video games are not just products.  To them (and me), video games are also an art.  Those who develop the elaborate narratives, painstakingly model the characters, precisely design the environments, labor over how the characters will move and how the user will interact with and feel a part of the virtual world they create — these people, to a certain extent, are artists.

Yes, video games form a mammoth entertainment industry.  But unlike musicians or writers or painters, video game developers can’t just set up a studio in their garage to achieve the pinnacle of their art.  They require complicated tools and training to reach the levels they want, and those things cost money.  Furthermore, the distribution of their work is tightly controlled by the console manufacturers, since video games require access to console APIs (remember this post?) to work at all.   Among the media of art, theirs is perhaps one of the most constrained in terms of access and resources.

If you’ll go so far as to agree with me that video games could be considered partially a form of art, then what a curious art it is, right?  Pictures, films, books — these are all principally observatory arts, and participatory strictly in the sense that your mind takes you away to that place that the artist is guiding you.  Video games, on the other hands, are participatory by nature.  While a general narrative and cast of characters are pre-defined for you, you get to not only decide on, but to actually create and execute the steps that lead you to that conclusion.  In that sense, the user becomes an artist his or herself.  Video games certainly focus on the audiovisual and narrative aesthetics, but it is often the art of interaction that makes or breaks the game.

Of course, it’s also this art of interaction that makes video games a highly controversial medium.  By making the experience so interactive or compelling that it seems like reality, video games developers are often accused of encouraging or enabling video game-like behavior outside the medium (two words: school shootings).  Further, because the developers determine the content of the game and the rules by which players can make their interactive decisions, they can potentially abuse that power and direct or encourage certain types of in-game behavior or sentiment, which can replicate itself outside the game.  An example of this might be (I’m making this up) giving a user extra points for running over bystanders in a driving game.

I asked Tom how the dynamic of creative license and freedom of artistic expression played out with the growing emphasis and action on geocultural sensitivity in corporations, and he signaled that these developers indeed felt that their creative license was being constrained, if not violated.  Certainly, in most cases, their intent was neither to offend nor make any kind of political or religious statement.  But part of what makes art special is that it is allowed to be edgy, provocative, and even controversial.  By being limited to corporate studios that have to (rightfully) play CYA in order to preserve their business, developers feel they are being robbed of their basic artistic freedoms.

So my question is, whither this art and its creators?  For the immediate future, they seem trapped.  Will they be forever constrained to corporate patrons who dampen their ability to express themselves as they wish?  Or will there be some video game developers revolution or renaissance, where they break out of their commercial chains and find away to create as they see fit?  Silly questions to some, but there are some folks out there in America and elsewhere who feel that their art is being censored to some degree.  And that’s some serious stuff.

Image used under a Creative Commons license courtesy of HVX Silverstar.