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After watching CBC's Gamer Revolution, I was a little taken aback. It is a surreptitiously negative reflection on gaming, describing the rise of the medium to mainstream status through a series of knee-jerk fearactionary commentaries on the ludicrously poised frenzy of professional gaming in South Korea and, of course, the neverending black light of violence. At one point we are referred to a study which demonstrates that teens playing violent games have violent reactions themselves... albeit deep in their brains. My! Just like playing sports, say, or driving a car might also cause aggression at times. However, comparative logic is shunted aside as the documentary moves on to the Columbine Massacre, building a Michael Moore-esque joyride of argumentative bullying.

My issue with this feature rests predominantly with the narration, read by a slick airplane-safety female voice who gravely spells out the negative repercussions this rise in gaming at every turn. She is systematically refuted by interviews with actual gamers and game designers (who are, themselves, systematically refuted with footage that depicts them as retards - in one segment, Sims mastermind Will Wright is shown getting lost in a hallway). Gamer Revolution might be interesting - at least to those coming late to the host of issues contemporary gaming has scared up in mass media - but it's slanted. It's a bald critique, not an expose.

It strikes me that television has never been kind to video games. Remember those hideous TV shows, with their savvy super-kewl hosts, which primarily consisted of hapless bespeckled kids bashing away at some product-placed video game on a ginormous screen? The hosts would "rap" with us, "breaking down" all the badass features of the game, every once in a while offering up a facile hint or tip for better play that the average gamer figured out themselves within five minutes. These shows smacked of condescension, manufactured hipness and, above all, a tragically bewildered disconnection from what gamers are actually like, what they're interested in. Compared to this drek, and the more recent attempts by television at leveraging the popularity of video games (see Spike TV's Video Game Awards, where Spike is somehow imbued with the power to declare video game triumphs... selections which often differ dramatically from the accolades awarded from within the gaming industry), CBC's Gamer Revolution is a breath of fresh air.

Still, television will never represent video games fairly and/or positively. We are talking about competing media here. Both television and video games vie for the citizenry's leisure time, with TV getting the short end of the stick in recent years. Gaming and TV are therefore fundamentally incompatible. Spike TV's awards steal advertising and product placement dollars from the video game market; CBC boosts its ratings by borrowing from widespread interest in gaming. Add to this the fact that most video game personas - designers and the like - are usually not very photogenic by television's standards: they are definitively represented as awkward. As long as television attempts to co-opt the popularity of gaming to boost its own profile, these images will feed a rhetorical strategy of negative comparison. Television, in short, is deeply vested in the activity of fucking video games up and defending its own share of the entertainment market.

Posted by Chris at 01:29 PM >> Commentations (2)