The Southern Strategy and War Games

In perusing Foreign Policy article on "militainment" and game warfare ("Meet the Sims... and Shoot Them") my eyes glazed over as they drifted across the shopworn tropes of every over-nervous mother who ever wondered why their sons turn yard waste into swords and rifles, every hypochondriac pacifist who ever got the vapors by seeing someone wearing cammo gear, and every neurotic and historically illiterate cultural critic who is shocked - shocked - at the idea that warfare is entertaining to anybody anywhere.

First, for those who may not be aware, the first marker of any hackish ignorant piece about gaming culture is any mention anywhere in the piece to Grand Theft Auto. Especially - especially - if "violence" is being discussed at all. If the author brings up GTA then the red flag should shoot up for any reader signaling, "I'm about to read ill-informed pap." In video game discourse, discussing Grand Theft Auto is like trotting out The Southern Strategy to discuss politics. Sure, there's a place for it, but the reference is so shopworn and so overdetermined by subsequent discourse that the chances of you really getting an insightful or even coherent (or even real) reading of it are in distant, distant orbit. There is almost no such thing as a serious treatment of GTA because the atmosphere around it is so polluted by shrieking nonsequiturs about gang violence and pixelated nipples. In much the same way that bringing up The Southern Strategy is usually - or gets interpreted as - shorthand for "racists(!)" and typically ends debate on an issue, referencing GTA is lazy shorthand for "boys are murderous robots who ape anything they see on TV."

More than just the lazily pejorative cultural/political stance the reference to GTA pre-inscribes, it also usually means that the person speaking isn't a gamer. It immediately marks the speaker as "outside" the community looking in (I would argue that referencing the Southern Strategy is a similar group marking act, but that's another story). The GTA controversy, such as it was, happened in 2001: an eon ago in the universe of technology and gaming discourses. The landscape between 2001 and 2010 has changed so much that any non-ironic or non-historical reference to those dark ages before XBox Live and graphical parallax mapping is an easy indicator of a voice outside the cultural stream. It also signals an outmoded attachment to the controversies of that earlier age - a point at which people treated audiences as blank slates on which culture projected value - that we would do well to move past. (It's more helpful, in my opinion, to begin thinking a little more counter-intuitively about violence in video games and imagine how audience might be using violence in culturally safe zones for the good of society).

The GTA reference and the ignorance it signals are illustrative of the kind of periodic cultural and historical amnesia that tends to grip academics every generation or so: an affliction that makes people in power imagine they are living in extraordinarily trying times of moral and cultural decay. Parents, teachers, and politicians ask, "Who is to blame for this (historically unprecedented) moral rot we see?" Previous generations had Batman, rock music, western movies, dime novels... The truth is that we're not experiencing any special kind of "moral decay" and people who imagine we are seem to be experiencing amnesia about the moral panic of yesteryear. It makes people - especially people in power - feel better to imagine they live in special times and they are doing something especially meaningful by crusading against the social cancers of popular culture.

With regards to the original article's fretting about the marriage of military and entertainment... what planet is he from? There's nothing new about this and the anxiety about war games making culture more militarized is ludicrous and ahistorical. What kind of Edenic past is being referenced when people allude to a time before war was in some sense linked to entertainment? Combat has always been entertaining - most games of any kind are on some level mimicking combat - so this rhetorical twisting over the "militarization" of entertainment is, in effect, pining for a past that never existed. Western culture is the least violent and least militarized it has ever, ever been (and I would argue this is because it has moved a natural human fascination with violence into virtual safe spaces like movies and video games).

So bring on the sex and violence: it's probably good for us.