Game Work: Language, Power, and Computer Game Culture

1 Studying the Computer Game Complex

Steve, a happily married forty-four-year-old man with two kids, sits before a nineteen-inch ®at-screen computer monitor, a joystick in his hand. And not just any joystick. Steve grips the award-winning Logitech Wingman Force, a game controller modeled after the joysticks in the latest ¤ghter jets. It has nine buttons, a throttle mechanism, and a “POV” hat switch that allows him to look sideways, above, and behind his simulated “Warthog,” a U.S. Air Force A-10 Thunderbolt II. The Intel Pentium 4 processor (3.2 GHz) and NVIDIA GeForce Ultra 5950 video card with 256 MB of onboard RAM render the ground below the aircraft with amazing realism, and because Steve has activated the simulator’s “weather effects,” the joystick shakes in his hand when he ®ies through turbulence. The stick also gives him a jolt when he kicks in the afterburners and vibrates when he pulls the trigger. The vibrations are rapid but dull in his palm, just how Steve expects it would feel to ¤re off thirty-millimeter rounds loaded into a real nose-mounted General Electric GAU-8/A Avenger seven-barrel cannon. And though Steve is only a casual player of Jane’s USAF—¤ve to ten hours a week—he has already played this simulation for more than ¤fty hours (and he’s still working on the training missions). Tonight he plans to focus his training on air-toground attacks, especially moving targets like tanks and supply convoys. Lieutenant Colonel “Scooter” Davis, the simulator’s training persona, warns Steve that today’s practice is going to be a tough one but wishes him “Happy Flying” just the same. Steve smiles and tightens his grip on the joystick. “Bring it on,” he says, and moments later he loses touch with the real world as he works the sluggish virtual Warthog down runway 22R of Nellis Air Force Base and takes to the sky. 1 Studying the Computer Game Complex  In the media wake of the Littleton, Colorado, high school shooting in 1999, news coverage quickly turned to ¤nger-pointing as people struggled to understand what could have motivated such youth violence. Within twentyfour hours, national TV news programs were reporting that the young men who had walked into their school and shot thirteen classmates to death had two unsavory pastimes: listening to Goth music and playing computer games. Within forty-eight hours, dozens of newspapers had printed stories speci¤cally on these two elements of this tragic event. Nothing about these stories, which seemed most interested in scapegoating the band Marilyn Manson and computer games like Doom, was very revealing. Music has been blamed for corrupting youth for centuries. And despite the fact that at the beginning of the twenty-¤rst century they are arguably little more than a hybrid medium extending the genres of ¤lm, TV, ¤ction, and comic books, computer games have a similarly troubled—if shorter—past. Stories about both were formulaic: music and games are popular , engaging, and ¤lled with disturbing images of rage, despair, supernaturalism , and death. It is to be expected then, the stories suggested, that those who are exposed to such material are going to be changed, made somehow more amenable to acting out in their own lives these supposedly artistic expressions of others’ profound frustration with the world. This narrative formula generally continues with a bit of scientism noting the considerable research that purportedly establishes a link between media exposure and violent tendencies in youth, offers several semi-shocking excerpts from a song or a violent screenshot from a game, and concludes by advising people—parents especially—to attend to their children (and to themselves) lest they be further exposed to such deleterious effects. Newspaper headlines demonstrated this formula as well. After the Littleton shooting, the Reuters newswire service distributed a story headlined “Colorado Teen Gunmen Liked Computers, War Games” (Reuters). Appreciation is enough to warrant claims of causality in this early “report.” USA Today took the liberty of explicitly expressing the implied generalizations of earlier computer game–blaming stories by running a piece headlined “Kids, Online and Off, Feast on Violence” (Thomas). This story summarized in broad and af¤rming strokes the various claims that have been made about how TV, movies, and computer games breed real violence in children by exposing them to its simulated two-dimensional representation. The Littleton assassins, like everyone else but more so, were made psychopathic by their 6 studying the computer game complex [18.117...