American Justice and the First-Person Shooter

The video- and computer-game industry generated a profit of US$6.35 billion in 2001, earnings greater than those of either Hollywood films or pornography and, in the entertainment field, second only to those of the music industry. It is estimated that 60 per cent of all Americans regularly play computer or video games;¹ 42 per cent of them are women; the median age of gamers is twenty-eight.² The production budgets for computer games now regularly run into the tens of millions of dollars, and the creation of a single game may involve a team of designers, actors, programmers, and musicians that rivals in size some film production crews. Despite the scale of this phenomenon, surprisingly little scholarship has been devoted to it. What scholarship there is can be divided into four basic categories:

1. History of Computer Gaming. Electronic games actually date back to 1958. In that year Willy Higginbottom, a technician who had designed circuits for the Manhattan Project, connected an analog computer to an oscilloscope and some buttons to create an electronic game of tennis. He did not patent the game. The first successful computer game was created three years later by a group of MIT technicians. Called Spacewar, it crudely simulated a spaceship shooting at enemies. It would eventually find its way into coin-operated arcade consoles. Computer games, then, are over forty years old, but it is only in the past twenty or so years that they have had any cultural profile. There has been little scholarly attempt to document their history, so most of the work in this category is being done by amateur enthusiasts.³
2. Taxonomy. Computer game enthusiasts and developers have been recognizing, defining, and naming computer game genres for the past ten years or so. "Gamers" (a term I will take to include not only enthusiasts but creators of computer games) now recognize such genres as real-time strategy games, role- playing games, simulation games, and first-person shooter games. Many of these genres have recognized sub-genres. For example, some real-time strategy games are called "god games" because they place the player in a position of detached omnipotence. Video games tend to be categorized not by narrative content but by style of game play. A real-time strategy game, then, may be set in outer space, in contemporary Europe, or in medieval China; because, in each of these settings, the player controls squadrons of fighters and their military hardware from a detached, third-person perspective, they are all real-time strategy games.
3. Socio-psychological Studies. This is the largest category of computer-game studies. Sociologists, psychologists, women's studies scholars, media scholars, and innumerable journalists have tried to discern the impact that video-game playing is having upon society. Most often, these studies are analyses of the effects of video-game violence or video-game gender representation on children.⁴ As early as 1982, the United States surgeon general, Dr. C. Everett Koop, publicly declared that "videogames were evil entities that produced 'aberrations in childhood behaviour'" (Poole 218), though he offered no evidence to support his position. These studies were given a special urgency after the Columbine massacre when it was revealed that the two young men who committed that crime were fans of the first-person shooter game DOOM. There was a Senate inquiry on the subject in the wake of that massacre.
4. Formalist Studies. These look at computer games as a new type of media experience and/or a new form of narrative. Much of this scholarship draws upon theories generated in film and television studies.⁵ The most prominent theorists working in it are, perhaps, Steven Poole, author of Trigger Happy, and Mark J.P. Wolf, editor of The Medium of the Video Game.

I would like to pursue this formalist line, in order to come to some conclusions about the possible ideological implications of the games, and to do...