How to Do Things with Videogames

3. Reverence

3 Reverence Videogames are often accused of disrespect, especially for celebrating violenceand forencouraging disdainof man, woman, and culture alike. But can a game do the opposite, embracing respect, deference, even reverence? In 2007 the Church of England threatened to sue Sony Computer Entertainment Europe fordepicting the Manchester Cathedral in its sci-fi shooter Resistance: Fall of Man. The church had complained about the game’s inclusion of the cathedral, which was named and modeled after the seven-hundred-year-old church in this industrial city in northwest England. After considerable pressure and public condemnation, Sony issued a public apology.1 In a statement, the company expressed regret for offending the church or the residents of Manchester, but not for including the cathedral in the game. Amazingly, but perhaps not surprisingly, none of the mass media coverage of the cathedral controversy discusses the game itself. Sony didn’t say much about it either, save a self-defeating statement from noting that the title is “a fantasy science fiction game and is not based on reality.”2 This statement implies, but does not actually address, the absurdity of critiquing a game abouta hypothetical postwartwentiethcentury inwhicha hybrid alien race called the Chimera invade and assimilate the human population. But neither Sony northedeveloper Insomniac Games ever tried to explain why they wished to include the cathedral in the first place. Ironically, the cathedral creates one of the most significant experiences in the whole game, one steeped in reverence for the cathedral and the church rather than desecration. rEvErEncE Resistance is not a game richly imbued with wisdom. It is a first-person shooter, and a pretty good one. It’s beautifully rendered , taking apparent advantage of the advanced graphical capabilities of the PlayStation 3. The game is linear, both in its plot and the paths through each level, but that linearity allows it to focus the player on a smaller, more tightly crafted environment. Resistance takes up a common theme in science fiction: an ultimate test of humankind against the Other. This is also one of the classic themes of videogames, one that has been around since Space Invaders. Because of its simplicity, Resistance is alsoa predictable game. You shoot aliens. A lot of them, over and over again. Your character , Sgt. Nathan Hale, is a one-note brute of a fellow with a mysterious past and a permanently furrowed brow. As is the case in most games of this kind, he is alone in his quest to rid the world of its space invaders, a turn justified by a feeble deus ex machina at the game’s outset, when all of Hale’s unit is killed in a series of overwhelming ambushes. Manchester Cathedral’s representativesexpressed theiraffront in two ways.3 The first appealed to intellectual property. They claimed that Sony did not have the right to include the cathedral’s name, image, or architecture in the game in the first place. Discussions of intellectual property rights have become so common, they risk replacing talk about the weather. Lawyers alone once obsessed over ownership, but now organizations and individuals alike invoke proprietary rights as cultural currency . The videogame industry is among the worst culprits of this practice. The public may squint when Disney lobbies to extend copyright terms to cover the products it itself adapted from public domain fairy tales, but no one bats an eye when videogame publishers issue press releases about their “all new intellectual property” or when journalists refer to forthcoming titles as “new IP” instead of “new creative work.” If a moviestudio had wanted to filmascene forapostapocalyptic action film in the Manchester Cathedral, indeed it would have rEvErEncE had to get the diocese’s permission. But not for the right to depict the cathedral—that could have been done by shooting from the street outside. Rather, the film crew would have needed to get the rights to be on location, including accounting for any potential damage and covering insurance lest anyone be injured during the shoot. What if the movie studio had created a computer graphics Manchester Cathedral, shot their scene on the lot with green screens, and digitally composited the shots together? The answer is unclear, as digital rights usage for landmarks is largely untested. The cathedral’s second affront appealed to media outrage. Manchester’s bishop took the opportunity to issue a statement against videogame violence in the broadest sense, connecting his objections to thecityof...