American Justice and the First-Person Shooter

Abstract

The video- and computer-game industry generated a profit of US$6.35 billion in 2001, earnings greater than those of either Holly- wood 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;142 per cent of them are women; the median age of gamers is twenty-eight.2 The pro- duction 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 phenome- non, 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 ana- log 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 lit- tle 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) ~~ Canadian Review of American Studies/Revue canadienne d'~~tudes am~~ricaines 34, no. 1, 2004now 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 omnipo- tence. Video games tend to be categorized not by narrative con- tent but by style of game play. A real-time strategy game, then, may be set in outer space, in contemporary Europe, or in medi- eval 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 strat- egy games. 3. Socio-psychological Studies. This is the largest category of com- puter-game studies. Sociologists, psychologists, women's stud- ies 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 posi- tion. These studies were given a special urgency after the Col- umbine 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 televi- sion 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.