Morality Settings: New Generation Game Systems and Parental Controls

Abstract

In Edited Clean Version: Technology and the Culture of Control,1 which connects theories of governmentality and Deleuzian control to the study of censorial practices in the digital era, I launched the book by recounting a Chaplinesque scene that saw me stymied in a failed effort to play a DVD on my PlayStation 2. Each time I tried to play John Water’s A Dirty Shame (2004), I received the same onscreen “error message”—“The Parental Settings of This Player Prohibit Play”—despite the clear intent signaled by turning on the machine, inserting a disk, and repeatedly jabbing the button to select “play.” But my machine said no, or more accurately, refused to say yes. My access was disabled by parental controls predicated upon “enabling” choice, “empowerment,” and the ability to exert more “control” over content and access. As I wrote in Edited Clean Version, this experience reveals the paradox of being in control: the delimitation of choice as a measure of securitization. Spending hundreds of dollars on a game system to then intentionally disable certain functions in a self-administered action of distributed micro-political technocratic morality is not unheard of today. Parental controls—touted as pro-user, de-regulatory measures in the neoliberal interest of user self-governance and of moral adjudication of their own digital environments—are described as “digital tools” for content filtering and blocking, use restrictions and management, and user monitoring and tracking. Since the passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 and supplemental legislation like the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act of 2005, such capabilities have become de rigueur integration in the United States, a design “solution” found in all manner of digital devices and services. Televisions, smart phones, tablets, music interfaces and storage media, operating systems, Internet search engines, social media sites, software and hardware: Our involvement with the world occurs through an assortment of such technologies, each equipped with parental control features.2 Game systems are not outside of this purview. For more than a decade, the following game systems have included parental controls in