Hmm. It appears that I’m well on my way to crafting a persona out of this frantic rhetoric. This could be fortuitous, or it may blow up in my face. I’ll take the risk. I can only hope that there are enough of you out there with your eyes turned skyward. I would rather be burned by hubris than crippled by doubt any day of the week.

Many thanks to former IGDA executive director Jason Della Rocca for fueling the fire with his parting rant at GDC 2009. It turns out that my amateurish zeal is not misplaced after all.

My associate and fellow Full Sail student Rafael Villar – from whom you will no doubt hear more in the future – has a saying that he has followed for much of his life: “It is okay to do the right thing.” This sentence has been on my mind a lot recently. The videogame industry seems painfully reluctant to seize the reins of cultural influence that have been laid at our feet, I imagine primarily because we’re unwilling to believe that we have so much power.

Case in point, from a comment I made on Jason’s site: For the longest time, I was crippled by a tendency to see the world as an immutable constant that I just had to deal with. I never acknowledged my own ability to change my environment for the better, primarily because the games I grew up with had presented me with only the most limited range of choices. This was natural; games had yet to advance to the point of creating true possibility spaces. But the fact remains that THE WAY I SAW THE WORLD had been shaped by the games that I played.

That is a terrifying amount of power, and it stands to reason that no other art form can reach into someone’s head and reprogram his preconceptions the way a game can.

We’re past the need for power fantasy. We’re past escapism. We’re past damsels in distress and worlds teetering on the brink of apocalypse. We can make games that affect our players in tangible, positive ways. If we had the courage, we could craft an experience that would inspire an aimless young man to follow his passion, pull a timid child out of his shell long enough to ask out that girl he likes at school, or give an insecure woman the strength to rise above her fears and hold her head high, all because we made a possibility space where those behaviors grant victory.

Cultures are shaped by values. But values do not emerge from nothingness. One of the primary functions of art is to reinforce the values of a culture, saturating its intellectual tapestry with the ideas upon which the entire system rests. This is how civilizations maintain their consistency; without art, it would be immensely difficult for a society to prioritize. You can always tell what is most important to a country by the symbols present in its art. From the recurring image of the nuclear family in 1940s American popular art to the obsession with nuclear destruction in 1950s Japanese cinema, a culture’s greatest hopes and fears are invariably represented in its art.

Now let’s not kid ourselves here: videogames are the next great art form of the 21st century. We already outsell Hollywood by a significant margin, and our audience is still growing every day. But what values are we representing? The feverish sensory exhilaration of war? The thrill and luxury of a life of crime? The apparent inability of women to save themselves from, well, anything?

Sounds asinine when you put it that way, doesn’t it?

But here’s the big secret of art: the process works both ways. Decades of western political thought were influenced by novels like Brave New World, 1984 and Atlas Shrugged. Science fiction has a rich history of influencing the developments of real-world science (see: Arthur C. Clarke and the geostationary satellite). Catchphrases from otherwise unremarkable movies creep into our cultural lexicon seemingly effortlessly. Even Scott Adams, creator of the Dilbert comics, has a particular affinity for coining pithy phrases and pushing them into widespread usage.

So we know it’s possible for games to change the way people think. We know that games will soon – if not already – wield more power over American popular culture than any other commercial art. And we know that changing the way people think can dramatically alter the course of civilization’s progress. So do the math. Leaving this kind of power in the hands of Grand Theft Auto is culturally equivalent to electing a 14-year-old president.

I’m tired of defending developers like Rockstar for the sake of my beloved art form. The “cool kids” of popular culture aren’t sticking it to The Man anymore; they are The Man, and if they can’t do a halfway decent job of it, then I’ll gladly kick them off their high horses and claim the throne for myself.

We’ve been handed the reins of popular culture. And where culture goes, history follows. Our world may have problems, but what better way to solve them than to reprogram our values as a civilization? If the roots are healthy, the tree will thrive.

Forgive my delusions of grandeur. But trust me when I say that it’s better than a life of self-doubt. Or to put it another way, someone tell Heather Chaplin that some of us are wolves and all we need is a pack to lead.

~ by George on April 5, 2009.