shouting loudly

Thoughts on the Guerilla Gamemaker Competition

The Slamdance Festival runs alongside the Sundance Film Festival, styling itself as an edgier sort of independent event. It also hosts a “Guerilla Gamemaker Competition,” featuring digital games created by independent designers. Slamdance may have called its indie cred into question this year, however, by dropping a controversial game from its finalists: Super Columbine Massacre RPG! The reaction was probably stronger than the festival organizers anticipated, perhaps leaving us with an important lesson about the power of video games as expressive speech.

The games left among the finalists included some fun-looking stuff, but none offered an implicit or explicit political statement like SCMRPG! Since the game was dropped, several other finalists and one sponsor have withdrawn from the event, and some remaining finalists have drafted a letter of protest urging Slamdance to readmit the game.

The question among newcomers to this issue, I imagine, is why one would support a game about the Columbine High School tragedy. Aside from the obvious rhetoric about defending the free speech even of those with whom we disagree, several prominent game critics have made a good case that the game is not what it sounds like. Game designer and founder of Manifesto Games, an online indie games distribution service, has made an about-face on his earlier decision not to host the game, and has written a detailed piece on why the game has merit. An interview with the game’s creator suggests that the game is actually supposed to cause unease, to make players question the conventional mechanics of violent game play in general. Plus, this is no graphic shoot-em-up: it is more like the old Final Fantasy role-playing games on the 8-bit Nintendo, with simple graphics, repetitive tasks, and slow combat sequences built on selecting options from menus rather than fast-paced button mashing.

Slamdance founder Peter Baxter has said that it was a “personal decision” to drop the game, though there has been some speculation that this comes at the urging of one or more sponsors. Game designer Ian Bogost has been following and commenting on the story. Slamdance recently changed its web site to offer an expanded official statement on dropping the game. (I link to Kotaku rather than Slamdance’s statement itself in case the festival’s page changes again.) The long and the short of it is that the organizers are afraid that displaying the game publicly would open them up to a law suit so costly that they’d be forced to shut down the entire festival forever.

My courtroom knowledge pretty much just extends to statutory law for academic papers, some discussion of IP law from conversations around the office with Bill, and the bare minimum knowledge of criminal law required to watch reruns of Law and Order. I can’t really say how likely Slamdance would be to get sued here, so I’m not sure how to evaluate this new statement.

On the one hand, Slamdance shows plenty of movies that are more graphic and potentially offensive than this game. I’m not sure what complaint you could possibly bring forth about going to a festival of this kind and being shocked and disturbed by, of all things, a relatively primitive-looking game.

On the other hand, people like to sue when it comes to media they don’t understand. Video games have been at the center of not just unconstitutional legislation, but also a number of civil suits alleging that games made kids commit crimes, came packaged with inappropriate and unrated hidden content, and so on. If someone were to sue Slamdance, I’m inclined to believe it would not go far, and at worst Slamdance would win in appeals, but perhaps that could be enough to shut down a small outfit.

The comic book community—not the industry per se, mind you—has a sort of solution to address issues like this. It is a First Amendmen watchdog group called the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. The CBLDF has defended at least one retailer charged with distributing obscene material to minors (who sold a Japanese “tentacle-porn” comic to an undercover cop, not to any kids), at least two cartoonist charged with trademark infringement (one who made a parody of the Starbucks logo and another who went by the name “King Velveeda”), and famously, the first artist convicted of obscenity in the U.S., Mike Diana. The CBLDF has a decent track record for picking up worthwhile cases, though a somewhat less impressive record for winning them. Its fundraising efforts are supported by fans and industry pros alike. It’s the kind of service that would only be needed for a medium that comes under unusually high scrutiny because of its associations with childhood, and its funding model could only work in an industry with such a hardcore fan base, built at least in part around feelings of marginalization.

The video game community, then, could potentially support such an endeavor. It’s got to be larger than comic book fandom by now, I imagine, and the need is clearly there. The Video Game Voters Network was formed in response to higher-profile legislative efforts, but civil suits may be just as numerous. Slamdance’s most recent explanation could just be a cheap cop-out, but the possibility of litigation may be valid. Perhaps the courtroom front seems covered well enough by the ESA, which challenges the unconstitutional game regulation laws as they are passed (and is also the major sponsor of the Video Game Voters Network). The ESA, however, only fights the battles that directly affect its affiliated companies, and amateur developers posting games to the internet are left to fend for themselves. It would be interesting and a little touching, I think, to see gamers and game developers come together to form a Video Game Legal Defense fund, but for the foreseeable future, it looks like Slamdance would be on its own if anything were to come of a public demonstration of SCMRPG!

It’s hard to say how the Slamdance situation will play out at this point. If the organizers’ fear of litigation is genuine, the competition may just continue on its dreadful course at this point. Slamdance is also hosting a panel about SCMRPG! which may be accepted as something of a compromise. If this new response appeases no one, perhaps the game will be readmitted (probably without legal incident), but it looks like Slamdance may have gone too far to turn around now. Either way, this may mark the final year of the painfully ironically named “Guerilla Gamemaker Competition.” (Or perhaps it’s just ironically conceived—the gamemakers themselves have certainly demonstrated their independent spirit and political mettle.)

I find it hard to believe that events would have transpired this way if the product in question had been an independent film. Not to say that film has exhausted its avant-garde, political potential, but this whole incident helps illustrate what an interesting position video games currently occupy in our culture. This medium is balanced between being established enough to provoke such reasoned response and principled action from people committed to the form’s artistic potential, and marginalized enough to keep businesspeople skittish and judges busy. I find Slamdance’s response disappointing, but the press for SCMRPG! and its supporters seems pretty positive. Having never played the game in question, I can’t say if it’s any good in itself. Perhaps the lesson to take away from all this, however, is that if you really want to make some ripples with your art, it may be a good time to be a game designer.