The Other Possible Outcome

There was one thing I thought of while trying to look on the bright side during the months when the supreme court debated the artistic worthiness of video games.  It almost makes me wish I could see what the medium would have been like had censorship prevailed.  Of course it wouldn't be worth it, and you will never, ever catch me saying the Supreme Court made the wrong decision.  The choice they made was absolutely, without question, the only correct one they could have made.  But I do wonder how video game development would have adjusted to a culture that hostile to its most common subject matter: violence.  And I think, if the medium managed to adjust rather than die, perhaps it would not have been all bad.

This is what happens when there's sex and violence
in our movies, kids.  

I liken the avoided video game censorship to the effect McCarthyism had on the film industry in the ate 1940s.  For those unfamiliar with film history, the simple version is that the McCarthy Era involved the blacklisting of many actors, directors, and writers who were suspected to be communists.  Unfortunately, all they really needed to be suspected was to do anything that seemed "Un-American," which included certain very strict moral boundaries.  It was a pretty messed up time, with promising and talented filmmakers losing their careers suddenly when they lost funding and venues.  As a result, movies had to tread carefully.  Mature themes had to be handled without mature content for fear of the blacklist.  Really, it wasn't all that different from the world we imagined were this law to be passed, just with film rather than video games.

The interesting thing about this was that it forced film makers to come up with creative ways to portray things that they couldn't get past the censors.  One of the most notable examples is the use of cigarettes to imply sexual content.  Especially in noir films, two lovers blowing cigarette smoke into each other so the smoke lingers together, or two cigarette butts smoldering in an ash tray, was used as a symbol for sex.  Or consider Hitchcock's Gory Discretion Shots, used before film was allowed to show dismemberment and mutilation.  Though these things are now allowed in film, thus occurring as a result of budget constraints or purposeful filmmaking, they were first developed during a time when more graphic depictions would have fallen under the judgement hammer of censorship.

Even silly games like Castle
Crashers might have problems.

Consider what a similar effect would do for video games. Of course games like Mario and other similarly innocent games would survive this process, but they're generally not what we're talking about when discussing either violence or storytelling.  Gameplay could survive this law, sure, but storytelling as we have developed it within this medium would take a huge hit.  This medium is still almost entirely comprised of stories centered around violence, for various reasons discussed in one of my previous articles.  But what if we couldn't depict that violence anymore?  What if we were forced to do things differently by an unjust                                                                   violation of the first amendment against the medium?

The most obvious effect would likely take place in the horror genre, which has, in the last decade or so, become less "survival horror" and more "gory and occasionally startling action game," much to the ire of many gamers, designers, and critics.  The need to show all the violence would turn into an aversion, and horror games would have to turn to their roots and focus more on psychological horror and playing on the unknown, like classics such as Fatal Frame and Silent Hill 2 or the lesser-known but masterfully terrifying indie game Penumbra.

Sure, this thing is creepy, but what scares you most is
always what you can't see.

But for the industry as a whole, it would mean spreading to genres it has barely touched before. If games cannot explicitly portray violence,  they would have to either portray it implicitly or avoid the subject altogether.  With the vast majority of games, this simply cannot be done.  We would have to start telling stories in different, less violent genres, such as drama and all its sub-genres (romance, courtroom drama, domestic drama, etc.).  This would not be easy, but it is something that must happen eventually, and I think it's fairly clear that progress is slow when it's easy to make money off Shoot Teh Bad Guyz VI: Less Talky Moar Shooty.  But take away the ability to make that, and what are we left with?  No choice but to innovate.

Make sure to thank these guys next
time you play a game.  

So in short, I think it would have been cool to see where the pressure from this law could have taken the industry.  I do not wish the Supreme Court had made a different choice, as the censorship of interactive art (an immensely important and exciting artistic development) could be one of the biggest artistic atrocities in history.  But gaming needs to evolve, and part of me wonders if this could have been the best way to stimulate that evolution.  But thankfully, we can now develop this medium as we like, without threat of censorship.  I hope we'll use it to develop this medium into a truly diverse and effective one.

And no, of course there's no such game as Shoot Teh Bad Guyz VI: Less Talky Moar Shooty. If there was, I would be too busy weeping in the fetal position to be writing this article.