In America, the Supreme Court ruled in June this year that videogames are protected under the First Amendment’s principle of free speech. In Britain, the News Of The World has been closed after further revelations of phone hacking. It is surely time to take advantage of this double newsfruit to produce an updated version of the celebrated Atari 2600 porn game Beat ’Em And Eat ’Em. In the new version, the gentleman ejaculating copiously from the rooftops would bear a curious resemblance to Rupert Murdoch, and your two flame-haired naked female avatars, horizontally jockeying with upturned mouths for the precious savoury liquid, would periodically issue gargling statements denying that they knew anything about phone hacking.
The SCOTUS decision is sensible in one way – videogames, being a form of artistic expression (even if they rarely in fact rise above the level of ‘entertainment’), qualify as ‘speech’ just as much as novels or movies do, and should therefore escape censorship. On the other hand, the judgment’s practical effect is weird: it was delivered in the context of striking down as unconstitutional a Californian law that made it illegal to sell or rent ‘violent video games’ to children. That statute defined the games under restriction as those in which the player ‘kill[s], maim[s], dismember[s], or sexually assault[s] an image of a human being’, thus proving Californian lawmakers hopelessly confused about the relationship between verbs and objects in interactive mimesis. (How exactly do you kill an image? Or sexually assault an image?) Notwithstanding this conceptual muddle, however, I found myself agreeing with the failed law’s spirit, inasmuch as I don’t think a six-year-old should be playing Kane & Lynch 2.
Even had the California law not been overturned, though, I am confident that my jolly Murdochian jizz-quaffing extravaganza would have been accorded an exception under its wise rule that a game would only be banned for sale to children if it ‘lack[ed] serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for minors’. My vision for Whack ’Em And Hack ’Em obviously has all those values and more. Tragically, it might still fall foul of US law’s ‘obscenity’ exception to free speech – as though blocky, brightly coloured images of spunking moguls and sperm-swallowing editors would somehow be more ‘obscene’ than what those characters actually accomplished in real life.
The Californian legislature had attempted to define what it was controlling by referring to videogames that, especially, were found to ‘appeal to a deviant or morbid interest of minors’. According to the mores of 21st-century society, of course, an eight-year-old staying at home to read a book might well count as deviant and morbid, but graphic representations of torture and murder are perfectly normal and healthy. “For better or worse,” Associate Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in the court’s opinion, “our society has long regarded many depictions of killing and maiming as suitable features of popular entertainment, including entertainment that is widely available to minors.” Enter Modern Warfare 3 – you know, for kids?
Meanwhile, the revelations about public deviance and morbidity by hacks hacking phones recalled, tangentially, an all-but-forgotten paradigm in videogaming: that the very rebarbativeness of a technical system could itself be a site of challenging play and exploration. It turns out that phone hacking hardly required much videogame-like methodological imagination or skill in lateral thinking: default voicemail PINs left most people’s messageboxes wide open, and a bit of ‘social engineering’ with helpline operators accomplished the rest.
But ‘hacking’ has long had a glamorous aesthetic. In TV dramas and films hackers use supercool operating systems (all sharp, flat GUIs) that money can’t buy. And I remember spending many happily suspenseful hours playing Steve Cartwright’s Hacker (1985) on the ZX Spectrum: it was mysterious from the moment you read the instructions, which explained nothing. (‘We’ve told you how to load the program: the rest is up to you.’) Sadly, mere gamelike simulations of hacking no longer have the same appeal these days: partly because the eerie, minimalist aesthetic of those early games is now just one of a near-infinite range of UI styles on modern computers, and partly because hacking real networks is so much more interesting and has a much bigger payoff, even if just in terms of publicity for digital Situationists such as LulzSec.
Of course, if any of today’s crackers grew up on stuff like Hacker, or the film Wargames (which heart-warmingly taught that penetrating military systems persuaded AIs that thermonuclear war was unwinnable, rather than just getting you extradited to the US to endure years of institutionalised torture known as ‘solitary confinement’), then such apparently innocuous fictions were at least as ‘deviant’ as any imaginable tits’n’guns-fest. Indeed, they were surely incitements to terrorism, and should have been banned from sale to adults, never mind minors, before they were ever released.
Illustration: Martin Davies