Censoring and Imagining Medium Specificity

In looking at both Gonzalo Fransca and Ken McAllister’s articles on game culture (“Studying the Game Complex” and “Simulation versus Narrative”), there are some critical parallels that emerge as far as game culture in social (and academic) discourse. I find this notion of “medium specificity” very much at work in both of these articles (perhaps used as more of a critique against a social backlash involving the creation of games operating within a certain system of aesthetic codes and social apparatus). Especially in Fransca’s article, he aligns his argument against this notion of “narrative” and “storytelling” stemming from the modes of literature and drama. Fransca claims, "My goal in this essay is to contribute to this discussion by offering more reasons as to why the storytelling model is not only an inaccurate one by also how it limits our understanding of the medium and our ability to create even more compelling games” (pg. 221). In this desire for more “compelling games” centered within a rhetoric of simulation, a language for understanding and researching video and computer-based game culture centers on a certain model of “behavior” or behavioral rules (pg. 223).  McAllister takes more of a critical stance involving the ethics and social response elicited by videogames as part of a value system within society. In linking videogame culture with definitions surrounding the “popular” and “mass media,” McAllister sets a system in understanding the reception of videogames as part of a “visual metonymy” (pg. 14). Thus, opening up a critical response that attempts to understand videogame research as part of a larger unknown in the field of embodiment and Psychophysicolgical force (noting both “harmful” and “positive” effects).

            Both articles also touch upon this notion of media response in the form of censorship and censoring bodies in defining videogames as a specific medium of cultural response (the headline focus on violence in this case). Whether focusing on media generated from the Columbine shootings- part of this narrative argument that both McAllister and Fransca are attempting to dispel- the fact that videogames are surrounded within a context of critical response (whether government officials to parent groups) opens up a line of critique extending to a number of various other media forms (especially the Motion picture industry). Fransca makes note of the issue surrounding videogames as a vehicle for speech (something the film industry went through in its formative years). In a sense, videogames have gone through much of what other arts have gone through in finding a placement within a societal framework of public opinion, and part of specific medium with effects that are conceptually different than that of a book, film or painting.

            In a sense, I am also reminded of Jane Gaine’s article entitled “Political Mimesis.” The premise of her work stems from a documentary tradition in defining and finding social and aesthetic patterns in re-articulating a body response to images. Even though her argument is based in the “representational,” I think there are strong elements which connect to this idea of simulation and a critical response/studies conducted around this notion of the human body and the physical “effects” of playing/occupying a game world. Gaine’s discusses the footage from the Rodney King beatings as a primary example of this sort of “political mimesis” in the way people (especially those who “identified” with Rodney King- in South Central LA)- were physically and emotionally “moved” by the images to reproduce a rioting response.  As part of the complexities of video and computer game culture, I wonder if this a helpful framework or notion in exploring a social response in playing games? Could a videogame create a situation- a type of response that moves people to physically react in “reality”? Or is this logic reducing videogames to a simple rhetoric of what is real vs. the imaginary world that the gamer occupies?