Damon Brown writes about videogames and pop culture for the likes of Playboy, Spin, the New York Post, hell, even Family Circle. A self confessed hard-core gamer of over two decades and counting, Brown recently released
Porn & Pong: How Grand Theft Auto, Tomb Raider and other Sexy Games Changed Our Culture - a book that chronicles the influence that games with mature content have had on our society.
Brown: "Videogames are just starting out, we have to give them an opportunity to grow up a little too"
I had the good fortune to get hold of Damon on the phone and put to him a series of questions relating to the subject of games and adult content as well as the state of development and even his thoughts on the R-rating debate occurring in Australia - a topic that he's touched on previously.
Given its length the interview will run in three parts - here's part one:
BigPond Games: Your latest book Porn & Pong draws links between video games and our cultural development. How affected is the average non-gamer of today by games do you think?
Damon Brown: I think quite a great deal and that's one of the misconceptions with the book. The main question has been "What can gamers get out of the book?" and that's not really why I wrote the book. I'm a hard-core gamer myself - people who have read it who are gamers have enjoyed it quite a bit - the challenge is for people who are not gamers to understand and appreciate the value of videogames and understand that they can be used as a cultural prism or cultural medium and actually be examined as much as books or television or music.
The book is really geared toward people who are not gamers. I try to set up some type of foundation so it's familiar to people who aren't gamers. Connecting videogames to the advent of the VCR; to the beginning of the modern porn industry; to the advent of internet pornopgraphy, to reality television - all these different connections. Hopefully somebody who has dismissed games in the past will realise these are cultural connections.
One of the biggest challenges for videogames nowadays is even though they bring in $US25 billion worldwide they still haven't been as critically discussed as much as Hollywood, who'll be lucky if it makes a billion this year. You see a whole different type of respect and discussion and relevance with that. If you look at other books that talk about videogames in many other cases they consider it a subculture. With
Porn & Pong I argue it's not a silo effect, it actually is culture.
BPG: Do you think the progression of mature themes in games keeps pace with society's values?
DB: I think it ebbs and flows. I break up the book into three eras - one's called the porn era and thats 1972 to 1995, right before Lara Croft. That era videogames are basically trying to emulate pornography or other forms of culture. They haven't quite figured out their own culture yet. The Lara Croft era which is from 1996 to 2001 (right before Grand Theft Auto III)... with that era you see a character that couldn't have been made in any other medium. It was interactive, it was made with advanced graphics that made her polygonal shape possible... there was all these different dynamics that made in uniquely a video game thing. It was something that other cultures could not do.
Finally you had the Grand Theft Auto era, which is 2001 to this year. And one of the things that you see is all of a sudden videogames are influencing other cultures directly, whether it's Grand Theft Auto, Mass Effect and the sex scene with that. You see videogames expanding into other cultures. You also see with Grand Theft Auto III that begins that era where videogames start making more money than Hollywood annually. You start to see this shift. it's not quite a black and white thing where these things influence videogames and videogames influence these things...but you do see a progression over the 35 years I cover in the book.
BPG: [Excluding Mass Effect and Grand Theft Auto] Do you think modern games approach the issue of sexuality well?
DB: Hmmm [laughs]. No, not really, to be quite honest.
BPG: Apart from Mass Effect is there any examples of games that do?
DB: I think it depends on the genre and the setup. There was a game called Indigo Prophecy about a decade ago. It was not the first game to have a major lesbian couple that was interactive - that was Fear Effect 2 Retro Helix and I have a chapter on that - but it was one of the first major games to actually have a lesbian couple that was not fetishised. They were just a couple - nothing extraordinary about them. They're quite normal, there's nothing spectacular about them.
One of the challenges that videogames and sexuality have had over the past 35 years is that many of the designers up until recently have been predominantly white or asian males. It's been a predominantly white male perspective. You have this idea where "this is my view of what lesbians are like". And in a lot of cases, it's skewed towards sexual pleasure as opposed to being a "boring" lesbian couple. So that's part of the challenge you see with videogames. And with Mass Effect and with major game designers like Jade Raymond, who was behind Assassin's Creed which isn't a sexual game but just the fact that she's got so much prominence and as a female game designer - and a good one at that - that's showing a shift. But if you look at a lot of the history I cover in the book [laughs] ...the mark is a little bit off.
Mass Effect: bringing a more level headed approach to gaming?
In videogames' defence, movies have been around for more than a century now, television I believe came about in the thirties. So you see this early adulthood with videogames where they haven't quite figured things out yet. The first movies, the first television shows and so forth, they were set up like plays. You would see one camera, there would barely be any moviement of the camera and everything was very stilted, because people were used to theatre... so it took a little while to figure out "Oh, we have multiple cameras, we might as well use them...and we can cut and we can add music and edit after the fact, it doesn't have to be a live show". All these different nuances that come in handy with a medium...with videogames were just starting to figure that out. We're just starting to figure out "Oh, you can download content," and new girlfriends or boyfriends in Grand Theft Auto, or you can use the internet to connect to people, sexually or otherwise. So then you see the beginning of Xbox Live and the PlayStation Network and WiiWare - all these things on the console side that took a while to get perfected. There's a certain amount of adolescence that videogames are going through and what I really want to do with the book is track those changes but at the same time not mock it too hard. Videogames are just starting out, we have to give them an opportunity to grow up a little too - but to do that we need to foster a little growth.
Stay tuned for parts two and three, where we cover what drives development nowadays, what makes online gamers tick, and of course the fraught topic of game censorship in Australia.
