While at DICE in Las Vegas (on which I've done no less than infinity writeups today thanks to the detailed notes of my colleagues Sheffield and Nutt), N'Gai Croal got to ask BioWare's Ray Muzyka something I really wish I could have asked him. And would have, if I knew the BioWare guys, which I don't, but wish I did.Anyway, forget my wishing -- Croal asked him, essentially, why he and Greg Zeschuk and the rest of the BioWare team didn't stand up for Mass Effect when that dingy Fembionese Liberation Army evillo from Fox was calling it SeXbox and all manner of malicious things. Especially since those things were actual balls-out lies, why didn't the creative forces behind the game stick up for the integrity of their work?
I'm sad to say that when EA stuck up for the game, I was actually surprised. But like most game consumers, I was relieved. And I also wondered about the people who'd put their hearts, not just their wallet, on the line for the game. In covering and in reading about games, I wonder about them a lot.
This is all sort of timely, because this week's Aberrant Gamer, set to go live soon, deals with the maturation of the medium. Croal has often advocated against what he calls the "continued infantilization of videogames," and theorizes that one major factor that keeps games from being respected as art is because its creators so rarely speak up in its favor -- and in its defense.
The credit for asking and the detail of the response goes to Croal, so you should check out the full details at Level Up, but the crux of it is this: While Muzyka told him that seeing Mass Effect cheaply slandered was like "having a gun pointed at your baby," he preferred to see the community response to the comment, and explore different ways to confront issues like these -- Muzyka did give a quote to the New York Times about how "really hurt" the team was by the offensive labeling of their work, which read like a statement of injury and less like a defense.
Says Croal:
"While we certainly respect Muzyka's stance, and we welcome EA's newly aggressive, forward-leaning posture in dealing with its critics, we can't help but feel as though something is wrong when the loudest and most visible voices in defense of Mass Effect were journalists and suits. If this were a painting, a novel, a play, a movie or a television show being made by an artist or artists as successful in their medium as BioWare has been in videogames, it's hard to imagine that a gallery owner, a book editor, a theater producer or a studio exec would be at the forefront of setting the record straight about their work."
It's not fair of us, of course, to tell creators how and whether to defend their work. That's not our right, no matter how passionately we feel about games. And we don't know what other issues might arise behind the closed doors, out of our sight. Maybe there are PR muzzles at work here; we can only theorize. We've no other choice than to respect that stance. But then, when will games be treated as art -- or, at the very least, complex creations with integrity -- if the artists themselves perpetuate what Croal calls an "ostrich mentality?"
