Feature By

Dale Weir

With contributions from Chi Kong Lui, Brad Gallaway,
Mike Bracken, Mike Doolittle and Thom Moyles.

Henry Jenkins is the director of MIT's new comparative media studies program. He has written about games for more than a decade. He has testified before the Senate Commerce Committee and the Federal Communications Committee, conducted workshops with game designers, spoken to PTA meetings and the American Library Association.

Last year, St. Louis enacted a law that required parental consent before children under 17 could purchase or play violent or sexually explicit videogames. The Interactive Digital Software Association (IDSA) argued that the ordinance violated the First Amendment and asked for a summary dismissal. On April 19, US District Judge Stephen N. Limbaugh S. decided that games weren't speech at all and therefore deserved no First Amendment protection. The ramifications of such a decision could be disastrous for the industry, yet it has received little to no coverage in the videogame or mainstream media. We speak to Mr. Jenkins, one of the most public videogame spokesmen in the industry, about this decision, its effect on the industry and the general state of games today.

Tell us about your position at MIT. How did that come to be and was it the first of its kind at the Institution?

MIT has long been a center for the development of new media technologies. The first computer games were built by the MIT Model Railroad club, for example. There is extraordinary work being done through the MIT Media Lab, the AI Program, the Laboratory for Computer Science, etc. We wanted to insure that MIT was also a center for the study of the social, cultural, political, and economic impact of media technologies. Four years ago, we opened the new Comparative Media Studies masters program. I am the founder and director of that program, which was one of the first graduate programs in the Humanities at MIT. Our interests extend far beyond games, including such questions as globalization, new media and democracy, branding in a transmedia environment, the cultural impact of intellectual property law, etc., but from the first, the study of computer games has been central to my vision of the program. We have hosted two national conferences on games—one focused specifically on gender and computer games which we ran at the height of the girls game movement, another designed to bring together leading game designers and game critics to talk about future directions for the games industry. We have done the Creative Leaders workshop program with Electronic Arts, which involves brainstorming some of the aesthetic potentials and challenges confronting games—character, narrative, emotion, and community. We've done workshops at E3 and GDC. And perhaps most importantly, we've launched a new research initiative, Games to Teach, which is designed to research and prototype new approaches for deploying games for the teaching of core academic subjects at the advanced high school and early college level.

You have grown to become one of, if not the most visible champions for games. Was it a result of your position?

Partially. I have been trying to use my position—and the visibility which MIT offers me—to speak out on issues of cultural policy which seem important to me. I have always had a deep commitment to standing up for core civil liberties and so it has been exciting to put those principles into action by testifying before the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee defending gamers and goths after Columbine, speaking before the Federal Communications Commission about the importance of media literacy education, speaking to the governors of the World Economic Forum about the importance of defending "fair use" for scholars and fans in the face of corporate attempts to tighten control over intellectual property, and signing amicus briefs defending games against various local attempts to censor their content. I have also been using my new platform to write for the general public about central aspects of our changing media environment and to speak out to the media in hopes of better educating citizens about some of the choices which will impact our cultural environment. I have certainly used my position to promote the further development of video games as an artform, to challenge attempts to censor game content, to encourage the industry to make a stronger commitment to the development of games for educational use, to push for more diversity in hiring practices within the industry, to foster the development of richer and more nuanced game criticism, and to provoke debates about how to create more "meaningful" representations of violence in games.

At the same time, my visibility is self-perpetuating. Once the media identifies someone as a spokesman for a particular position or an expert on a particular topic, they tend to return to that person over and over again. This is an optical illusion as far as games are concerned because it gives the impression that I am the only person taking a position in opposition to the censorship of game content and the stigmatization of game players. In fact, there are many researchers world-wide who share my concerns and have been doing research to complicate our understanding of the social and cultural impact of games. The media simply doesn't report their research, which tends to be more nuanced and less sensationalistic than the latest study which claims to have found that illusive link between media violence and real world violence.