Burn, Andrew; (2004) From The Tempest To Tomb-Raider: Computer Games In English, Media And Drama. English, Draam, Media , 2 pp. 19-25.

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Abstract

Computer games are a controversial medium - it needs hardly repeating. They attract all the opprobrium previously reserved for video nasties, resurrect all the old debates about violent effects, induce suspicions about addictive, dumbed-down, antisocial behaviour which used to be levelled at television, and provoke moral and aesthetic panics about the the blunting of young people’s ethical and artistic sensibilities. It’s worth reminding ourselves that we have heard all this before. Every new medium has attracted similar concerns, from Renaissance anxiety about the dangerous new habit of silent reading after the invention of the printing press, to nineteenth century concerns about the morally debilitating effects of reading novels; from mid-twentieth worries about television and horror comics to late-twentieth century paranoia about the internet.// The history of English teaching has its own version of these worries. One of the most curious of these is a deep suspicion of visual media which ran through the period of Leavis’s influence on school English. Denys Thompson and David Holbrook both condemned absolutely the visual culture of comicstrips and popular cinema as a cheapening, deadening influence, the enemy of the word, which for Thompson was the great tradition delineated by Leavis, for Holbrook was the authenticity of working-class traditional culture. This anxiety about the visual was not confined to conservative cultural theorists – even Raymond Williams, Leavis’s great Marxist opponent, excludes horror films from his otherwise generous argument for popular culture. More recently, Fred Inglis, whose account of children’s literature approvingly embraces the comicstrips of his youth, makes an absolute distinction between these supposedly innocent representations of childhood and childish interests, and contemporary comics and horror movies, which he sees as loathsome and nasty (Inglis, 1981).// We know now that there is no rational justification for any of this. To represent the visual as meretricious and aesthetically debased, Thompson and Holbrook had to be very selective in their examples. If they had had to consider the marginal illustrations of mediaeval romance manuscripts, or the paintings of Blake, or Cruikshank’s illustrations of Dickens, or Ted Hughes’ collaborations with Leonard Baskin and Ralph Steadman, their objections to the visual and to its long cultural association with the word would have looked pretty empty. In fact, their objection only masqueraded as an argument against the visual – it was really an argument against the contemporary popular culture of their day. The popular culture of yesterday, of their own youth – Holbrook’s folksongs, Inglis’ Dandy and Beano, Williams’ jazz music – could be comfortably accommodated in their attempt to widen the span of what could be valued as culture in schools and children’s lives. But the culture of today was too much, and they failed to understand it. We now embrace the popular, teach comics with enthusiasm, view films and TV drama as worthwhile objects of study, and have a view of text which extends beyond the word, combining image, language, graphic design, animation and even music in the range of electronic texts which are now increasingly part of our domain. Games, however, still worry us, maybe. Many schools still outlaw games in their computer suites; there are lurking suspicions that they offer shallow characters and narratives, immersive experiences that somehow aren’t as wholesome as the immersion of literature or film, and representations of violence and sexism that are endemic to the medium rather than incidental properties of many game texts as they happen to be at the moment.

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