Rating Video Games for Sexism? Ugliest Swedish Export Since Tor Johnson

I’ve
got a new
Daily Beast column up about Sweden’s plan to rate video
games for sexist content. Snippets:

God bless—Odin bless?—the politically correct
Swedes, who are currently working on what might become that
country’s ugliest export since Tor Johnson.

As the shouting match over the role and depiction of gender and
sexuality in video games that’s part of “Gamergate”
fires up the blogosphere, Sweden’s “government-funded innovation
agency” Vinnova are, along with the country’s video game
association, developing a ratings system to track “sexist” content
in games. Given our own country’s history of slapping “voluntary”
ratings (read: implemented under threat of government regulation)
on everything from movies to comic books to record albums
to TV
shows to…video games, it probably won’t be long before a
“Rated S for Sexism” designation starts getting debated or enacted
right here in the Land of the Free.

I run through various examples of how American nannies and
censors shut down various aspects of pop culture (can’t trust the
masses, can we?) and resurrect one of the great unremembered
mini-scandals of the Clinton years:

There’s always a temptation to shut down
conversation, especially for people who think they can control the
means of cultural production through coercive means. It was a huge
scandal back in 2000 when Salon discovered
that the federal drug czar’s office under Bill Clinton leaned on
network shows such as ER andBeverly Hills
90210 to fill “their episodes with anti-drug pitches to
cash in on a complex government advertising subsidy.” It got so
bad, Salon reported, that “government officials
and their contractors began approving, and in some cases altering,
the scripts of shows before they were aired to conform with the
government’s anti-drug messages.”

Besides the mendacity of it all, such a scheme misses the
obvious truth that “the audience
has a mind of its own.” Which brings us back to Sweden’s
proposed ratings system and top-down noodging of video game makers
to “change the way we think about things” in a proper progressive
direction. At least the Swedish plan is public knowledge. But it’s
just as unlikely to have any effect on gender relations or how
people play video games as a drug-czar-approved episode
of Beverly Hills 90210 kept kids from becoming
crackheads.

Read the whole thing.