That Orson Scott Card did it again with his involvement with Chair Entertainment’s newest game, Shadow Complex. It looks quite astounding, doesn’t it? I can’t wait to play it. That activity is somewhere on my top fifty list of things to do when I move to Austin next week. Anyway, Orson Scott Card is probably best-known for a science fiction work titled Ender’s Game. It was an alright enough book. I liked it. This was well before I knew about Orson Scott Card’s deepest, darkest secrets. Oh. What’s that? Huh, they’re not secrets apparently.
See, Orson Scott Card is a bit of a homophobe. Bits of Card’s homophobic hatred along with the whole Shadow Complex issue were expertly chronicled by GayGamer last week. Shortly thereafter, Gamasutra’s Christian Nutt wrote a superb piece about Shadow Complex, Orson Scott Card, and how gamers should treat a game that involved a bigot like Card. Nutt’s piece will probably go on to become one of the game industry’s seminal works of the year. It’s good work, it attracted a lot of attention and discussion, and it also attracted the attention of Shadow Complex’s writer: Peter David (Wikipedia’d). Mr. David joined the discussion to Nutt’s piece first by waving his bruised ego around in the room. Once that was finished and he said some more things, he then attempted to provide the girls and boys of the internet a lesson in morality and brotherhood (emphasis mine):
What’s the end game here? To try and send a message to as many sources as possible that if they hire Orson Scott Card to work for them, they’re going to take a financial hit? To put Card out of business? To make sure that someone is going to face financial ruin because he has opinions that differ from yours?That is intolerant. It’s inelegant. It’s cheap and vicious and small-minded.
Intolerant is a funny word. Technically, someone is being intolerant if they are ever disrespectful of another person’s differing opinion, view, or belief. By calling Orson Scott Card a bigot earlier in this piece, I was displaying intolerance. Technically.
When I was reading up on Orson Scott Card last week (ie, scanning Wikipedia like a good internaught) I found an interesting piece that he wrote for Sunstone Magazine. Sunstone Magazine’s little summary in Google is: “Sunstone is an independent forum for open, thoughtful, and constructive discussion of all things Mormon.” Orson Scott Card wrote a piece for this magazine back in 1990 entitled “The Hypocrites of Homosexuality.” In this piece, Card says the following (emphasis is, once again, mine):
Laws against homosexual behavior should remain on the books, not to be indiscriminately enforced against anyone who happens to be caught violating them, but to be used when necessary to send a clear message that those whoflagrantly violate society’s regulation of sexual behavior cannot be permitted to remain as acceptable, equal citizens within that society.
The thing about intolerance is that it’s not a never-ending feedback loop. Showing tolerance to the intolerance that Orson Scott Card is suggesting in the previous quote is not good citizenship, it’s promoting an ideology of persecution. Boycotting Card’s involvement with Shadow Complex on the grounds that he’s a bigot, Peter David goes on to say (not in those words, of course), requires that one “[a]cknowledge that [he/she is] basically stooping to the same level of intolerance as those you would despise.”
So Peter David considers the boycott of a video game in which Orson Scott Card was involved to be on the same level as the denial of basic civil rights to homosexuals. Instead, Peter David suggests the following:
How refreshing would it be for a massive call that said, “Instead of having a boycott, let’s support this person financially because we want to show that we’re bigger and better and more tolerant and more accepting than he is, and our business is with the type of material he produces rather than his opinions. Let’s demonstrate by our actions what it’s like to understand and accept that different people have different ways of life and shouldn’t be attacked for it.”
Let’s demonstrate our maturity and tolerance of bigotry by giving the bigot more money. That’ll show him.
Passive-aggressive is the new civil action for political change.
Peter David then says something somewhat [more] unbelievable:
The issue of whether someone should buy “Shadow Complex” should boil down to one thing and one thing only: Is it an exciting game that will give you your money’s worth? If the answer is yes, then buy it. If the answer is no, then don’t. A gamer’s issues should be with whether he’s getting bang for his buck; not whether one of the people associated with the manufacture of the game is voicing ridiculous opinions.
In the end, a gamer shouldn’t care about things like civil rights, gay marriage, bigotry, or any thing like that. Peter David is here to say that there is only one thing that gamers should care about: is this game fun and exciting? After all, nothing matters more in a video game than fun.
All of the work put into the effort of discussing the charged meaning of Orson Scott Card’s involvement from GayGamer’s Dawdle and Gamasutra’s Christian Nutt appears to be lost in less than a paragraph. When even one of the game’s creative developer’s reflexively boils down the simplicity of Shadow Complex into mere “excitement” and “fun factor,” does the potential thematic meaning and political overtones of Shadow Complex even matter? Given David’s attitude, are any gamers even left wondering if this person could have consciously infused his world with the meaning that the game’s audience have been discussing intelligently (and the game’s universe, which was created by Orson Scott Card)?
I have yet to actually play Shadow Complex, but from what I’ve been told by friends, all of this discussion of Card’s involvement with the game (and what that involvement means) actually results in very little of substance. The game seems to dwell on nothing more than an average shmuck who falls in love with a girl, follows a girl into a cave, and high adventure follows from there. So… Is that it then?
Of course it’s not. Regardless of the game’s content, the larger point was always how gamers should treat the contributions of someone as hateful as Orson Scott Card. Maybe his views made it into the game, maybe they didn’t. What matters is that gamers took up the torch and all sat around pondering the implications of Card’s involvement, what the game became (or could have become), and what our reaction as gamers to the whole event would be.
Regardless of how it all played out, what matters is that Shadow Complex didn’t slip onto Xbox 360s everywhere without so much a whisper. Regardless of what the Peter Davids of the world say, it’s not just a game. It’s what you take from it.