videoludica. game culture 

Note: This article has been revised on June 13, 2007. I made a few corrections after receiving some useful feedback from Matt Wardman, whose letter is published at the bottom of the page

As I write this, the Manchester Cathedral is reportedly considering suing Sony for copyright infringement and blasphemy regarding the use of the Cathedral as a battlefield for Resistance: Fall of Man. This is not the first time that Sony and the Church have collided.

In September 2005, a PlayStation2 campaign titled "The Passion of the Gamer" ignited a major controversy in Italy. Following a unilateral condemnation by the Vatican and by most, if not all, political parties, Sony Computer Entertainment of Italy harshly removed all the printed ads and issued a public apology

In this case, however, the querelle concerns the very materiality of the virtual worlds, rather than their promotional strategies. According to BBC News, The Bishop of Manchester, Right Rev Nigel McCullough, described the decision to feature the city's cathedral as a backdrop as "highly irresponsible" - especially in the light of Manchester's history of gun crime. "It is well known that Manchester has a gun crime problem," he told the BBC. "For a global manufacturer to re-create one of our great cathedrals with photo-realistic quality and then encourage people to have guns battles in the building is beyond belief and highly irresponsible".

Right Rev McCulloch's statements are deeply flawed as they implicitly suggest a direct link between simulated, fictional violence in videogames and real violence in the city of Manchester. Such view, however, is not surprising considering the Church's official stand on digital games. Last January, as part of the annual papal message for World Communications Day, titled "Children and the Media: A Challenge for Education," Pope Benedict XVI discussed the media's effect on children, condemning the influence of violence games and films on the youngsters:

"Any trend to produce programs and products--including animated films and video games--which in the name of entertainment exalt violence and portray antisocial behavior or the trivialization of human sexuality is a perversion, all the more repulsive when these programs are directed at children and adolescents" (Benedict XVI)

[The Pope's statement, by the way, was clearly motivated by the Rule of Rose scandal that 'shocked' Italy just a month before - in other words, we are witnessing a war of words - and worlds - between the Church and Sony, between the real, the virtual, and the supernatural).

Meanwhile, Reverend McCulloch has demanded Sony's official excuses and the removal of Resistance: Fall of Man from the shelves. The BBC also reports that The Very Reverend Rogers Govender, the Dean of Manchester Cathedral, said that the first-person shooter game is "undermining" the work of the church:

"We are shocked to see a place of learning, prayer and heritage being presented to the youth market as a location where guns can be fired. This is an important issue. For many young people these games offer a different sort of reality and seeing guns in Manchester Cathedral is not the sort of connection we want to make. Every year we invite hundreds of teenagers to come and see the cathedral and it is a shame to have Sony undermining our work." (The Very Reverend Rogers Govender)

This issue is indeed crucial. The collusion between virtual worlds and simulated architecture is not new, but such incidents are bound to grow exponentially. Sony's response to the accusations is that "Resistance: Fall of Man is a fantasy science fiction game and is not based on reality", which does not change the fact that without a permission, they could not have used the monument in the game. Usually, both film and game companies seek a "location release" in advance for using places to be filmed or reproduced, thus Sony's comment ("We thought we obtainted the permission") is rather ambiguous.

Even more interestingly, David Wilson, a Sony spokesman, told The Times newspaper described the virtual cathedral as "game-created footage [...] not video or photography", which raises even more questions regarding law, videogames, and tangible vs. simulated architecture.

This issue is extremely complex as it involves legal, technical, and even ethical factors. Rather than trying to provide some answers, I would like to add my own set of queries:

1) Can a videogame be more sacrilegious or blasphemous than a H&M billboard featuring Madonna on another famous cathedral, the Duomo of Milan?

2) Is Resistance: Fall of Man really "undermining" the Cathedral's significance as The Very Reverend Rogers Govender argues, or is it rather increasing its visibility on the cultural map? The Da Vinci Code - another Sony's owned property condemned by the Vatican as "offensive"- has had the effect of raising awareness around Leonardo Da Vinci's "The Last Supper" and the annexed Church, Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, by a factor of 10.

3) How do we make sense of the notion of "sacred" in simulated spaces? Can a Church in a videogame environment be as "holy" as its tangible counterpart? Ernest Adams - and many others - would probably say no. In a very influential piece written in 2002, he argued that:

"The primary function of architecture in games is to support the gameplay. Buildings in games are not analogous to buildings in the real world, because most of the time their real-world functions are either irrelevant -- the real-world activity that the building serves isn't meaningful in the game -- or purely metaphorical. Rather, buildings in games are analogous to movie sets: incomplete, false fronts whose function is to support the narrative of the movie" (Ernest Adams, Gamasutra, 2002).

If a tangible Church is, by definition, "authentic" and therefore "sacred", a game space - which lacks "authenticity"- cannot be "sacred". Thus, all religious representations in games are just "interactive movie sets". But is the distinction really that transparent? What does praying in Second Life mean, then?

4) In many Call of Duty maps the players can engage in furious battles in small villages' churches (consider, for instance, the Church Tower map in CoD3). Would the Church label such simulated warfare "blasphemous"? Is Call of Duty desecrating religion? Or is killing Nazis "always legitimate" and "historically accurate" in a first-person shooter?

5) The clash between the cult of the PlayStation and organized religion is not limited to Cristianity. As Ben Kuchera writes:

"In 2002 the Sikh Coalition began a petition against the Eidos title Hitman 2 based on the use of holy temples in the game. The petition lays out their feelings clearly, "The Harmander Sahib is a holy Sikh place of worship that serves as a religious and a political center for the Sikhs worldwide. The Harmander Sahib is held in reverence, just as the Vatican by Catholics... such a graphical portrayal of violence within the sacred grounds of any religious place-whether a Gurdwara, a Temple, a Church or a Mosque, is completely unacceptable." (Ben Kuchera, Ars Technica

So, the question is: Are videogames intrinsically trivializing religious architecture? And, as a corollary, are videogames secular by default? Will "sacred" spaces become "taboo" material in violent games after the latest Sony's faux pas? Does that mean that we will not be able to play Mega Church Networked Special Edition?

Update On June 11, 2007, Sony issued an official statement:

"Sony Computer Entertainment Europe is aware of the concerns expressed by the Bishop of Manchester and the Cathedral authorities about the use of Manchester Cathedral in the game Resistance: Fall of Man, and we naturally take their concerns very seriously. Resistance: Fall of Man is a fantasy science fiction game and is not based on reality.

The game is set in an alternate and mythical version of Europe in the 1950s, in which the enemy are strange looking alien invaders seeking to destroy humanity. Whilst we believe that we have sought and received all permissions necessary for the creation of the game, we will be contacting the Cathedral authorities in order to better understand their concerns in more detail." (SCEE)

Meanwhile, CNN reports that the Church of England is now asking to "apologize and contribute a large donation from the game's profits as it did not pay a commercial fee to use the cathedral as a backdrop". Other request - such as - the withdrawal of the game altogether, and the other to modify the section of the cathedral's interior - are still considered. The BBC also reports that another demand is that "Sony to support other groups in Manchester fighting against gun crime."

Some thoughts from game scholars

Dan Pinchbeck, a researcher at University of Portsmouth shared a series of interesting comments on this issue: Two things that are interesting that are coming out of this: firstly, the CofE has never taken such a strong line before, and its curious that they have more of a problem with the fact that its one of their buildings being used than the large numbers of historical (as opposed to fantastical) shooters that are out there. In other words, there's an undercurrent of a head-to-head conflict over branding and IP sitting just below the moral argument. This has been conflated with misreports of the game: two of the national broadsheets carried the story yesterday, both of which made errors about the content of the game.

The Independent on Sunday described the Cathedral sequences as involving 'hundreds of casualties' whilst the Times reported it was about 'a shoot-out between rival gunmen' (apologies if that's the wrong way around!). The reality is that this very short sequence actually involves a swarm of scorpion like aliens and a few 8 foot, multiple-eyed goons.

Not that its suprising the papers are not actually looking at the media artifacts, but given the potential seriousness of the CofE's stance, no-one is bothering to check their facts.

So - historical shooters that re-write chunks of history and reduce German, Japanese or Korean soldiers to mindless evil cannon-fodder are
fine; bugs in a church, apparently not so fine. A case of 'not in my backyard/not on my IP' or a specific instance of serious (i.e. legal)
retaliation from a real-world organisation - given the rise in games cited in the real world, a potentially interesting one to follow?

Its also interesting in the context that Fall of Man generally feels like it could have been put together in a McCarthyite, 'reds-under-the-bed', 1950s B-movie script meeting - it's a wonderfully visible metaphor of the current political climate. And no-one is criticising the game on the basis that it's appallingly derivative and rather dull..." (Dan Pinchbeck, June 10 2007)

Dr. Jason Rutter (The University of Manchester) also shared some poignant thoughts: "I find this story interesting not just because of the usual representations of violence in the media trope (or that I live in Manchester) but the almost hidden claim that 'permission' was not granted for use of the cathedral's interior in the games.

I think this is a great example of the manner in which 1) Places we might
regard as public are privately owned, 2) organisations are increasingly
active in managing behaviour in these places and 3) Use copyright of a way of managing access.

For example staff at the Galleria dell'Accademia in Florence are very quick
to stop victors taking pictures of Michelangelo's David -whether or not they
use flash and the case of professional photographers being stopped from
taking pictures of Anish Kapoor's Cloud Gate in the Millennium Park are well documented.

Now, I don't know how Insomniac Games generated the interior of the
cathedral but if, as has been suggested, they used the virtual tour
available of the Manchester Cathedral website - then that does open up a whole can of copyright worms.

Reports in some reports that 'Sony added that it believed it had "sought and received all permissions necessary for the creation of the game"' and Sony's that the sequence in question 'is game-created footage, it is not video or photography' might suggest that any legal action around copyright is more worrying that publicity created about a violent video game" (Dr. Jason Rutter, June 10 2007)

"Some other 3D videogame cathedrals that might be worth considering:

1. TimeSplitters 2 uses Notre Dame set in 1895.
2. Eternal Darkness uses a fictional French Cathedral, to very powerful effect.

Tomb Raider must use a lot of non-Christian religious sites, but I think they were largely fictional.

This is only tangentially related, but if I was the Christian Church, I think I'd be more offended by the fact that so many videogames set the church as a front for the villains/zealots/monsters. The examples are almost too many to list:

1. Diablo (the church is corrupted by Satan)
2. Eternal Darkness (the cathedral and the holy relic is a trap set by an otherworldly evil)
3. Chrono Trigger (the cathedral in 600 AD is a front for Yakra and the monster army)
4. Syndicate Wars (the church is a front for a powerful mega-corporation)
5. Final Fantasy 6 (Kefka becomes God himself... or at least the imagery suggests so). Also, it strikes me how often RPGs present a kind of pagan mysticism as "the truth"... Valkyrie Profile, Final Fantasy 7, and Chrono Cross come to mind most immediately, but there are a lot of other examples" (Douglas Wilson, June 12 2007)

"The inside of the cathedral is fairly generic - without the more or less
exact mix of the exterior, I doubt anyone would have noticed. If,
however, the copyright is extended to the contribution of a building's
architecture to the skyline, that would seem to create a very different
set of rules for IP. Misrepresentation is already established, but as
you say, if a portion of a public space can be claimed (i.e. one
building in a city skyline) then this would seem to have ramifications
beyond the obvious impact upon designers using real spaces in game
worlds.

Whilst I agree with both Jason and Matteo that, in a sense, the usual
moral bulldozing and misrepresentation is nothing particularly new, the
notion of using it to fairly transparently wrap around a copyright
issuesis extremely interesting. Leaves one wondering if Cheddar Gorge
will be the next to object to adding alien warfare to its list of kid's
activities... (Dan Pinchbeck, June 12, 2007)"

Feedback, Revisions & Comments

"Your article is a really excellent review of a lot of issues. I disagree
with a few of your interpretations and statements, but you have you covered all the questions and raised some interesting new ones. You have made one wrong assumption, however: Manchester Cathedral is not a Roman Catholic Cathedral; it is Anglican. The material you quote from the Vatican is interesting background material that will have informed the Cathedral's Actions, but provides no precedents or instructions for an Anglican Cathedral. In short the "Catholic Church" (I assume you mean the Roman Catholic Church) is not involved in this at all - unless it chooses to express an opinion as a third party. Another point: the wider Church of England is not directly involved. It is strictly between Manchester Cathedral (which is a "legal person") and Sony. Also - a detail point, the Bishop should be "Right Rev Nigel McCullough"." The Dean should be "The Very Reverend Rogers Govender" I hope that is useful feedback. I'd ask you to make modification to correct these points - but it is still an excellent review. I will be linking to your article in my next post. Regards" (Matt Wardman, June 13, 2007).

Hi Matt, thank you very much for your message. I find your comments on the case extremely interesting. Also, you are absolutely correct - the Chuch is Anglican, not Roman Catholic. Being originally from Italy, I have the tendency to see everything through Catholic-tinted glass - the pervasiveness of Catholicism in every single aspect of Italian life is unsettling. This, perhaps, explains (although does not justify), my embarassing mistake. Your feedback is very much appreciated - I have revised my article. I also encourage the readers to check out your observations on the matter - your analysis is accurate, illuminating, and objective (Matteo Bittanti, June 13 2007).

Link: The Wardman Wire's analysis: the Legal angle

Link: Update 4: Resolution Not Imminent

Link: Update 3: Fisking Speedy Pete

Link: Update 2

Link: Update 1



To be continued

Link: "The Passion of the Gamer"

Link: BBC News article

Link: SCEE official statement

Link: Ars Technica on the controversy

Link: Resistance: Fall of Man (PS3)

Link: Eurogamer's Comment

Link: Dan Pinchbeck

Link: Jason Rutter

Link: The Wardman Wire's angle