Public Games

2006/05/15

Should there be a "Corporation for Public Games"? Do we need more public media, and should games be one of those media?

I would say no.

I'm not persuaded that the US should be increasing its share of state-sponsored broadcasting. A private, commercial mass media certainly has its problems, but becoming a bureacratized institution like the BBC doesn't seem like an improvement.

I question this proposal on two grounds: propriety and efficacy.

"Games in the public interest" sounds to me like "the state should use its power to tax workers because they won't voluntarily give me money for my brilliant game." In other words, it sounds to me like yet another impatient attempt to bypass the marketplace.

If people aren't interested enough in games that are good for them to be willing to buy them, who here is arrogant enough to say that, well, these people don't know what's good for them and what we really need is another public, state-run bureaucracy to provide this service to them whether they like it or not?

In a nation founded on the principle that the power of the state should be limited, is it appropriate to expand that power for any trivial purpose? What necessity is addressed by allowing the state to compete with the private sector by providing games that are (in someone's opinion) good for us?

The argument from efficacy is that even if the intentions are good, the results will eventually wind up being not so good: power corrupts. Instead of trusting the marketplace to do its thing, state-run media forcibly extracts money from people so that a few elites can broadcast the messages they think the people should hear. Eventually it becomes impossible to resist using that power to push one's favored point of view. Moyers and Totenberg (not to mention the BBC's anti-Bush editorializing) are merely recent examples of how state power over communications channels can be abused; conservatives could just as easily install their own mouthpieces.

Do we really need more of that? It's all very well when the state favors your political views, but how will you feel when you learn that your tax dollars are subsidizing "LimbaughWorld"?

I'm skeptical. I don't think there is any general mandate requiring us to accept being forced to pay for yet another bureaucratic agency; I don't think a public game development institution in particular is justifiable; I don't think such an institution would make games that people would want to play; and I don't think such an institution would remain unpoliticized for very long (if at all).

In closing, please note that this is not some Philistinic, torch-and-pitchfork-wielding, "ban Big Bird" argument. The question isn't whether art is socially valuable -- it's whether government is the appropriate or best source of such art.