April 15, 2001

Questions for Ernest Adams, Author of "Dogma 2001," a Video Game Manifesto

By CRAIG TAYLOR

Photograph by Ben Schott Related Sites The Home Site of Ernest Adams Dogma 2001: A Challenge to Game Designers The Dogma 2001 Vow The International Hobo Game Design Consortium

 Tell me about “Dogma 2001,” the video-game manifesto you published on the Web.

It’s based on a manifesto called “Dogme 95,” which was put together by a group of filmmakers, including the Danish director Lars von Trier. They set up a Vow of Chastity, which included all these really extreme, outrageous rules that challenged directors and made it very hard to make a movie. I went and read the Vow and thought, This is hilarious. It carries over very nicely into the video-game industry.

Carries over how?

The potential of video games has nowhere near been tapped because we’re concentrating on making money. I’d like to see more games that would take me someplace new, that don’t just say here’s some elves and here’s a forest, go fight something.

You propose the three-word formula: “Technology stifles creativity.” With everyone obsessed with the new PlayStation or fixated on the Xbox, that's practically heresy.

It's had a lot of attention. Experienced pro game developers are irritated by me for the most part. And some of them think that I’m jealous of their success, which is not the case. I've worked in that market. Then there are these young, idealistic wannabes in their basements who are saying: “Yeah. This is a great challenge.”

Among those challenges: you forbid Good-and-Evil battles, first-person shooters, technical jargon and what you refer to as “conceptual non sequiturs.” I was raised on Pac Man. Is a giant disembodied dot-eating head that gets chased by ghosts a non sequitur?

No. He’s perfectly fine. In an abstract game, you are in a completely abstract place, and you can have abstract rules. But if people are going to make realistic games about the real world, I would like them to make some effort to reward logic as opposed to brute force.

Rule 4: “There shall be no knights, elves, dwarves or dragons.” Why not?

It's not that elves and dwarves and dragons necessarily equal mediocrity. It’s just that there are so many of them out there. Please, could we have nothing more from European folk tradition? That well’s been sucked dry. I would love to see elements of Hindu mythology brought into gaming. Though it’s tricky because it’s still a living religion.

I noticed you don't mention the Lara Croft porn-star stereotype for female characters.

I’ve written about it before. I find it offensive myself, as a feminist, but it's difficult in an industry full of horny young men to make that point and make it stick.

Still, doesn’t the success of these games, at least among that market, suggest they’re doing something right? So they’re homogeneous. If kids are happy with them, what's the big deal?

If you went down to the public library and the only books were James Bond books, and then you went to the video store and the only movies were James Bond movies, how would you feel? I would be extremely annoyed. But that’s the state of games, and that’s why a significant percentage of the population finds them boring.

The comparison to books and movies raises the question – from one perspective, video games are the dominant cultural form of the age. But the closest we ever get to engaged criticism is the sort of violence-is-bad attack that John Ashcroft recently relaunched. Could that change?

My next lecture is “Can Computer Games Ever Be a Legitimate Art Form?” I think the answer is an emphatic yes. But the industry has to bring it along. Movers and shakers don’t care as long as it's nonpornographic and it’s not wrecking their children’s minds with violence.

And what about you? Were you prepared for the criticism that your ideas would attract?

It’s always been important to me to reject peer pressure. I didn’t wear blue jeans for years because everyone was wearing blue jeans. I didn’t take drugs because everyone else was taking drugs. It’s a part of my own nature to reject regimentation and to encourage others to do the same out of what the British would call bloody-mindedness. “Dogma 2001” is an expression of bloody-mindedness as much as anything else.