None of this is new anymore, and it’s not so unusual to come across players in their forties or fifties. Moreover, in recent years, the image education sector has largely begun its aggiornamento by integrating digital cultures into its activities. From the perspective of image education, should we consider video games as a whole, or, like cinema, should we make distinctions between “commercial video games,” “authored video games,” between “industry” and “independents”? Between “entertainment” and “art”? Based on the observation of the evolution of the social image of video games, this article questions the issue of the “digital transition” about movie theaters and image education, and defends a socio-cultural approach to gaming capable of reconciling audience practices, societal issues, transmission, training, and education of young people.
Subject of the moral panics of the 1990s/2000s (discourse on addiction [1], violence, disconnection from reality, etc.) or assimilated to US cultural and economic imperialism, the video game medium could seem, at first glance, to enter into direct contradiction with the principles of an education in images historically and initially centered on cinema, as an art and driving force for an awakening of consciences and critical thinking. Moreover, associated, at its beginnings, with the rise of computing, the video game is often presented by its detractors as a standardized object devoid of the singular qualities of the work of art. Fortunately, this caricatured vision gradually became more nuanced during the 2010s. The schematic opposition between “art” and “industry” showed its limits: Stephen King is now considered a great writer, we have understood that so-called auteur films also respond to forms of standardization, television series are now taken seriously – despite their narratives and their highly codified formats, they appear as the refuge of audiovisual creativity.
Symbolically, the CNC’s commitment (creation of the Video Game Support Fund in 2008) has helped to consolidate a vision of video games as an art and industry, based on the model of cinema. The evolution of public practices, but also the generational renewal within those involved in image education, has also led to the multiplication of initiatives around digital technology and video games [2].
This is hardly surprising: the centrality of cinema in image education is the product of a given socio-historical context. Had it been born in 2020, image education would probably have immediately integrated the media, comics, along with cinema, television, and… video games. Thus, the new generational practices of the 1990s and 2000s came to shake up a model inherited both from the social struggles of the 1970s and 1980s (themselves driven by older popular education movements) and from the public policies led by Jack Lang, Minister of Culture, in the 1980s and 1990s.
Digital transition and disruption of cultural hierarchies
Currently, the integration of the associative environment into public policies is being largely accomplished, and a form of consensus has been established. Image education is organized around general objectives carried out in particular by school and extracurricular programs: acquiring a common culture based on a corpus of works and authors; developing an artistic practice; raising awareness of film professions. But also around more specific objectives, invested by educators: developing individual critical awareness; contributing to social cohesion. However, while being itself the product of renewed technological innovations, it is cinema, reclassified as the 7th Art, which constituted until the end of the 2000s the almost exclusive, in any case, central and ideal object of image education. By changing access to works, their distribution and production methods, but also by giving back to audiences the share of expertise and prescriptive power that was denied to them, the digital transition has shaken up the cinema and audiovisual sectors at all levels.
Thus, while the Society of Film Directors (SRF) borrows from Buñuel to celebrate the movie theater, stating that “the movie theater is the only place where a film is shown that invites us to leave our homes, meet strangers, and hear news from outside” [3], at the same time, how films, series, and images in general are viewed is no longer primarily through cultural venues. For the 12-39 age group, viewing on smartphones is the majority. Beyond that, people switch to computers/televisions. Furthermore, the DVD market is considered almost dead, even though media libraries, for example, have acquired substantial funds.
The same goes for VOD, which has been supplanted by S-VOD. While arthouse cinema platforms exist, they remain confidential and sometimes struggle to keep up. LaCinetek (8,000 subscribers), Mubi, and Tënk operate with a monthly subscription plan but target an ultra-cinema-loving audience. UniversCiné, launched in 2007, has by far the largest catalog (more than 7,000 titles, seven times more than LaCinetek) and should finally change its model. One question remains: what audience practices/expectations do these platforms correspond to? Will they replace the defunct video stores for a segment of the movie-loving public? The question is worth asking since the exclusivity of the film seems to contradict contemporary habits. This includes moviegoers who spend more time watching series and who readily frequent multiplexes where films can be seen in their original version…
This is evidenced by the search for hybrid formulas, as friendly as they are intended to reach an audience of the happy few in June 2019 at the La Rochelle Festival, the daily newspaper Le Monde (which, we remember, opportunely offered with its evening edition, in the 2000s, a series of heritage films on DVD from the “catalogue” of Films without Borders) joined forces with LaCinetek to launch a “Ciné-Club” project. Director Pascale Ferran (one of the initiators of the platform) explains: “Borne up a long time ago on the passion and cinematographic choices of Claude Jean-Philippe and Patrick Brion on television, we wanted to invent a place that would allow us to continue this work of transmission. Very quickly, the idea of creating a digital Ciné-club arose. » [4] We can see that for those in their forties and fifties, the taste for images was not necessarily forged in cinemas but via television and video clubs. For today’s generation, it is the smartphone and the computer. With, inevitably, an impact on the type of production: the format of the two-hour film finds it difficult to find its place outside the cinema [5].
Video games and cultural action
On April 18, 2019, the Chair of Innovation and Regulation of Digital Services at Télécom ParisTech organized a study day dedicated to the digital transition during which various researchers and professionals made a harsh observation: the French model of cultural exception and financing of cinema has reached its limits, the barely revised media chronology is already obsolete and is destined to disappear [6]. At the same time, TV series have established themselves as a particularly dynamic space of creativity, with series mania even taking over from “traditional” cinephilia. Geek culture in the broad sense has emerged from the ghetto and established itself as a cultural standard (as evidenced by the successes and scholarly analyses of Game of Thrones or The Hunger Games ) [7]. VR (virtual reality), “immersive entertainment”, streaming video games (Google Stadia), and e-sports have taken off, promising new upheavals in practices to come.
Unlike media libraries, for example, public and community cinemas have been slow to take the measure of digital cultures. Yet they play a significant role in the socio-cultural network of the territory and are relays for cultural action. Hampered by a lack of resources and personnel (and sometimes fear of change), outdated and/or rigid cinema configurations, and regulations that do not allow much flexibility in experimenting with the diffusion of non-film images, the historic places of cultural diffusion on which image education has long relied have thus seen video games invest other spaces. Museums, art schools, media libraries, youth centers, and even universities are now taking video game creation seriously.
The Rendez-vous de l’Histoire in Blois has been integrating video games into its programming for several years. The National Library of France regularly organizes meetings on the subject, as an extension of its mission to preserve video game heritage. In March 201,9 in Lyon, a conference was held entitled “Video Games, at the Crossroads of History, Arts, and Media.” Popular events such as Virtual Calais (Hauts-de-France) or Stunfest (Rennes), as well as initiatives around e-sports and educational work involving virtual reality tools, digital cultures, and video games, are investing in all fields: leisure, school education, cultural and artistic programming, social action, and even in hospitals where video games are used by some practitioners for therapeutic purposes. Teachers are using video games in their lessons, based not on the serious games proposals promoted by the National Education system, but on a critical reading of the video games that young people play.
To speak only of French-speaking countries, Switzerland is seeing an increase in cultural and educational events and activities around video games [8], while in French-speaking Belgium, where the anchoring of lifelong education (equivalent to French popular education) is important, video games are integrated into educational thinking, as evidenced by the action of For’J, Federation of Youth Houses and Youth Organizations [9]. In Canada, the establishment of one of the main studios of the French multinational Ubisoft in Montreal has generated an entire ecosystem. In addition, the Department of Film Studies at the University of Montreal was a pioneer in opening specializations in game studies nd television studies.
In France, we have not yet reached the point where a movie theater programs video games like we program films. The experience of Quai 10 in Charleroi is exemplary of the obstacles and limits of what is possible or not to achieve in a place that is not designed from the outset (including architecturally) as a hybrid space. Too often, video games and digital cultures remain a pretext, a means of occasionally attracting an audience that no longer comes, a “sideline” of cinema whose centrality we want to preserve at all costs in the name of the supposed capacity of arthouse films to awaken critical thinking. In Hauts-de-France, at the initiative of the DRAC and the De la Suite dans les Images theater network, a long-term project launched in 2019 aims to train managers, facilitators and facilitators of rooms in video game action, but also to support cinemas in the implementation of long-term programming actions [10], often in areas considered “difficult”.
Video games, a social object
I have already argued at length in the past in favor of an education in the image extended to objects other than cinema, which is autonomous as well as a partner of public policies, and which is part of a critical perspective capable of responding to social expectations concerning sexism, racism, but also classism [11]. When it distinguishes cinema from other images, education in the image renews a vision of the autonomy of the work of art, which has nevertheless been largely called into question by work on culture in recent decades [12]. The upheaval of cultural hierarchies that we have been experiencing since the 1990s is not solely the product of the digital transition, but this has undeniably accelerated things.
Thus, the emergence of social networks has allowed the media affirmation of particularly active fan communities, which have exploded the boundaries of cinephilia as we knew it, with its pantheon of works and authors. Filmmakers like John Carpente, or Dario Argento, long mocked for their roots in B movies, are now presented at the Cinémathèque Française. No one disputes the artistic dimension of comics anymore. Upon its release, the video game Red Dead Redemption 2 made the front page of the daily newspaper Libération. This blurring of hierarchies is accompanied by a reappropriation by the public of discourses on cultural productions, to the detriment of traditional prescribers (cultural programmers, critics, teachers, etc.). The latter must therefore rethink their role vertically.. It is no longer just a question of transmitting a body of works relating to “good” culture, but rather of providing the tools that allow us to understand how cultural productions make sense in our society.
It is therefore no coincidence that video game communities are involved in socio-media controversies that concern French society as a whole. Whether it is working conditions in the gaming industry [13] or sexism, gamers debate the same subjects as everyone else. We can see in the numerous articles and debates on social networks the sign that critical thinking is no worse among gamers than elsewhere… Before #MeToo, before the controversy in the cinema sector and Adèle Haenel’s speech, feminist gamers mobilized to denounce sexism in geek culture [14]. Finally, in January 2020, a documentary about “hegemonic masculinity” in video games was released on YouTube and received an enthusiastic response [15], proof that not only does video game play not make you stupid, but that video game audiences feel concerned by the most pressing social debates. In January 2020, the Le Stream Reconstructible collective had raised more than 130,000 euros via Twitch to support the ongoing strikes.