From “Lara Croft” to “Silence we play”, “Libé” at the heart of video games – Libération

2023-11-04 01:03:00

Libération at 50 yearsdossierThe newspaper was not only the first general media to open its pages to the video game world, it immediately considered it as a cultural and artistic object rather than a commercial phenomenon.

“It is the first time since the Stone Age, when bipeds began to embroider legends in the evening around the fire, that a fictional character with an identifying and addictive aim has come directly from the computer cauldron. The classic tragedy and the soap opera, the novel and the comic strip, without forgetting the heavyweight Hollywood studios, now have a new competitor, not only in the race for dollars but also in shaping the collective imagination: a mutant has arisen in the genetic lineage of videogames.” It is July 26, 1997. Robert Mitchum and James Stewart have just passed away, One Piece is taking its first steps in the jump scene, and Libération is devoting its cover to Lara Croft, “the new immaterial Eve”. Way to mark the occasion of a global excitement which sees fashion designers or U2 snatching pieces of the icon of the game Tomb Raider. But Libé is not content with noting the commercial phenomenon and the future revolution that it is shaping for the cultural industries. The journal also talks about the work for what it is, its plastic qualities, its dramaturgy, its technique. The cover of the newspaper has since featured in all French video game histories as a marker of nobility, of recognition of video games beyond player circles and the specialized press.

Journalist in the Culture department, Olivier Séguret was around thirty years old when he discovered what was then widely seen as a media for teenagers. A night of enchantment around Metroid, on Nintendo NES, before fully succumbing with the first Playstation and this Tomb Raider. When he takes the video game and installs it in the pages of Libé, he does so with the eye and methods of the film critic that he is. Breaking with the approach of the specialized press – especially that of the 90s – which observes video games through the prism of consumer testing, noting the quality of graphics or sound as others evaluate the handling of a vehicle.

From the start, there is the idea of ​​not separating video games from other registers of the sensitive, the beautiful, the arts. While recognizing its own qualities. The gesture establishes a tradition at Libération (and spread elsewhere, at Inrocks for example), where the question of the legitimacy of video games as art has never really arisen. At the time, the Libé editorial team played little, if at all, video games (a little more today) but they trusted their journalists. To talk about video games in the 90s is to seize an established popular practice, and whose sustainability proves that it is no longer a simple flash in the pan as we might have believed at the end of the 70s. Installing video games in the general press means first of all reporting on movements in society and culture, practices that are largely foreign to the readership of the newspaper with language understandable by all.

The case is all the more tricky because video games are by nature an art of hypercommerciality, inseparable from the state of the art and its production conditions. Critical language must be coupled with a necessary account of the state of the industry. Libération does this in the weekly column “Moi, jeux”, run by Olivier Séguret, and in the podcast Silence, we play, where for sixteen years weekly updates on industry news have been mixed with a critical dimension practiced on the mode of debate. The show being a rare space of plurality, when in around thirty years the situation has hardly evolved, at Libération as in the rest of the general press: if video games have carved out a place for themselves in most of the editorial offices, it has not become institutionalized to the point of having several specialized journalists.

It is in this common space that Silence on Play constitutes, open in particular to journalists from other editorial offices, that Libération will best reflect the explosion of the independent scene and the diversity of video games torn between blockbusters with budgets that are in the hundreds of millions of dollars and solo creations.

If the idea of ​​approaching video games in the same way as another artistic field remains, the discourse is evolving. We have learned to be wary, for example, of a fun industry that hides great brutality. Players, during the Gamergate episode and the waves of harassment against creators that resulted from it. Companies, scrutinized in particular through behind-the-scenes investigations at Ubisoft or video game schools.

If there is a fight for video games, it is a common fight to be waged to preserve critical spaces undermined by the press crisis and the emergence of a discourse forged by streamers who are as influential as they are influenceable.