Rockstar's Legal Gang Beats Down Online Art Installation
Rockstar Games, as the saying goes, may not know much about art, but it knows what it likes - and what it doesn't.
And what it definitely didn't like, according to the The Daily Page, was an "online art installation" created by University of Wisconsin art student Dave Berg. Berg's work was displayed at The Highest Score, a site Berg created to "contemplate video game violence."
Berg's chosen medium of expression was Rockstar's 2005 release The Warriors. A short, looping clip of a gang character kicking a woman on the ground was displayed over and over. A counter on the page was synchronized with the onscreen action and exceeded 285,000 by the time Berg received a heavy-handed "cease and desist" order from Morrison Cohen LLP, a Big Apple law firm representing Rockstar
GP: What? No Blank Rome? Quick, somebody tell Jack of Miami...
What was Berg's point?
As he told the Daily Page, "...video games as a medium are perhaps one of the final frontiers where sexism and graphic violence exist, to a certain point, unchecked and definitely encouraged... what is depicted on my website is something that occurs in the game, but does not help you solve puzzles or learn lessons - it exists for pure entertainment... The saddest part concerning this "entertainment" approach to these issues is that while these games are rated for certain age groups, it is a common fact that video game rental stores and many other stores that actually sell the game do not check the purchaser's age at the time of the sale."
"Secondly, I'm very interested in the concept that our postmodern world has dealt with for the past 20 years, namely, the desensitivization of violent images on one's mind. The fact that this video clip is occurring at a constant sound beat and motion, and it is paired with a numeric value, I'm interested in the idea of this image becoming less and less hard to look at with every second that passes, due to the hypnotic rhythm that exists within the site."
"Paired with that, I wanted to point out how America seems to be so obsessed with large numbers... That is why I put a counter in the top left corner... I'm essentially conducting an experiment, as i am curious as to whether people will begin to lose their focus on how brutal the image is and begin to become obsessed with the number's growth."