THIS IS A PRE-PUBLICATION DRAFT OF: French videogaming: What kind of culture and what support? Hugh Dauncey Abstract This article discusses developments in French public policy towards videogaming in the 2000s, and explains them by locating them within the context of French cultural policy during the Fifth Republic (especially since the 1980s), and evolving interpretations of what kinds of activities can contribute to France’s ‘cultural presence’ in the world. A popular leisure activity – what view from the French state? In March 2006 French Culture and Communications Minister Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres awarded the prestigious decoration of Chevalier de l’ordre des Arts et des Lettres to the French videogames authors Michel Ancel (Rayman, Beyond Good and Evil, King Kong) and Frederick Raynal (Alone in the Dark, Resident Evil), and the Japanese creator of games for Nintendo, Shigeru Miyamoto. Honouring – by making them ‘Knights of Arts and Letters’ – representatives of a leisure practice frequently looked down on in France by many representatives of elite culture was a political and cultural symbol that the state wanted to redraw the conceptual, legal, financial and industrial boundaries of videogaming, and particularly, to signal that for the Ministry of Culture, video was truly ‘cultural’, rather than mere software. Other – commercial – signals of the significance of videogaming had come two years earlier, when figures revealed that in 2004, after a 10% rise over 2003, French consumer purchases in interactive leisure products had exceeded €1 billion, including more than 33 million items of software, or two for every French household. Also in 2004, the interactive leisure industry grew to employ more French citizens – 12,000 plus – than cinema, long-considered France’s prime cultural product after literature. And statistics revealed that literature itself was also being overtaken by videogaming: the most popular cultural product sold in France in 2004 was not The Da Vinci Code (800,000 copies), but the more than million-selling GTA San Andreas! After the French state’s realisation of the importance of comic-books (‘bandes dessine´es’) in the 1980s and popular music (‘musiques amplifie´es/actuelles’) in the 1990s (Teillet, 2008) it was the turn of videogames to warrant attention of governments anxious to promote France’s economic and cultural independence. Donnedieu de Vabres’ honouring of the videogame creators in 2006 marked a significant shift in attitudes from only a few years earlier, when it had seemed that traditional prejudices in favour of high culture were still dominant. In October 2002, Jean-Claude Larue, speaking as former member of the Conseil supe´rieur de l’audiovisuel (the regulatory body for audiovisual and communications industries) and then chair of the Syndicat des e´diteurs de logiciels de loisirs (a videosoftware trade association) had made a dyspeptic and despairing assessment of videogaming’s chances of establishing itself as a cultural form which could co-exist in the ecological system of French culture on an equal footing with other more politically favoured activities: I’ve tried in vain to convince two Presidents of the Republic and six successive Ministers of Culture that multimedia products and videogames are revolutionary and the preferred media of young people, and that French video industry is internationally recognised for its quality, but that if we leave it exposed to the winds of free trade, it will be the winds from America which will blow strongest. With fourteen recent business failures in the sector we are experiencing a massacre of French firms in a climate of general indifference. Even the Brin-Buisson Commission’s study of the effects of pirate copying neglected to look at videogames. It’s an aberration that while solutions have been found to help the film industry with appropriate labour legislation and subsidies, and the music industry is protected by