Eccentric Flower:200911/Just A Game
From Eccentric Flower
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Just a Game
ROBERT DISCLAIMER: This is about social issues having to do with computer games. You can read and understand the controversy in the essay, and the articles I am going to link, without needing or wanting to know any actual gameplay mechanics.
If you don't follow computer games, or even if you do, you may not be aware that a game was just released called Modern Warfare 2. But I'm betting you will become aware of it in the coming weeks. Add it to your cultural lexicon now.
Oh, I'm not recommending the game. In fact it's not a genre to my taste and I don't intend to buy or play it. But it comes with a controversy. Remember the last wave of people getting up in arms and talking about violence in computer games on every talk show in town? This is going to spawn another of those.
There is a level/scene in Modern Warfare 2 called "No Russian" where, for extremely vaguely defined plot reasons, your character (an American soldier) must infiltrate a group of Russian terrorists. During the majority of the scene, these terrorists storm through an airport, shooting civilians and innocents and anyone in their way, leaving no one alive. You don't have to help, but you are complicit nonetheless. Furthermore, you can't change the outcome. If you rebel and try to kill the terrorists, they just shoot you down too. (They have machine guns. You have a handgun.)
Kyle Orland at Crispy Gamer writes about his experience playing this level and notes that while he expected to just be able to shrug it off, he got a rude surprise:
Now, many of the people who have commented on Orland's post feel that Orland is - not to put too fine a point on it - a wimp and a crybaby. And disingenuous. After all, the level is the only one in the game that is skippable by choice; there's an unhelpful warning at the beginning of the game that one level is potentially offensive and you can opt out. And Orland does seem to write like a rubbernecker at a car crash - horrified by the violence and yet fascinated by it in a sensationalistic way.
But the people who take Orland's side, who say, in essence, "Saying 'it's only a game, detach, get over it' is too simplistic a reaction" have a point too. "It's only a game" was good enough once. I'm not sure it's going to be good enough much longer.
This minuet has an A-B-A structure. Please hold for the key change.
Right now I am playing a game called Dragon Age: Origins. It is, at its heart, an old-school team RPG from the people who perfected the form - Baldur's Gate brought into the new millennium with the current technology. It looks gorgeous. It is quite violent (the game's content is severe enough that the web site for the game asks your age before it will let you in). These are not fights with guns, these are sweaty fights with sword and armor and melee scrums so bad you sometimes can't figure out who's bleeding on whom. These are fights that make you work for it and leave your characters panting from exhaustion at the end.
But the real issue that makes Dragon Age suitable only for adults is not the violence, but the complexity of the themes. This is a game about hard compromises, about betrayals and nasty politics and Really Bad Things happening to people who usually don't deserve it. This is not fairy tale politics. It's a game where you often have to choose between one person dying or another, or violating someone's principles at the expense of something you need to accomplish. Loyalties are strong and complicated, like in the real world. Even your party members - who are all at least theoretically loyal to you - may not like each other, and they will probably not unanimously like what you do, even if you're a saint.
Morrigan, who was raised in the woods rather cruelly, almost ferally, and is an unlicensed magic user, regards Wynne, who is part of the officially-sanctioned mage Circle (who to Morrigan lead a life of captivity, policed by templars who fear them and will kill them at the slightest misstep) as something odious. Do you help Wynne and risk Morrigan's distaste? On the other hand, something horrible has happened in the Circle and Wynne is only trying to save her fellow mages and innocents because she fears the templars will come in and exercise the nuclear option (which they have already told you they will). Can you let Wynne and all the other survivors be slaughtered just because you happen to agree with Morrigan that the quasi-slavery of the Circle is an outrage and those sheep deserve to die? What if you don't agree with Morrigan? What if you only agree with her partway? What if you'd really like them both to travel with you but are worried you can't get them to see eye-to-eye? And does it affect your decision any that Wynne is a decent, good-natured person and Morrigan is a caustic bitch, but Morrigan is one of the best offensive people to have in your party, whereas Wynne's the only party member with healing magic in the game? (And remember, you may acquire many allies, but you can only travel with three of them at once.)
I believe that exposing the young and impressionable (and even the old and impressionable) to violence should be done very carefully, but we must consider the possibility that difficult ideas - especially the ideas that people are often very cruel to one another and that often the wrong people die - are even nastier and should be handled with even greater care than the blood and gore. That's not to say they should be avoided. I don't believe keeping people in a bubble does anyone any favors. But - lightly, lightly, always tread lightly.
Another Crispy Gamer article about what has already come to be called "THAT scene" in Modern Warfare 2 doesn't discuss the level itself much at all; it talks about the politics implied by the level, and the game in general, and why they are facile and flawed:
I'm sure there are some people reading that and saying, "Aw, come on, ideological analysis of a first-person shooter?" But the thing is, the ideas are getting complex and real. The games are getting complex and real. If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck .... If a game is nuanced enough to present a realistic and muddy morality, then it's nuanced enough to be discussed seriously as such. It isn't going to do for a game maker to say "We weren't trying to make any kind of statement" with a game like that much longer, because the games will have progressed to where they are damned well making a statement whether the manufacturers intended it or not - just like you can't use as a defense when you hit someone with an iron bar that you didn't know it was going to injure them. The court will claim, with justification, that there was a reasonable expectation you should have known.
Here is the thing: The reason that once upon a time "It's only a game" was good enough was because the games themselves were not good enough. Getting angry about the pixilated violence in games, once upon a time, was silly. But the games are catching up to reality, and scarily fast. The "it's only a game" argument begins to leak when lovingly rendered 3-D blood and ragdoll physics means that broken, mutilated bodies fly around and flop and ooze in exactly the same way real carnage would. Blink your eyes a few times and we will have photorealistic games which play exactly as a real shooting spree, complete with accurately sampled screams and cries. We're very nearly there now. Yes, you will still be still sitting one remove from the actual carnage. But does that make it better or worse?
I happen to think that making the violence truly participative would actually improve the situation. If we were in a VR environment where you would have to swing what appears in every aspect to be a real sword, and get just as winded as you would if you were wearing real armor, if you got covered in what appears to be real ichor, or had what for all practical purposes actually appeared to be a serious wound inflicted upon you - if you were pulling what appeared to be a real trigger on a real gun - then you would have to have the emotional involvement. If you killed someone you would have to actually be killing someone, and take the emotional strain and consequences of doing that. And I don't think these games would be very popular once people figured that out, once we went through the first rounds of traumatic stress disorder from VR games and people going nuts and so on. But even so - then there would be no illusions about what one is doing. In fact it would be sort of an acid test. The people who did it a few times and then said, "No, no, I can't do that anymore" would have passed it. Everyone who seemed to be able to do it endlessly without psychological consequence, or showed signs of actually enjoying it, could be lined up and put into the army executed placed under careful surveillance [ahem - sorry about that].
Whereas, when you sit down to what looks very much like a real killing spree but all you are doing is pushing buttons, there's a detachment there, a deadening. It may be that in this case "It's not real, it's only a game" could turn out to be the worst possible thing we are telling ourselves - because, unlike movie violence, you are a participant, however detached. You are pushing the buttons. And pushing a button is a lot easier to do than firing a gun or swinging a sword. I used to not think that computer games were gateways to real violence. I am becoming less sure of that as the games evolve.
For some reason, I ended up reading a long thread on Metafilter about the "No Russian" level, and comparisons to Dragon Age came up there, too. A couple of people there fairly bravely took on the inherent weakness of "it's only a game" in a similar way that you do ("Stormfront is ONLY A WEBSITE").
There's another argument to be made that's specific to games, though, and unfortunately the people who are making it right now mostly rely on personal reaction or vague appeals to teleology(?). I keep waiting for someone to bring up Milgram and the mass of follow-on work that's been done -- for example, the recent study in which people who participated as interrogators in a simulation of torture increased their belief in the subject's guilt, while those who witnessed the same simulation passively mostly identified with the subject's pain.
-- 17:06, 13 November 2009 (GMT)
Dan, the thing about the "fairly bravely" - I must say a few words in support of the people who are leaping in defensively and frantically with "it's only a game." They are not necessarily being dismissive; what they often are is scared. A number of game players fear that, given half an excuse, the bluenoses will come in and shut down this entire segment of the game industry and we will all be reduced to playing Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing.
(This is, of course, overstated for dramatic and humorous effect, but remember, being "tough on computer games" is almost as much a reflexive no-brainer stance for most politicians as being "tough on crime." Who are they going to upset? They figure most of the people who'd get upset by cracking down on computer games don't or won't vote anyway.)
So, yeah, gamers get a little jumpy anytime someone says, "Hey, wait, maybe we shouldn't just shrug off the violence in this, let's talk about it," and they get really twitchy when someone inside their own community says it. They fear that what World of Warcraft players call "the banhammer" could drop any minute.
I'm not ceasing to play Dragon Age. I'm not advocating the banhammer, nor am I advocating a complete lack of concern about this stuff. I'm trying to find a truth somewhere in the middle - an honest discussion about this form and its consequences without throwing the baby out with the bathwater in either direction. That shouldn't have to be a fairly brave thing to do, and I'm hoping it's not.
-- 17:26, 13 November 2009 (GMT)
Well, and I was typing quickly; "fairly bravely" probably isn't quite the right phrase. It's a matter of nested contexts: bluenoses do dominate the discourse in the broader world, but the reverse is true at a place like Metafilter or a gaming forum -- probably *because* of the broader context.
In other words, I think they're being dismissive *because* they're scared, and it takes a certain amount of fortitude to wade through that.
I'm picking up that I wasn't clear about the Dragon Age reference, either -- a couple of people were holding it up as an example of moral dilemmas done well, in contrast to their opinion of the "No Russian" level.
-- 17:47, 13 November 2009 (GMT)
How long before "they" start coming after the people that design and implement the games, who obviously must be as sick and twisted and mentally disturbed (or even moreso) than those who play it?
-- 18:02, 13 November 2009 (GMT)
I've spent the last couple of months desultorily reading The Murder of Helen Jewett, a history of a prostitute murdered in New York in 1836, most likely by a 19-year-old clerk and patron who nonetheless was acquitted. At that time, novels were viewed with the same jaundiced eye that video games are now, and rock 'n' roll was in the '50s to the '80s (Tipper and the PMRC anyone?). Novels were thought to excite the passions too much, leading to non-marital sex. Some times, I suspect, it may well have been a goad to some people who were predisposed to that sort of thing anyway. And I suspect that some ultra-violent video game will be a goad to some people who are predisposed to be ultra-violent in real life. But I suspect the cure here (the banhammer? I love the word -- makes me think of what Germans use to drive spikes into railroad ties) would be much worse than the disease. People were fornicating long before novels, and people were killing long before video games.
-- 20:51, 13 November 2009 (GMT)
I love this journal. I learned another new word:
ICHOR
Hadda look that one up. Ew.
-- 21:01, 13 November 2009 (GMT)
Remember, Bunny, it's a long I!
(In case you decide to use it in conversation sometime. I can't recall that I ever have.)
-- 21:05, 13 November 2009 (GMT)
It's a long i? I must never have used "ichor" in conversation or heard it spoken aloud. Thank you for keeping me from potential embarrassment on a future podcast or conversation with horror film geeks.
-- 22:55, 13 November 2009 (GMT)
I thought it was a long "i" but not sure I ever heard it said. Bizarrely, I remember where I learned the word, years ago -- it was in Heinlein's The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hogue, which I always thought was an underrated work of his.
-- 00:43, 14 November 2009 (GMT)
Funnily, I never thought it would be anything but a long I. I don't anticipate ever using it in conversation, but who knows? Still, ew.
-- 01:00, 14 November 2009 (GMT)
For my first disclaimer, I'd like to say that I'm not in any way a computer game player; even if I were, I wouldn't play shooting, war- and killing-metaphor metaphors. (The last games I played often were Joust and Ms Pac Man. I guess enough was enough.) Worse, I don't really warm up to many board or card games anymore; which is sad, because the consequenseless, moderately social pastime thing would probably do me some good. So take what follows from the outsider I am.
I believe that deep in the brain, the events we perceive are taken as absolute value, as it were. I entirely trust the outer layers of the brain to correctly assign values to things like "game" or "virtual" or "make-believe" and so on, in order for us to derive our personal, comfortable degree of separation from the events we're particpating in. *And yet the core events are still there, being experienced.*
If people were to go to their analyst and declare that the fully-detailed war and killing events were recurring in dreams as often as they've been indulging in them as video games, I wonder what the reactions would be. Does it make it "better" that video games are voluntary and dreams are, to oversimplify the matter, involuntary? But, we say, that the video games are entertaining or that they act as release brings me to my next point:
Why aren't there video games about groups of people organizing themselves with the goal to hunt down and have forcible sex with an unwilling recipient? Why aren't there video games about unspeakable acts of animal cruelty happening in some basement by a gang of teenage thugs?
Will some of the game players say the issues in my examples are too strong even to play at? Whoever needs to play-act at raping, say, has *serious* problems and people using guns and swords do not? Even if such games *were* developed and marketed, many game players wouldn't even indulge in them because the idea is too gruesome/icky/illegal in real life for them.
My point is that I find it a bit odd that while many people would play a shooting game, they wouldn't play a rape or animal cruelty game. If you can play a shooting game and a killing game, all the while saying that it is safely behind your intellectual organizing principles and thus comfortably abstracted, then you should have no problem playing a raping game. But no! I imagine many players wouldn't even want *any* record of participation of a multiplayer raping game in their brain because it is simply too horrid. More telling still, the players who *would* indulge in such games should be mightily careful with whom they shared that tidbit of information.
I do not want to see video games banned (or trashy novels, or smutty pictures, etc.) I feel that anyone who would find reasons to avoid playing a virtual raping or animal cruelty game, who can still play a killing game, will be hard-pressed to be internally consistent regarding the reasons justifying the selection of one/some and deselection of the other(s). At the very least, we are okay with shooting and killing and war. It will be interesting to see what will come of it.
I understand the educational component of games, problem solving, and strategy. I understand that hyper-realistic versions of past unpleasantness might just galvanize people to prevent the possibility of those unpleasant things from happening in the future. Good luck with that.
-- 17:44, 14 November 2009 (GMT)
I'm not an online gamer, either. The last one I dabbled in was a D&D game.
One thing that jumps immediately to mind is that I can think of no legal and/or justifiable excuse for rape or animal cruelty in any form, whereas no matter how much we might abhor war, it is legal, and people are trained in real life to be damned good at it. It's always been with us, and I maintain that it always will, in one form or another, until our entire personna is revised to eliminate competition in all of its forms.
I don't quite know what to make of Grand Theft Auto, which involves thugs breaking the law. I've always thought that fear of the consequences is what keeps most people honest, whatever those consequences might be (religious damnation? Jail time? Execution?) So maybe a game like GTA is a way to play out fantasies that one would never entertain in real life? It must involve degrees of horrendous behavior or something. GTA comes off with a sort of "boys will be boys" quality, whereas cutting up kittens is just too abhorent to even contemplate.
This from someone who doesn't believe in capital punishment. I guess I'm really all over the map with this one.
-- 19:24, 14 November 2009 (GMT)
Bunny42-- Thanks for the points you make. My point in pitting several abhorrent realities against each other is to refer to what seems to me to be an inconsistency in what is allowed in an allegedly harmless fantasy medium, which is growing less abstracted as technology improves. While I believe war will always be with us, I hardly think that wargames are in some way preparing youngsters for a world in which they will be decisionmakers, participants in war, and will be better prepared for it for having rolled some dice and given themselves carpal tunnel. Killing fantasies, rape fantasies, animal cruelty fantasies are ALL abhorrent, yet somehow, if your starry-eyed child brought someone home who played online games focused on the latter two, you'd have a cow.
I am stumped by the idea of an excellently trained warrior, because in myths it means that they are so good the bad guys go away, die off, or are scared. In real life, it means nothing to have the best plane or gun or knife or strategy, because even the second-best of those things can cause a lot of damage. I would love to completely decouple the idea of engaging war fantasies from the idea that somehow we must prevent wars themselves. When we shoot orks or whatever it is that we shoot in games, we're working out steam not from attacks from professional warriors. We are bitchslapping that cow in the office who won't shape up, the clerk who got our order wrong, the driver who cut us off. Many of us are completely disconnected with war as it is fought. We complain, we lose loved ones, we harrangue our politicians, we write blogs, and we play shoot-em-up games. But it is all quite removed.
I don't have young ones, so maybe these role-playing games are actually played by individuals actually likely to be faced with the decision to participate in national defense. I think that the vast majority of people will never see anything more dangerous than driving to work. Why, then, are they having killing and blood fantasies?
Maybe I'm gushing blue blood.... I dunno.
-- 23:29, 14 November 2009 (GMT)
Mmancuso-- I see where you're coming from. In the abstract, killing is killing, be it by M-16 or kitchen knife. But if you take as a given, for better or worse, that there is a kill or be killed element to our personalities, survival of the fittest, as it were, then war games seem to be the least heinous of the three we've been discussing. No one sane would slaughter pets for fun and recreation. And rape isn't about killing, necessarily, it's a sickness borne of the need for power. The operative word being sickness.
I suppose your "blue blood" could make the argument that war-type killing is a sickness as well. And yet, even in war there are limits. My Lai is a good example of the frenzy of war taking over and making soldiers into killing machines. If you want to dissect it further, having different standards about what constitutes an acceptable kill is kind of scary. It's like trying to bring some sort of order to insanity. However, I think we have to do it, because the instinct for self-preservation will always be with us. So in order to maintain a semblance of civilization, we establish a hierarchy of what kind of killing we'll tolerate.
I'm not prepared to believe that gamers go on to be monsters. I think the percentage is actually very small. It's like everything else, though. We don't hear about the hundreds, thousands daily of successful plane flights. We hear about the one that crashed.
"Bitchslapping that cow in the office" evokes the image of taping a picture of one's boss on the wall and throwing darts at it. You'd never actually throw darts at your boss (would you?) I suppose the games could work the same way. Pow, pow, pow, rat-a-tatta-tat. Just blowing off virtual steam.
-- 16:15, 15 November 2009 (GMT)
Bunny, a lot of wars get started because of "a sickness born of a need for power" -- the two World Wars come to mind -- so I'm not sure the distinction with rape that you make is on point. If it were, then the war games would uniformly be from the perspective of the "good" guys (from the creators' perspective). But I there are many games that can be played from the "bad" guys' perspective. Indeed, of the two video games I ever played in my life, in one, Sub Battle, I regularly played the U-Boat in the North Atlantic. Perhaps the distinction is that war games have some kind of historical or other educational element that hypothetical rape or animal torture games would not? I don't know; I'm just wondering aloud.
-- 18:37, 16 November 2009 (GMT)
Mrissa:
"The reason that once upon a time 'It's only a game' was good enough was because the games themselves were not good enough."
YES YES YES THIS.
That doesn't mean that there's no place for very realistic violence in video games. It means that being careless and dismissive of art forms is really not a good idea.
-- 16:15, 13 November 2009 (GMT)