Two kinds of violence

Videogames and violence: Together forever

In the USA, legal proceedings are beginning to determine whether or not extremely violent video game sales should be more rigorously restricted to adults only. By next week, new laws may be in effect to more tightly control how this kind of media gets sold to the public. Predictably, gamers both young and old are keeping an eye on stories like this, awaiting news about what they will and won't be able to purchase over the counter. The question of violence in video gaming is an enduring one and dates back all the way to the day when icons and avatars on-screen stopped looking like white dots and started looking like things you could kill. I remember this from when I was a boy; even when Space Invaders was the hot thing, people were still decrying its potential to turn a nation of gamers into wanton murderers.

As a human being, I am anti-violence and I make no apologies for that. I believe that entering into a dynamic where guns and bombs solve your problems only creates a paradigm where what's right becomes irrelevant and the best you can hope for is to own the biggest stick for as long as you're able. Not really a very effective way to run the world. As a gamer, I am of a slightly different mind (not that I say "slightly"). A gaming world is controlled and limited. Problems are completely resolved through strategic force. People don't die, they are only "reset". Nobody's children have to grow up without parents because of my in-game actions. Nobody has to live the rest of their lives with the memory of something they'd rather not have seen or done. 

Though it's clear game violence is not in the same category as real-world violence, this does not support the hypothesis that playing violent games is without effect. I think there's more than ample research-based evidence that violent videogames do not turn people into killers (unless they were already predisposed that way), so there's no need to dig up that simplistic and antiquated argument. It's important to note, however, that the polar opposite argument which appears at the other end of the continuum - that violent video games are completely and utterly harmless to the psyche  - also lacks credible research-based evidence to support it. Simply put: If, for an hour or two a day, you're controlling a first-person experience where you are killing people in realistic 3D and listening to their screams, and doing so with complete impunity, you may not be transformed into a killer... but it isn't without effect, either.

This is a broad discussion, the scope of which goes beyond this simple editorial. I am, however, going to address one simple facet: How not all in-game violence is equal. 

Guts and gore to save the Earth

The era in which I really dove headlong into video gaming and never again came up for air was in the mid-90's when Quake was the big game at the time. Though, arguably, not as much of a landmark game as Doom (the id software offering which came before it), there's no arguing that Quake is one of the most important ancestors to the modern shooter. With a fully 3D environment, extensive user-modding options and viable online multiplayer, it was pretty important. For those of you who have never played it, you are a Marine (yeah, some things never change) and you're saving the Earth from evil. The back story, simple as it is, puts you on the wrong side of some sort of demon gate where you alone have to beat back wave upon wave of disgusting demon-creatures who have only one thing in mind: Killing you and everyone like you. You cannot turn your back on this duty; without you, the Earth will be overrun. You cannot reason with these demons; they won't listen. They can't listen. You only have the one option: Eliminate evil in order to protect the innocent. It's a brutal, gory battle to the end. Just to make sure you remember who you're up against, there are pentagrams on the walls, blood splattered on the ground and cold, dirty stone or metal everywhere. 

This isn't a game I'd show at a seminar about conflict resolution. It's barbaric and primitive. It's simplistic and, let's face it, kind of dumb (you have 360 degree movement and can pull a trigger... that's not really the kind of skillset which will get a Marine into an ivy league school). Meat-headed problem solving aside, however, Quake has a moral center. There's no grey area here where right and wrong are concerned.  If you do not act decisively and with lethal force, you will have failed to discharge your duty to protect the innocent. You are fighting bloodied zombies with a chainsaw bolted to one hand and a bag of grenades in the other. You're fighting evil spider-like creatures who hurl flying spiked balls at you. You're fighting eyeless fiends who have giant scythe-like claws instead of hands and bloody, gaping, fanged mouths that they want to stuff you into. If you can't figure out who the bad guy is in this game, you're probably wearing a blindfold and earplugs. Quake is rather like a dimwitted surgeon who attempts to cure lung cancer by dropping an anvil on the patient's chest; rather inelegant, but the intent is still to cure the malady. And that's good... in its own weird way.

Fish in a barrel

Now let's underline my point by bringing out Shadow Warrior;  it's an older game that I'm singling out because it makes for a nice, tidy example of videogame violence. There are many examples from which to choose... but let's go with the lowest-hanging fruit for now.

Shadow Warrior is a shooter in which you march around with a gun and blow away enemies in a 3D world. You can probably fill in the rest; it's not as if this shooter was particularly revolutionary in its concept or design. If you aren't familiar with it, think "Duke Nukem" in a cartoony, racist characature of Asia. As it is in Quake, you are dishing out gunfire hell against evil bad guys... but Shadow Warrior does something that Quake doesn't do: It requires you to do the wrong thing, without any moral ambiguity whatsoever: To get around in Shadow Warrior, you need to have keys to open doors. These keys are acquired in predictable ways; found littered about in levels for you to discover. At one point, however, you require a key from a man who is strung up over a pit of fire by his ankles (presumably by the game's villains). He has the key you need, but the game has no mechanism by which you can help him or rescue him. In fact, the only way to get the key - and, thereby, complete the game - is to drop him into the pit of fire. In other words, you can't win Shadow Warrior unless you murder someone who did nothing wrong and is powerless to defend himself. Later in the same game you discover Lara Croft in a secret room (yes, that Lara Croft) and you cannot rescue or help her. As you shoot her down, you say (out loud) "You've raided your last tomb". 

This is where the line gets drawn for me: Though I am not ready to recommend Quake as a token of moral maturity, you can clearly see the difference between the two games: In one, your make-believe world of violence is somehow attached to an inarguably moral "rightness", while, in the other, you are the bad guy. You are the problem. You are the asshole. And the bigger an asshole you are, the more you're rewarded for it. You can't even claim it's a test of skill.

Shadow Warrior is far from the only example of this. Even Quake 2 rewarded you for killing unarmed, defenseless prisoners. More modern example such as the Grand Theft Auto series see you pummeling a prostitute with your fists to get your money back after putting her to work. Let's not even get started on Rockstar games which completely throw a moral compass out the window, such as Manhunt and Bully... where the crueler and more brutal you are, the better the game works out for you. In fact, many games are designed now so that you're punished for hesitating to be the worst possible thing you can. This isn't an isolated series of aberrations; this is what we call "trend".

What makes something a game?

When people complain to me about how video games explicitly show graphic violence, I shrug my shoulders. It's true that this is common and, in fact, violence is the currency of almost every game you can buy today. That having been said, once someone is desensitized to the splattering of blood and body parts which characterizes so much of pop media storytelling in this day and age, all that remains is the question of what the violence is telling us. If video game violence makes the argument that one has to blow demons into meaty chunks of goo in order to save the earth, I might be willing to listen. If video game violence tells me to murder a pleading, innocent, defenseless victim simply because I can do so with impunity... that's where I have to ask: "Is a grownup supposed to think that's fun?"