It’s tempting to apply this to the history of early videogames. Since the first-person shooter was invented, there has been controversy after controversy over violence in gaming. It could be argued that moral critics of videogames have made the same elementary error - they have mistaken the images on the screen as reality, and reacted accordingly.
It is unlikely, however, for any player to seriously mistake gaming for reality, or reality for gaming. As proponents of videogames have argued every time a Manhunt 2 comes out, if someone carried over their in-game actions to reality as a result of playing the game, there would almost certainly have already been something psychologically unbalanced about them beforehand.
Navigate the skies with ease. Buy a bagel? Not so much.
As Barry Atkins argues in More Than A Game, “If [videogames] are simulating something, then [they are] not simulating lived experience.” This is regardless of the graphical quality or realism of a game. When we play a game - by definition - there are implicit rules about what we can and cannot do. For instance, when we play Spider-Man 3, we navigate through an impressively recreated Manhattan. We can fly from building to building, we can beat up street criminals and thwart crime, but we cannot buy a bagel from a trademark New York street stand. When we play Call of Duty 4, we can shoot all manner of incoming enemies, but we cannot become a conscientious objector. It is simply outside the rules of the game. To conscientiously object would be to not play the game.
After all, to play a game is to play the protagonist - to take on a character like in theatre sports, or schoolyard game. The protagonists of Call of Duty 4 do not ever consider conscientiously objecting, and so to play the game we cannot either. When we play Half-Life, we become Gordon Freeman, who does not object to mowing down thousands of enemy soldiers in the name of self-preservation. This is not necessarily a moral choice on behalf of the player. It is a choice to play the game.
However, it does not follow that we cannot judge a game on moral grounds. The actions of the player are, in most cases, dictated by the creators of the game and are therefore often more their moral choices than those of the player. We may, therefore, question IO Interactive’s decision to create situations in Kane and Lynch: Dead Men where the player is rewarded for firing upon innocent bystanders. But again, the fiction of the game comes in - Kane and Lynch are psychopathic anti-heroes, and narratively speaking, it makes sense to fire upon innocents.
Soldier #1 prepares to hand the enemy a posy of flowers.
This strikes at the heart of the issue. If Kane and Lynch was a film, it would be narratively justifiable, and unlikely to raise the hackles of any moral watchdog. As a game, it requires those consuming the product to act out such heinous acts rather than simply observing them. There is a level of distance in a film, a disassociation enabled by the simple observatory nature of it. Videogames, on the other hand, require participation without necessarily offering moral choice. The player has not necessarily chosen to be a violent psychopath, but they must act as one nonetheless. Once you decide to play a game, you are locked into its own moral constructs - rare is the possibility of creating your own morality. Even RPGs, so often touted as the ethical dilemma games, routinely only offer a reasonably binary choice between nice and giving, and nasty and ruthless.
It is true that critics of videogame violence largely prefer to make baser arguments than these, but this is undeniably the reason games are singled out over films for violence. It is the ‘play’ aspect that sets games aside: to play as a character, or within a setting beyond your control is, in a sense, to hand over your own sense of morality to the game designers. It is the ease in which the nature of games allows critics to suggest player complicity that makes them a larger target. A film-goer is not complicit in the actions just witnessed because they were only observed, just as a reader is not complicit in the morality of a book. However, because the player of a game is more directly responsible for any given action occurring, it is easier to claim moral involvement.
Do you like binary choices: yes or no?
However, if we are to compare playing a game with watching a film, or reading a book, we can draw some interesting parallels. Just as there is a certain amount of ‘literacy’ involved in playing a game (a giant ‘X’ means a weak spot, for example), we can potentially compare any action required to complete the game to reading a paragraph of a book, in a mechanical sense. Both are actions that necessarily require user skill and input in order to progress. That is, you can’t complete Call of Duty 4 without shooting enemies, just as you can’t complete War and Peace without reading paragraphs.
This is not to suggest that gamers shouldn’t think about their actions while playing a game. And certainly, any gamer thoughtful enough not to play a game because of the morality contained should be applauded. The prevalence of violence in videogames is worrying, especially as for a game to be considered ‘mature’, it almost certainly will contain violence. But it is time for critics of videogame violence to rethink their attack, or at least give a more definite reason why ‘doing’ is so much worse than ‘watching’. Because at the moment, they still look like those early audiences watching The Arrival of a Train at a Station, mistaking fiction for reality.
Loading...
