On the eve of “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2″‘s release, we find ourselves in an interesting quandary concerning video game ethics. Some of you may know about this controversy, but for those of you who don’t, let me explain: the plot of this game, which is a balls-to-the-wall military shoot-em-up, is that Russians have invaded the United States and now you have to stop them. All well and good, except the game drops you in the boots of a deep-cover CIA agent who finds himself complicit in an act of “extreme terror.” In other words, the game gives you a gun and tells you to shoot up innocent bystanders at an airport. While this is certainly tasteless, I had a hard time understanding why Infinity Ward felt the need to put a disclaimer in front of the sequence, or why there was so much anxiety over it in the press. I mean “Grand Theft Auto” collects collateral damage like postage stamps, and we’re all accustomed to its existence.
And then I watched the scene itself. Now I get it. It’s a truly horrible thing, very brief, and absolutely no strategic or functional element. You walk up to a crowd of 50 or 60 people and you just mow them down. They scream, they cry, blood goes everywhere. It’s…quite awful. And then, completely without purpose, the thing is gone.
Blegh.
Now I’m not really in a position to say anything here. I resisted the “Grand Theft Auto” series as long as I could, but when GTA IV arrived I had to have it. That game absolutely involves, either directly or indirectly, the slaughter of pedestrians. I don’t like that fact, but it does. So why is this so different? Why does this feel like the carnival performer who goes too far for a shock? I have a few theories:
1. Intention. In fairness to GTA, many of these pedestrian causalties I mentioned are complete accidents. You’re driving a stolen cop car that’s on fire, gang-bangers are on your tail, you run over a dude trying to cut a corner. It’s unavoidable. For the most part, this is how death occurs in the GTA world. I know, I know, that doesn’t make it much better, but it does have an effect on the tone of the game.
2. Comedy. I hate to point this out, but GTA is…well…funny. Yes, you run people over, but there’s something goofy about it. The whole game exists in this overblown, Martin Scorsese meets Paul Verhoeven fantasy world. I have avoided playing the game for years, but I have always conceded that the deaths occuring in Rockstar’s flagship serious are not at all shocking. Even a squeamish person could watch this stuff, it’s an absolute cartoon.
3. Terror. That’s the big thing: MW2 makes you a terrorist. That’s a sore subject.
In spite of all of this stuff, the thing I find most uncomfortable about Infinity Ward’s decision to put this in is how it shines light on the basic hypocrisy of game violence. Ten years ago, you could put whatever you wanted into a video game, because no one could seriously suspend their disbelief and buy what they were seeing. Things have changed. Developers arms-race each other to make things more real, while writers and publishers demand increasingly shocking and bloody content to grab the spotlight for themselves. We are getting to a point where games are too real-looking for me to comfortable with their content.
For the vast majority of games, this isn’t really a problem. But there are a select few, mainly “Left 4 Dead,” “GTA IV,” and “Gears of War,” which have officially put me in a strange psychological place, because I love to play them but I don’t like their graphic nature. I can tolerate much less from the video game medium, because unlike movies or television, you are complicit in what happens on the screen. You take part in it, and that makes my radar more sensitive.
I don’t believe video games produce violent children, but even if they did, it would make no sense to place moral responsibility on corporations to raise our kids. Well-adjusted young adults whose parents did their jobs can play “Modern Warfare 2″ for days on end and come no closer to violence in the real world. At the end of the day, if a video game makes you kill someone, your problems are much more serious than what you do on your PC.
Nonetheless, gamers are unwilling to budge on violence in their medium, nor are developers; bring up the topic and they shrug you off angrily as a post-Columbine reactionary. But we haven’t really stopped and asked ourselves where we’re going with this culture, and maybe we should. Maybe the rules of good taste need to adjust themselves. We have the power to create worlds that are far more real than anything we’ve encountered before, and perhaps with that should come some level of non-compulsory moral obligation. I wouldn’t care about putting a chainsaw through a guy on the SNES, but the 360 makes that behavior…a little less than my idea of recreation.
I’m not making any kind of moral statement here, or at least I’m not intending to. I’m stating a simple fact: I have no desire to chainsaw a guy, either in the imaginary or literal realm. If you make a game whose purpose is to allow that, I am going to pass. Of course, what always happens in reality is harder to deal with: a game like “Gears” will produce a great deal of things I am interested in (fighting an evil army, working as a team, taking cover and flanking positions, struggling against overwhelming odds, unleashing big explosions), and then slap the chainsaw in there as well. Sigh.
At some point, we as a society are going to have to become students of history. Human beings have a taste for violence, that much is clear, and I don’t want us to end up like so many other civilizations, who have become consumed by the voyeuristic pleasure of mayhem at a distance. What happens when our games are photo-real? What happens when you shoot a guy and it’s nearly indistinguishable from reality? Certainly it won’t make us killers, but it might make us…the kind of people I would rather not be.
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