Nobody remembers their first kill. It’s not like the high-security prison yards, where they pace just to forget. When it comes to video games, nobody remembers their first kill. If you can recall your first video game, well, then you’ve a chance of pinpointing the setting (over a blackened Space Invaders killing field? Atop a Sonic the Hedgehog green hill? Deep within a Pac-Man labyrinth?). But a name, date and face? Not likely.
It’s not just the troubling number of digital skeletons in the players’ closet that prevents recollection—although from Super Mario to Call of Duty, the trail of dead we virtual killers leave behind is of genocidal proportions. It’s that these slayings are inconsequential and forgettable (there is the odd exception: the sight of the crack Russian markswoman Sniper Wolf’s blood colouring the snow in Metal Gear Solid, for example, remains vivid in memory). Remember the first pawn or knight you ‘took’ in chess—the moment you callously toppled its body from the board? Hardly. Even if the piece had a name and backstory—a wife and children waiting for news back home, a star-crossed romance with a rival pawn—such details would have been forgotten the moment you packed away the board.
Most game murder leaves no imprint on the memory because it lacks meaning outside the game context. Unlike depictions of death in cinema, which can trigger keen memories of the viewer’s own past pains and sorrows, game violence is principally systemic in nature; its purpose is to move the player towards a state of either victory or of defeat, rarely to tears or reflection. Likewise, there is no remorse for the game murder, not only because the crime is fictional but also because, unless you’re playing for money, there is no consequence beyond the border of the game’s fleeting reality. And yet, to the casual observer, the player’s bloodlust appears unnerving in both its flippancy and insatiability. Why are video games so unashamedly violent, and why is virtual violence apparently so appealing to humankind?
Video games were deadly from the get-go. Spacewar!—the protogame of the MIT labs played on $120,000 mainframe computers in the early 1960s—set the tone: a combative space game in which two players attempted to be the first to gun the other down. From this moment onwards violence was the medium’s dominant mode.
The arcades concentrated the sport-as-combat metaphor into sixty-second clashes between player and computer, dealing as they invariably did in the violence of sudden failure. This was a decision driven by commerce, not art: their designers needed to kill off the player after a minute or so in order to make money. Violence was part of the business model: in the battle between human and machine, the machine must always overwhelm the player. In such games, as the author David Mitchell wrote in his novel Number9Dream, we ‘play to postpone the inevitable,’ that moment when our own capacity for meting out playful death is overcome by our opponent’s. But the obsession with screen violence isn’t limited to the venerable arcade machines of the 1970s and ’80s. It seems to be within the DNA of all games, passed down from the playground (Cops and Robbers) to the board (chess, Go) to, finally, the screen. Longtime video-game players are guilty of innumerable virtual crimes, from minor indiscretions like jaywalking, in Atari’s Frogger, and smoking indoors, in Metal Gear Solid, to more serious outrages like driving under the influence, in Grand Theft Auto IV; gunning down an airport filled with civilians, in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II; and full-scale genocide in Sid Meier’s Civilization series. In some cases, the appeal specifically derives from the thrill of illicit behaviour.
The medium’s core tenet—beat them before they beat you—is so familiar that it passes almost unnoticed. From the dawn of video-game time we have known to blast the Invaders before they blast us, to swallow the fruit and chase the Pac-Man ghosts back into a corner, to hoover up the health packs before our comrades get to them, to cast the first stone, throw the first punch, make the first headshot. This rule is part of the video-game contract, one of the few human pursuits that, alongside sport, repels notions of reconciliation or compromise.
We instinctively understand that our games are violent because they reflect a violence within us as both individuals and collectives. Games offer a way to explore violence within safe and fictional borders, allowing us to confront our more primal instincts. (Sony’s Tokyo Jungle is a good example: it casts you as an animal living in a postapocalyptic vision of Japan’s capital. Regardless of whether you choose to play as herbivore or carnivore, your ambition is the same: crush the weak in order to make yourself more powerful so that, in time, you or your offspring may crush the powerful. Just as Minecraft reminds us of the mortal dread of a shelterless night, so Tokyo Jungle taps into the ancient part of our brain that remembers what it is to shiver under a tree, mad with hunger and an urgent desire to procreate before it’s too late.)
Besides, conflict is a necessary function of all fiction, including games. So what, in 2013, inspired President Barack Obama to issue a call for Congress to fund a clutch of studies into video-game violence’s potential effects on the player? The problem must be to do with the aesthetic of the violence—the way in which it’s rendered on the screen. It is a question of form, not function—something that moves the conversation into the realm of all screen violence. It is a style concern.
Depictions of video-game violence chart a similar trajectory as those in cinema. They too have moved, generally, from the staid to the outlandish (from the ‘ox-stunning fisticuffs,’ as Vladimir Nabokov put it, of 1940s-era Hollywood, to the gore of the contemporary slasher flick). But in video games, the journey’s pace was set by technology, not censorship. Early game designers couldn’t spare the graphical processing power needed to render a spout of blood or a glistening wound. They made do with guttural screams to bring the collapsing pixels to more vivid life.
Free from censorship and drawn to the potential marketing potency of being dubbed a ‘nasty,’ some developers even courted controversy with violent subject matter (notably 1982’s Custer’s Revenge, an Atari 2600 game in which players assume the role of General Custer, the historical figure who, in the game, is tasked with overcoming various obstacles in order to rape a Native American girl bound to a post). But even the most vulgar scene is robbed of its power when rendered in tubby pixels, like a lewd scrawl in a tittering teenage boy’s exercise book.
Finally the technology caught up, and games had the opportunity to begin to present the game violence and murders in something approaching a true-to-life form. Controversy was courted by savvy game publishers, who employed preposterously expensive publicists such as Max Clifford to whip the tabloids into a foam of indignation. But beneath the artificial outrage, the vividness of, say, Grand Theft Auto’s murder sprees, or Call of Duty’s spluttering death animations, made explicit the violence at the heart of games that had formerly been abstract or just implicit.
The new-found clarity of depictions of video-game violence brought the question of its potential effects on us into focus. To what extent is the video game’s primal appeal based upon our baser instincts? And that question leads to another: to what extent does the video game’s preoccupation with virtual violence affect us?
On July 22, 2011, Anders Behring Breivik, a thirty-three-year-old Norwegian man, bombed government buildings in Oslo, killing eight people. A few hours after the explosion he arrived at Utøya Island, the site of a Norwegian Labour Party youth camp. He had posed as a police officer in order to gain entry to the ferry that would carry him to the island. When he disembarked, he fired a Ruger Mini-14 semi-automatic assault rifle into the crowd of unarmed adolescents. Sixty-nine teenagers died in the attack.
After his arrest, Breivik explained that he had staged the political attack in order to save Norway and Western Europe from a Muslim takeover, and that the Labour Party had to ‘pay the price’ for ‘letting down Norway and the Norwegian people.’ A few weeks later, the Norwegian police made public Breivik’s ‘manifesto’ diary, in which he mentioned completing the fantasy role-playing game Dragon Age: Origins, using the online game World of Warcraft to relax, and, most worryingly, playing Modern Warfare II as part of his ‘training-simulation’ in advance of the attacks.
Since their inception, games have struggled to shrug off the perception that they are violent, often mindless, occasionally sexist, and fundamentally unconstructive. The medium’s big-ticket blockbusters reinforce the viewpoint with their cacophonies and blooms of explosion. Video games may share DNA with chess, but their likeness is often that of adolescent power fantasy, glorifying war’s aesthetic divorced from its graver consequences.
As a result of this perception, any public killing spree with a perpetrator under the age of forty or so throws a spotlight on video games and the question of whether their shadow falls across the story. Often, these headlines are generated in the cultural friction that exists between generations. On one side are the game-literate—for whom video games have always been part of the entertainment diet. On the other, the video-game-illiterate, who mistrust video games for their ability to so forcefully and entirely distract young people from other works of art and life, and the way in which they render explicit the abstract violence of childhood games such as chess and Cops and Robbers.
Studies continue to be inconclusive as to whether there is a causal link between violence and consumption of violent media. In their 2010 paper ‘Vulnerability to Violent Video Games: A Review and Integration of Personality Research,’ published in Review of General Psychology, Patrick and Charlotte N. Markey showed links between raised aggression levels in players with a predisposition for violence when playing violent games. Another paper, ‘Understanding the effects of violent video games on violent crime,’ published by the Social Science Research Network and reported by The New York Times, claimed to demonstrate a correlation between a drop in violent crime by youths, and the rise in popularity of violent video games. Despite the inconclusiveness of studies (which, it should be noted, have also never managed to establish a quantifiable link between the theatre, film or television and violence), numerous lawsuits have sought to implicate or even entirely blame the influence of video games for public acts of violence.
In the aftermath of the 1999 Columbine High School massacre in Colorado, the police eagerly pointed to perpetrators Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold’s video-game hobby (Harris created his own levels for Doom, which were widely distributed). In 2001, relatives of the thirteen people killed in the massacre sought damages from computer-game makers, claiming that their products helped bring about the killings. The lawsuit, which named twenty-five video-game publishers, including Sony, Activision, Atari, and Nintendo, and sought $5 billion in damages, argued that investigations into the tragedy revealed the influence violent computer games had on the pair who carried out the shootings. The suit read: ‘Absent the combination of extremely violent video games and these boys’ incredibly deep involvement, use of and addiction to these games and the boys’ basic personalities, these murders and this massacre would not have occurred.’
John DeCamp, the lawyer acting on behalf of the families, said the legal case was an attempt to change the marketing and distribution of violent video games that turn children into ‘monster killers.’ The judge dismissed the lawsuit, saying that computer games are not subject to product-liability laws.
Video-game supporters argue that critics have the causal link backwards, and that violent people are attracted to violent video games. Violent video games do not create violent people; they merely provide an escape for already troubled minds. The American psychologist Jerald Block argues that, following Harris and Klebold’s arrest in January 1998 for theft, both youths had computer access restricted, which caused the anger that they had previously expressed in virtual worlds to spill into reality.
But when killers such as Breivik cite specific video games as being ‘training tools’ for their killing sprees, it becomes more difficult to dismiss the headlines, or to argue that the rote blaming of video games is nothing more than a straightforward attempt to confine madness with sense.
In context, the quotations from Breivik’s diary were part of a general discussion of pastimes Breivik used to unwind, and crucially, came long after he had formed his initial plan for mass murder. This didn’t stop British newspapers such as the Mirror claiming that Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II allows players to ‘shoot people on an island,’ implying a causal link between the game and the style and location of the real-world killings. When Breivik testified to his fondness for World of Warcraft and his particular understanding of Modern Warfare II as a ‘police shooting simulator,’ this led to headlines such as The Times’s ‘BREIVIK PLAYED VIDEO GAMES FOR A YEAR TO TRAIN FOR DEADLY ATTACKS.’
But it’s difficult to imagine how World of Warcraft could ‘train’ a person for any acts of violence, other than perhaps suggesting that murdering swamp rats is an effective way to pay for some fur-lined boots. More important, for many of its ten million monthly subscribers, it’s an experience that creates community, provides the lonely with a virtual family, and promotes teamwork and competition. Modern Warfare II is certainly thematically analogous to real-life shooting, but it is also as mainstream as a summer blockbuster; the game sold more than ten million copies in the United States alone. In both cases, as with poker or golf, the games allow humans to play, compete, and make social connections. They may improve hand-eye coordination, and in this sense could be used to ‘train’ someone for murder, but less so than an obsession with clay-pigeon shooting might.
Video-game violence became America’s concern du jour once again following the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School that occurred on December 14, 2012, in Newtown, Connecticut, when twenty-year-old Adam Lanza fatally shot twenty children and six adult staff members. The massacre, the deadliest at a high school or grade school in U.S. history, renewed the debate about gun control in America. But video games were also an addendum to the post–Sandy Hook gun-control debate.
In December 2012, Wayne LaPierre, executive vice president of the National Rifle Association, protested too much when he accused the games industry of being ‘a callous, corrupt and corrupting shadow industry that sells and stows violence against its own people.’ Then, in January 2013, representatives from Electronic Arts and Activision—the publishers behind the Call of Duty and Medal of Honor series—were called into a conference with Vice President Joe Biden to discuss the relationship between games and real-life violence. Subsequently, President Obama has called for more studies to investigate what links tie game violence to real violence, while U.S. senator Lamar Alexander provided the extremist perspective when he proclaimed on television that ‘video games are a bigger problem than guns.’
Overstated depictions of violence are not unique to video games and cinema. Shakespeare’s theatres dripped with blood, and directors routinely used goat’s entrails to add gore to a scene. If the realistic (or exaggerated) depiction of violence in art leads to real-world mimicry, then it’s been happening for centuries. As the British comedian Peter Cook drolly put it, when referring to the supposed copycat effect of screen violence: ‘Michael Moriarty was very good as that Nazi on the television. As soon as I switched off the third episode, I got on the number eighteen bus and got up to Golders Green and … I must’ve slaughtered about eighteen thousand before I realised, you know, what I was doing. And I thought: it’s the fucking television that’s driven me to this.’
Trying to rationalise the irrational leads to a madness of its own. But beyond the sensationalism, it’s more difficult to explain away the disproportionate focus on violent content, a point that few of video gaming’s apologists bring up. Hollywood may share an obsession with bullets and explosions, but cinema’s thematic range is more diverse, offering romance, drama, and documentary—subjects that games struggle to depict.
Is this merely a by-product of the medium’s own prolonged adolescence? As games such as Papers, Please and Cart Life demonstrate, game designers who have begun to explore away from the plainer themes of competition and domination (which are so fundamental to the commercial behemoths, Call of Duty, FIFA, et al.) are beginning to find more widespread success. Or do video games, as in Block’s assertion, principally allow us to vent our anger, our primal instincts of violence, in a safe space, without consequence?
Is some of the appeal of video games the way in which they allow us to explore our own darkness? Or is it something else? Do games enable us to explore the violence around us as an act of processing and understanding?
Before Jewish families were sent to the labour and extermination camps during the Second World War, they were placed in ghettos to await processing. Here, according to survivors’ accounts, parents tried to divert their children’s attention from the surrounding horror by creating makeshift playgrounds. These play spaces were intended to preserve and maintain not only a kind of routine amid the dread disruption, but also a place of innocence.
Adults also sought out avenues for play, especially the kind of games that would offer them a psychological reprieve from their circumstances. The historian George Eisen recounts one story in his book Children and Play in the Holocaust of a man who traded a crust of bread for a chessboard. By playing chess, he reasoned, he could forget his hunger.
The children used to play in a different way: not to escape their reality, but to confront it. Their games were, typically, violent and warlike. They played games that, according to Eisen, simulated ‘blowing up bunkers,’ ‘slaughtering,’ and ‘seizing the clothes of the dead.’ At Vilna, Jewish children played a game they dubbed ‘Jews and Gestapomen.’ The children playing the role of Jews would overpower their tormenters and beat them with sticks, which were used to represent rifles.
Play was also found in the extermination camps, where children who had the strength to move reportedly created a game they dubbed ‘tickling the corpse.’ At Auschwitz-Birkenau, they dared one another to touch the electric fence and, most grimly of all, they played ‘gas chamber,’ in which players threw rocks into a pit while mimicking the screams of the dying.
One game, ‘klepsi-klepsi,’ replicated the physical abuse Jews often experienced during daily roll call. One player would be blindfolded while another stepped forward to strike him on the face. Then, with blindfold removed, the one who had been hit would guess which of the children was his attacker, judging their guilt from their behavioural clues. To survive Auschwitz, Eisen points out, one often had to bluff about stealing bread or about knowing of someone’s escape or resistance plans. Klepsi-klepsi was a rehearsal.
Peter Gray, a developmental psychologist, explains in his book Free to Learn why this kind of play was important to the children of the camps, and why violent-themed play continues to be valuable outside that extreme context:
In play, whether it is the idyllic play we most like to envision or the play described by Eisen, children bring the realities of their world into a fictional context, where it is safe to confront them, to experience them, and to practice ways of dealing with them. Some people fear that violent play creates violent adults, but in reality the opposite is true. Violence in the adult world leads children, quite properly, to play at violence. How else can they prepare themselves emotionally, intellectually, and physically for reality? It is wrong to think that somehow we can reform the world for the future by controlling children’s play and controlling what they learn. If we want to reform the world, we have to reform the world; children will follow suit. The children must, and will, prepare themselves for the real world to which they must adapt to survive.
Despite the fact that violent play is usually a symptom of violent society, a way to understand through fiction the bruises of reality, video games are the latest recruit to the aftermath blame tradition. And, like all new mediums, they provide the right sort of scapegoat, enjoyed as they are by a generally younger demographic, from whose ranks America’s school shooters have often stepped. They are separated from older media by virtue of their interactivity. The medium has a unique capacity to inveigle, and even implicate, its audience through its interactivity. When we watch a violent scene in a film or read a description of violence in a novel, no matter how graphic it is, we are merely spectators. In video games, whose stories are usually written in the second person singular—‘you,’ rather than ‘he’ or ‘she’ or some foreign ‘I’—we are active, if virtual, participants. Often the game’s story remains in stasis until we press the button to step off the sidewalk, light the cigarette, drunkenly turn the key in the ignition, or pull a yielding trigger.
If video games can prepare us to become expert accountants or city planners or drivers by mimicking these real-life activities, it’s logical to argue that they might also prepare us for crime and violence.
But as the examples of the extermination camps demonstrate, games tend to reflect and replicate the world in which they are designed. They present a safe and consequence-less space in which to enclose and examine human life, love and tragedy. No wonder they can be so elementally appealing, when they aid us in understanding the confusion and mess of existence.
If this is true, then, in games as in all fiction, anything is permissible (so long as we also uphold the rule that nothing is beyond criticism). Video games should, by that measure, be free to replicate any human tragedy—perhaps even one of the school shootings for which they have so often shared blame.
Danny Ledonne released his independent game Super Columbine Massacre in April 2005. The game’s cutesy, sixteen-bit Final Fantasy–style graphics belie its macabre and challenging content: in the game you play as Harris and Klebold, following their actions on the day of the Columbine High School attack.
Ledonne was attending another high school in Colorado at the time of the killings. Confused as to why boys of a similar age, location and situation (he, like Harris and Klebold, was bullied at school) would express themselves in such a destructive manner, Ledonne decided to make a home-brew video game using the PC program RPG Maker to try to make sense of the events leading up to and during that day.
The plotline follows the events of the day with meticulous detail amassed from newspaper reports and sheriff records. Such attention to minutiae (your characters have the exact same number of bombs and weapons as Harris and Klebold, for example) has seen Ledonne described as obsessional, perhaps even glorifying the attackers’ acts.
‘I felt like if I wanted to make a serious game, I ought to take my subject seriously,’ says Ledonne. ‘This wasn’t going to be something I’d sink months of time into unless I was going to tell the story the way it happened. Without the attention to detail, I think the game would run a much greater risk of trivialising the shooting and would undermine the game’s primary purpose of showing the player a story they only thought they knew before.’
While the game doesn’t show footage or stills of any of the victims, it does intersperse real photographs of the boys, quote things that they said and, finally, display a graphic image from the coroner’s office of their lifeless bodies at the scene. What drove the decision to display such an image?
‘That decision was an easy one,’ says Ledonne. ‘I wanted to connect the limited graphical reality of the “game” with the deeply serious consequences of the game’s subject matter. They killed people. They killed themselves. This isn’t Mario Brothers. This really happened. Here are the crime-scene photos to prove it. The player must now account for what has happened thus far in the game. I felt like a documentary approach filled with real quotations and real photos was the best way to confront the shooting in honest terms. Video games often sanitise their violence and thereby short-change the player in terms of understanding the ramifications of his/her actions. I wanted to challenge that. This is a subject that demanded as much.’
The game quietly launched on the Internet for download on April 20, 2005, the sixth anniversary of the shootings. For a while it went mostly undiscovered, but when the academic Ian Bogost wrote about the game in May 2006, it began to gain attention and notoriety. Many press outlets decried the game for making entertainment out of others’ suffering. Ledonne is adamant that this is not the case.
‘I don’t regard this game as entertainment,’ he says. ‘Many have written about how morally challenging this game is to play. A review in Salt Lake City said: “I hate this game with all my heart not because it was made, but because the real Columbine massacre occurred.” And, that, I think, is the real point.’
Like the horrors reflected in the children’s games of the camps, Ledonne’s game aimed to make some sense of the atrocity, or at least to provide a crude route towards understanding and empathy. Its primary purpose is to give the player an experience of the lives the pair led, the horrific and tragic acts they perpetrated, and their eventual demise at their own hands. It aims to provide players with the killers’ perspective—their feelings of alienation and loneliness, their withdrawal into an isolated world in which they used media—including video games, but also music and books—to rekindle their feelings of alienation.
As Bogost put it: ‘This game is certainly not meant to make us excuse Harris and Klebold, or to forgive them. But it does ask us to empathise with them, to try to understand the situation they perceived themselves to be stuck in.’
In this sense, the game shares an ambition with Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine and Gus Van Sant’s Elephant, films which respectively dissect and recreate the events at Columbine, and which were awarded the Palme d’Or in consecutive years. Ledonne’s game, by contrast, was banned from an awards event. In October 2006, Sam Roberts, the Guerilla Gamemaker Competition director of the independent Slamdance film festival, emailed Ledonne encouraging him to submit the game to the contest. Ledonne agreed to submit his game as he considered the award’s existence as evidence that ‘all forms of art can be valid tools for societal exploration (even painful topics like school shootings).’ The game was shortlisted for the award until, a few weeks later, the event’s organiser, Peter Baxter, announced the game’s removal.
The festival organisers blamed the decision on fear that a media backlash against the game’s inclusion could scare off sponsors, or even attract a civil lawsuit, something that could throw the festival’s future into jeopardy. The decision drew condemnation from many who believe video games have the power to investigate violence, not just as a mode of interaction, but as a real-world topic.
‘There are moments in the game that push the idea that games can be emotionally difficult, that they can be satire, that they can be critical social commentary,’ says Ledonne. ‘If all people want is entertainment, this isn’t a very good choice; the graphics are sub-par at best, the gameplay is clunky and limited, and there is so much reading involved that someone looking for a “murder simulator” would best look elsewhere. But entertainment aside, is it “wrong” to make a film that centres on another’s suffering? What about a book? A painting? A song? A theatre production? Why are games different? If there are films about the suffering of Christ, why could there not be video games? Video games absolutely should be able to approach the same issues other art forms do, albeit in the manner that is inherently unique to gaming.’
It’s this ‘inherently unique’ aspect to video games that is the cause of so much consternation when it comes to their depicting sensitive issues and events. While Bowling for Columbine and Elephant address many of the same issues as Ledonne’s game does, there is a key difference, in that here you role-play as the antagonists.
‘I disagree with the contention that because video games are interactive they must somehow be treated differently to other creative media,’ argues Ledonne. ‘This is a dangerous line of argument, because of course every medium is in some way distinct from the others. Surely this tired concern about how “interactive” games are is merely a reaction to their infancy as a medium. I can’t think of a single medium that hasn’t had a share of controversy for whatever unique expressive qualities it has.’
Ledonne points out that similar criticisms of tabletop role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons were made in the 1970s.
‘I suppose the same arguments could be wheeled out against an actor who plays an antagonist or children playing Cops and Robbers,’ he says.
Bogost agrees: ‘Interactivity is one of the core features that differentiate games from passive media like film. In a game, we play a role. Most of the time, the roles we play in games are roles of power. Space Marine, world-class footballer, or hero plumber. Isn’t it about time we played the role of the weak, the misunderstood, even the evil? If video games remain places where we only exercise juvenile power fantasies, I’m not sure there will be a meaningful future for the medium.’
The idea that video games can allow a player to take on the role of an antagonist is not a new one. The difference with Ledonne’s game is that the position is forced upon you as you recreate real-life horrors. Why re-create historical tragedy, when within fiction there is less risk of wounding people who were affected by the real events?
‘We can learn about the system of ideas, values, historical circumstances, and personal feelings that drove their decisions,’ explains Bogost. ‘I’m sure every American wonders how and why the 9/11 hijackers could choose to commit the acts they did. Is it enough just to wonder? Should we not try to understand? Understanding and empathy does not mean apology or excuse. It’s worth flipping this point on its head: from the hijackers’ perspective, what do you think someone can learn by playing a game in which people value global capitalism over faith? In which people can learn to become soldiers of America’s Army to pursue that goal? Who gets to be right?’
‘Games offer a window through which we can see the world a different way,’ says Ledonne. ‘I suppose that’s a lofty jump for some people to make, and as a result video games are often scrutinised because the power of role-playing can be very potent. But I think this is something to study, redefine, and embrace … not flee from.’ Custer’s Revenge, the game for the Atari 2600 launched in 1982, received widespread criticism, and raises the question of whether meaningless evil can be validly portrayed in games.
‘We shouldn’t confuse expression with sensationalism and offence,’ says Bogost. ‘Custer’s Revenge was probably created to offend, not to inspire or raise questions in its players. That is not because it depicts rape, by the way, but because it fails to offer any meaningful perspective on rape, from a historical perspective, from the perspective of the perpetrator, or from the perspective of the victim.’
‘It’s important to remember that while The Birth of a Nation is a deeply racist film by today’s standards, it is also an important landmark for filmmaking itself,’ says Ledonne. ‘Perhaps the same importance cannot be placed on Custer’s Revenge, but nonetheless perspectives of sexism and racism should have the same accessibility in video games as they do in a variety of other mediums. Watching Triumph of the Will or listening to Nirvana’s “Rape Me” can be very valid experiences for an audience to have. So long as an issue exists in the real world, artists will feel compelled to represent it in their work … including via video games.’
Yet video games’ detractors seem nervous about ascribing such freedoms to the medium, or celebrating them. Video games involve play, and play is associated with childhood. For that reason, even subconsciously, many struggle to accept true creative freedom in terms of the medium’s subject matter.
‘If games are to truly explore the world we live in instead of merely allowing us to escape from it whenever we press the power button, then games need to have the artistic licence to approach any subject,’ says Ledonne. ‘I think it is possible to make a game on virtually any topic that comes to mind, and the game should be evaluated on its content rather than its form. Is there any subject matter that should be off-limits for sculpture or acrylic? Of course not. What matters is what the work contains.’
Bogost agrees: ‘No topic is off-limits to art of any kind. We must not be afraid to try to understand our world, even if such progress seems difficult or dangerous. Clearly there are more and less meaningful ways to simulate any topic. But no subject is a priori off-limits. It is then the job of the critic to tell us whether it is good or successful.’
Whether or not there should be limits to fiction is not a new question. It was Vladimir Nabokov’s wife, Véra, who rescued the manuscript of Lolita from a backyard incinerator at Cornell University. Beset by doubt over the book’s subject matter, which examines an older man’s infatuation with a teenage girl, Nabokov hoped to burn the novel before it reached the public. Likewise, the American literary critic George Steiner had second thoughts on the publication of his 1981 novella The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H., in which Adolf Hitler survives the Second World War and is given the opportunity to defend his crimes. Steiner had the book recalled and pulped.
The question of whether—or to what extent—literature should allow readers into the minds of terrorists, murderers, and abusers both fictional and historical is one that continues to trouble authors. But if video-game creators share such qualms, it hasn’t stopped the production, in the course of the past forty years, of games that ask players to march in the boots of legions of despots and criminals, both petty and major.
Most would agree that no topic is off-limits in games, even if examples of games that have tackled difficult territory with grace and assurance are scarce. But in games the author doesn’t always control the action. Players are often given free will, even the free will to act out unspeakable evils that the game’s creator may not be able to present in context or with appropriate virtual consequence.
This becomes a greater issue in games that present not carefully authored stories to follow, but rather entire systems in which the player is free to behave in ways of their own choosing. In 2013, in anticipation of the release of Grand Theft Auto V, a forum participant asked whether players would be able to rape women in the game. In the post, which was widely shared and condemned on social media, he wrote, ‘I want to have the opportunity to kidnap a woman, hostage her, put her in my basement and rape her everyday [sic], listen to her crying, watching her tears.’ When our world facilitates this kind of behaviour (and attaches to it grave consequences), should a game not be allowed to do the same in its careful imitation?
A 2011 Supreme Court ruling recognised that video games, like other forms of art and entertainment, are protected by the First Amendment as a form of speech.
‘For better or worse,’ Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in the decision, ‘our society has long regarded many depictions of killing and maiming as suitable features of popular entertainment.’ As such, the vision of opportunity expressed in that rather worrying forum post is permissible. But if this freedom is necessary to maintain the artifice of the world, it can be argued that the designer has a responsibility to engineer the virtual victim’s reactions in order to communicate something of the pain and damage inflicted.
Fictional characters, whether they appear in novels, films, or video games, are never fully independent entities. They are conjured by words on a page, directions in a screenplay, or lines of programming code, existing only in imagination or on a screen. A creator has no moral obligation to his or her fictional characters, and in that sense anything is theoretically permissible in a video game. But a game creator does perhaps have a moral obligation to the player, who, having been asked to make choices, can be uniquely degraded by the experience. The game creator’s responsibility to the player is, in Kurt Vonnegut’s phrase, not to waste his or her time. But it is also, when it comes to solemn screen violence, to add meaning to its inclusion.
Questions about video-game violence will continue to gain urgency. History has shown that the video-game medium curves towards photorealism. As the fidelity of our virtual worlds moves ever closer to that of our own, the moral duty of game-makers arguably intensifies in kind. The guns in combat games are now brand-name weapons, the conflicts in them are often based on real wars, and each hair on a virtual soldier’s head has been numbered by some wearied 3D modeller. The go-to argument that video games are analogous to innocuous playground games of Cops and Robbers grows weaker as verisimilitude increases. How much more repellent might Custer’s Revenge be if rendered by contemporary technologies with their ever-more-realistic graphics?
The rise of motion control (where physical gestures replace traditional button-control inputs in video games) and virtual reality (which fool our minds into thinking we have bodily entered into a virtual space and role) will, for many, accentuate those concerns. Some games now no longer merely require your mind and thumbs, but also your entire body. In a hypothetical motion-controlled video-game version of Lolita, it would be possible to inhabit the body, as well as the mind, of protagonist Humbert Humbert. A virtual sex crime might elicit a very different response if, instead of pressing a button to instigate it, you were required to mimic its pelvic thrusts and parries—even if, as in Nabokov’s work, it was included to illustrate or illuminate, not titillate.
In the aftershock of an act of madness, some seek prayer, others revenge—but most seek sense in the senseless moment.
In the hours following the Sandy Hook massacre, a news outlet erroneously reported that the shooter was Ryan Lanza, the brother of gunman Adam Lanza. Poring over his Facebook profile, many noticed that Ryan had ‘liked’ the video game Mass Effect. Emboldened by an expert on Fox News drawing an immediate link between the killing and video games, an angry mob descended on the developer’s Facebook page, declaring them ‘child killers.’
Despite the absurdity of the logic, a chain effect was set in action, one that’s ended up at the White House. Video games are the youngest creative medium. What literature learned in four millennia, cinema was forced to learn in a century and video games are now expected to have mastered in three decades.
The issue of game violence and its potential effects may seem like an abstract, esoteric issue, demanding scientific study to make clear what is opaque. But game violence has logic and precedence and is always an act of play, not of sincerity. The worry is, then, those who cannot tell the difference, from disturbed high-school student to the U.S. senator.