When I first heard about the school shootings in Connecticut, I couldn’t believe it. I thought that reporters had jumped to conclusions and were overestimating the number of deaths. As the day went on, the numbers increased, and the names of the victims were released. They were mostly six year old children.
That night, I turned on my 360, as I do every night, getting ready to play Black Ops 2 with my dad, uncle, sister, and some friends. This time when I got on, it felt wrong. It felt empty and repulsive to shoot people, knowing that this action is used to harm and end the lives of innocent people. This isn’t to say there is something wrong with this game in particular. The violence is not the most important part of my experience with the Call of Duty franchise – it can be a good distraction and I often use it to stay connected to family and friends – but I stopped playing for a few days and turned to Minecraft. I wanted to make something, instead of just mindlessly shooting things for entertainment. It just felt hollow.
Even though people were still in shock from this tragedy, several groups sprung into action. The first being the gun lobby in the US. They said guns don’t kill people, people kill people. They said we should arm every school teacher. They said the real problem is the mental health system. These are familiar arguments to every citizen in the US, and are backed by a feverish devotion to the second amendment.
I was expecting that response. Then, the video game industry lashed out, because the shooter had a connection to gaming. They said there is no proven connection between gaming and violence. A lot of gaming news outlets gave their take on the violence, bemoaning the fact that the industry is blamed. They felt like underdogs, and that their medium is just misunderstood. Gamers and gaming writers often see themselves as cultural warriors, bravely fighting against censorship as they cling to the first amendment.
The immediacy and inappropriateness of these responses bothered me. People died. People who were children died. I expect the NRA to make fools of themselves, but I didn’t expect the gaming industry to follow suit. Fine, games industry. You can tout your studies that dispute any link between gaming and violence, and you can pretend that you’re bravely fighting for freedom of speech. But think about what you’re really fighting for. You are being intellectually dishonest if you believe that cutting back violence would hurt the gaming industry. Why is violence present in games in the first place? Sure, it is your right to include as many maimings and beatings as you want in your art, but what is it for? What are you trying to say?
I really do love having freedom of speech and I want other people to have it too. However, I don’t like that this is used as a cover for the creative laziness of all forms of entertainment. Movies, television, music, and books are all like this, but I’m going to focus on gaming because it is young enough to change. Violence in most games isn’t some statement or expression of some idea. Violence is there to give some cheap thrills to an audience that the industry has no respect for. Violence is appealing because it’s visceral, taboo, and it makes teenagers feel powerful. Violence in video games is a way for boys to act out the male power fantasy that they’ve been socialised to believe in. If you want something badly enough, all you have to do is make your wants known with violence. It’s a simple equation that is being used over and over again in video games.
The gaming industry likes simple equations and directives. They’re easier to stick to. Consumers like violence, says the industry, so let’s amp up the violence. Let’s give players the ability to zoom in on broken bones and body parts, let’s give players the ability to chainsaw their way through a body, and let’s give players the ability to pull off blood-laden moves with quicktime events. The problem with the focus on all of the blood, finishing moves, and combat is that it creates repetitive, ugly, and forgettable gaming.
I used to be as angry as most gamers when people blamed violence on video games. I also used to believe censorship was unequivocally evil. I thought it was suppressing the voice of the people to appeal to the “sensitive” natures of some members of society. Then, I took a course on the comic book industry. There was a time when comic books were the medium to blame for societal ills. The term “juvenile delinquent” was tossed around frequently during a Congressional hearing on comic books and their impact on children. I thought the people holding these hearings were just out of touch. Then I looked at the materials in question, and realized how awful comics were in the 1950s. Severed heads, raped women, and tortured human bodies all graced the covers of many older comic books. They used an argument that rang familiar in my mind, “It’s art! You can’t censor art! This is what the consumer wants! Let the consumer decide! Don’t take away our first amendment rights!” What I saw wasn’t art, just expressions of the grotesqueness of the human mind. They just took the grossest and most shocking thing they could think of and put it on the cover of a comic book. They weren’t fighting a principled fight against a pro-censorship government, they were trying to make a quick buck off the curiosity of children. They were hucksters who had few good ideas. After the hearing, comic books shed horror, crime, and erotic sub-genres and stuck to the spandex-clad heroes that we know today. The industry shed their Comics Code stuff in the 80’s and that led to some of the mindless nonsense that we see today in comics, but when they had a code to follow, characters became interesting. When a superhero has limits put on their behavior, when they have to act while thinking about what is best for a society, it creates a great story. Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, and even Hellboy have all benefited from that time in history. The industry was forced, kicking and screaming, to restrain themselves, and the result was a deeper, more meaningful, more touching and artistic series of comics. The restraint used in those comics in terms of their art and their treatment of violence is what makes them great. When I look at the games industry, I can’t help but think it would benefit from this type of regulation today.
Getting back to video game violence. If you don’t believe me about restraint, let’s take a look at the greatest games ever produced by the industry. In my mind, they are Shadow of the Colossus, Portal, and Journey.
In Shadow of the Colossus, you kill things. Giant, beautiful monsters that slowly groan and rumble through the environment. You ride your horse to their location, find the weak point of the monster, and stab it. You don’t kill these monsters for fun, you do it to save the life of a girl. As the game continues, you start to feel bad for the monsters you kill. They weren’t harming anyone. They were living their lives and you came into their territory and stabbed them. The game is a meditation on what you will do to save a human life. It made me appreciate nature and life. It made me feel sad about killing, and it made me think about the other monsters I’ve killed because they look monstrous. Is that enough of a reason to kill something?
In Portal, you have a portal gun and you eventually kill a robot. The aim of the game isn’t to kill Glados, the robot that spends most of her time torturing you. The aim is to preserve your life and escape. You eventually find yourself having to destroy the life of the robot, but you do it out of self-preservation. It is the only way you can get out. You don’t mindlessly kill people and the only “gun” in the game is a portal gun which creates new pathways for you to escape through. It’s also a fantastically feminist game, since all of the characters, including the turrets, are female. I played it and saw it as an expression of life for women. You live your life with a set of constraints and tests that ultimately trap you, and you find that the only way to live your life on your own terms is to break those traps and leave the system entirely. You can’t win on Glados’ terms, because she just wants to test you. Even if you succeed in her tests, she wants to kill you so she can move on to testing someone else. Portal shows that there are other ways to fight against an evil system, and that the greatest freedom is the ability to escape from the societal constraints that exist in life.
Finally, there is Journey. The game is about your character finding their way to a light in the mountains. There aren’t really any instructions. You just move forward and explore, trekking and sliding through dunes and wind, adding pieces to your scarf and floating through the air. You spend part of it alone, but the time spent with other players is deeply moving. I still feel pangs of sadness when I think of a game I had to leave. You can’t speak to other players, since the only noise your character makes is a series of chirps. I tried to chirp to the other player, to let them know in some abstract way that I was sorry to leave them. I felt guilty for abandoning them, to the point that when I replayed it, I carefully helped along another player. I was hoping that my kindness would absolve me of my previous sin of abandonment. At the end of the game it appears as though you ascend to a new plane of being and a star is shot back to the starting point. There is no killing, there are no guns, and there is no blood. Your greatest achievements in this game are pressing forward, helping others, and passing gracefully. What a heartbreaking and thought-provoking game.
I hope the industry looks at these games and sees the common theme. I hope they see their overuse of violence as the sad, creative crutch that it is. I hope they snap out of their laziness and make games that allow players to experience new worlds, have new thoughts, and feel new emotions. There are better ways to be taken seriously besides including graphic scenes of mutilating a human body. You aren’t tough, your games aren’t gritty, and you aren’t pushing the envelope. In video games you can create a world with literally anything in it. You could make new species, new societal structures, new ways of life, but you choose to fill your worlds with guns and swords, blood and gore, screaming and violence over and over again. You are desperate to be seen as relevant and interesting. You aren’t brave for doing it. It makes you look like a bunch of little boys that want to be seen as grown ups. Real adults don’t revel in violence and destruction. They realise that the most important and interesting parts of life don’t involve finding new ways to maim and destroy a human being. We all know that is what it really comes down to, and I wouldn’t miss seeing less of that in my games. I don’t want the industry to entirely abandon violence, because it does have its uses. I do, however, want them to become mindful of it. If nothing else, the criticism of violence in games lets the industry know that we’re watching it.
