Why Are There So Many Violent Videogames?
I was reading the transcript of Brian Moriarty's "Entrainment" lecture which I had the pleasure of attending at the 1998 Game Developer's Conference. As weird as it reads in print, it was even weirder in person, let me assure you. But it was also effective and thought-provoking. I recommend giving it a read, but it is pretty long.

In the lecture, Moriarty pleads for game developers to be responsible and thoughtful in the placement of violence in our games. This was a noble call to action, but I don't think many people heeded it. I'd guess that more than half of the people or more that went to that lecture aren't even working professionally in the games industry anymore. 8 years is a long time in this business. For people, anyway. For our games - well, the people animate more realistically, and the blood is much more believable, but the top games that we're playing now are pretty much the same games that we were playing in 1998. I think the first Grand Theft Auto game hit the shelves in 1997.

Ignoring the explosive growth of the "casual games" industry (which emphasizes simple, non-violent games), why are the bulk of our games still centering around violence - blowing stuff up, killing things, and gaining new powers and pick-ups so that we can blow bigger stuff up and kill bigger things? There are three reasons: Violence is Easy, Violence is Powerful, and the derivative of the first two: Violence sells.

Violence is Easy
Violence is the simplest of human interactions to simulate on the computer. You play a death animation, trigger some bleeding, trigger some other event, and you are done.

That is orders of magniture less complex than trying to create a dynamic, interactive romance scene. For more comlex social interactions, you have to do one of the following:

#1 - Invent software capable of winning the Turing Test, which will play a fully realized, believable character capable of responding to the player in any weird way possible.

#2 - Borrow from the movies and books and have interactions with the NPC's occur in non-interactive "cut scenes" (Which are now no longer a real part of the game, but rather an interruption of the game).

#3 - The middle-ground between the two - script up some level of believability to the NPC and proper reactions to expected situations, and hope the player forgives you when he does something unusual - like try to talk to the same character twice, or after a certain game-shaking event has occured.

#1 is impossible, #2 is a dodge that players will get irritated with if you over-use it. The sole advantage of #3 is that while it sucks, players are used to it and fairly forgiving.

But simulating violence? Piece of cake. You don't need to have conversations with a guy and understand his hopes, dreams, and relationships to shoot him in the head with a sniper rifle.

Violence is Powerful
Violence is, unfortunately, pretty close to a universal human experience. Whether it's being involved in a scuffle on the playground in third grade, having a loved one sent off to war, or simply turning on the six o'clock news, we are exposed to it constantly. Our brains are hard-wired to react to it. We instinctively fear it and must assure our own survival if it occurs to or near us. Simulated violence in media can fire off an emotional fight-or-flight reaction with the player. In particular, in video games, it gives the player the illusion of competence in a deep, dark part of the brain that expects us to go hunting mastadons with our spears any time now.

Admittedly, after a bit of flying Falcon 4.0, a very silly, illogical part of my brain was telling me "Hey, if the balloon goes up and they are in desperate need of more pilots to fast-track through the fighter pilot program is READY, baby!" Well, not really, though the good flight sims really are apparently pretty good training for the real thing. After all, the Air Force ordered a special version of Falcon 4.0 for training. And the Marine Corps ordered a special version of Operation: Flashpoint for their training. And I remember reading that even Starcraft was used by Air Command & War College for combined-forces training.

So some part of our brain thinks it's practicing survival skills when we play these games, and it reacts in a primitive way that gives us pleasure as we do so. It's how we are wired. Learning to throw a ball and play catch does the same thing. I do not accept "Wacky Jackie" Thompson's assertations that these games train you to commit murder, any more than playing catch teaches you to kill people with rocks. But the primitive parts of the brain still think of these things as training survival skills, and reacts in a powerful fashion as a result.

And you know what? It's not wrong. Apparently playing first-person shooters DOES help your survival skills in the modern world... but not in the way our politicians would believe. Paul Kerney recently discovered in a recent study that players who frequently play First-Person-Shooters have much improved cognitive and multi-tasking skills over those who do not.

Violence Sells
For the same reason the "summer action flicks" with cookie-cutter plots and rotating action-hero casts keep drawing the crowds, violent video games keep selling. Audiences react well to it. And because violence is once of the easiest things to simulate on a computer, this means the bang-for-the-buck value (pun unintentional, but it works!) is huge.

Short of a radical change in consumer habits with respect to violence (unlikely, considering it's been a constant throughout recorded history... what do you think they used the colliseum for in ancient Rome?) , video-game violence is here to stay.

What Do We Do About It?
While this may be a controversial thing to say - I don't think it's a bad thing. Yeah, I vote with my wallet and I choose not to support games with gratuitous violence and no real socially redeeming virtues. I won't let my children play games that I think are inappropriate for them.

But if you want a society that produces great art masterpieces, you have to have a society that allows any idiot to paint a toilet seat and present it as art.

Moriarty contended in 1998 that the power of the video game for a medium of expression, communication, and education was far more powerful than previous media. "We can not only describe the horrors of Auchweitz. We can put your hand on the lever of the gas chamber." Powerful, heady ideas - and stuff that thrilled me to speculate. Since then, we've had a video game that re-creates the David Koresh / Waco standoff, a game that puts you behind the scope of Lee Harvey Oswald's rifle on that November day in 1968, and - the most stomach-turning of all to me - a game that lets you re-create the Columbine High School Massacre by Harris and Klebold in 1999.

Moriarty's message? "This new kind of authority is not for the careless." Maybe. I could never bring myself to play any of the above games. They had their stated, lofty goals - their higher purpose - which might have been genuine, or simply done to deflect criticism that these are nothing but sensationalist crap.

Which is it?

Which was Hugo's "Les Miserables," when it was published in 1862? Or, as Moriarty notes, Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring?"

Labels: Game Design, Politics

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 11:46 PM (Permalink)