This is the main reason my posts have a bit more space between them lately. It's tough to sit and write when I can sit and BLOW THAT GUY'S BRAINS OUT! HIT HIM WITH THE AR4 COMMANDO! USE YOUR POLARITY SHIELD! THERE'S A SNIPER OVER THERE!
Ahem. Sorry. Yes, I never quite grew out of my boyish loves for video games. While in university I disciplined myself not to play them, as I knew they would start vying with studying for my time. Once out of university I got back into video gaming gradually...at first it was just replaying some old Super Nintendo favourites like Super Mario World, which I can almost beat with my eyes closed, hands tied behind my back, 50 yards down the street shouting out directions to the person actually holding the controller. But then, for Christmas 2003 Shauna totally spoiled me by giving me both a Gamecube and an original---and still functioning---NES. For the first few months I barely touched the GC, and played Tetris nonstop. I am proud to say that I have the high score record at 572 George St., Fredericton and still retain it unless the old divorced lawyer guy who moved in after us is a Tetris-fiend. Eventually the GC's fancy graphics and cool games drew me in. I think Metroid Prime was my first obsession. (I can't beat Metroid Prime or Metroid Prime Echoes! In both games I've made it to the final bad dude, but I just can't beat him. I've kind of given up...the fun of these two games lies mostly in the exploring and gaining new abilities, rather than the fighting, I guess.)
My favourite games tend to be first-person shooters, like Goldeneye: Rogue Agent. As the genre title implies, these games are rather violent. There is a perverse satisfaction to looking through a scope and waiting for the exact moment that the bad guy pops up and the crosshairs turn red and then bam! down he goes. Perhaps Nintendo will someday come up with a less utterly-inappropriate-for-children first-person shooter game, like Super Mario Nerf War or something. After all, with Super Mario Smash Brothers they did make a quality one-on-one fighting game, a genre that is best-known for the ultra-bloody Mortal Kombat series. But I'm a grown-up, so I allow myself to play games with real guns and real killing, albeit not without a certain guilt. For example, I cringe when I think about my mother reading this. She wouldn't even let me play with GI Joes when I was a kid, and they could barely hold guns in their stupid inflexible hands, let alone fire them. Transformers were acceptable because they transformed from a robot to a train or a dinosaur or a tape recorder. I guess she just overlooked the laser guns they either held or had mounted to their shoulders, knees, chests, ears, eyes, fingers and earlobes. My peace-loving mother always liked to believe that I chose non-violent toys of my own accord. Yes, I did choose Lego, but then I would turn The Fire Rescue Set into the Intergalactic Death Machine With Big Guns.
However, I will not touch video games that have a thinly-veiled real-world political stance behind them. The main offenders here are games like SOCOM and Rainbow Six. I am just not interested in pretending to be an American soldier "defending American freedoms," as I once read on the back of a Rainbow Six game. Those who like these games say "It's just a game, it doesn't mean that I condone the war in Iraq or anything." Video game or not, I find it sickening to partake in a game that takes situations that are so very close to reality and then portrays one side as good, right and just and the other as evil, treacherous and needing to be eliminated like insects. As if such a video game can claim to be ideology-free. This is probably the same reason my mother is anti-GI Joe. I don't agree with most of the known US military actions since WWII, so I I don't want to play games in which I carry out these actions or similar but "fictionalized" ones. Also, in today's economy of media conglomerations, playing SOCOM is quite possibly buying into American warmongering in more than just an ideological sense. Who knows who owns the software developer, and what else they own or have vested interests in.
I don't think I'm some kind of moral beacon because I boycott a few games. The case could be made that all video games have some degree of real-world ideology behind them, and playing these games is, in at least a passive sense, opening oneself to the validity of that ideology. I can't say that I research the game-maker's parent company before buying a game. For all I knowEA Games, makers of Rogue Agent and Nightfire, another Bond game I like, might be owned by Haliburton or Lockheed or some other group involved in oil and guns. James Bond, Dr. No, Oddjob and Enemy Soldier #2 are fictional characters, but they're still representations of humans and my shooting them in the head is a violent act on some spiritual level. And I've played and enjoyed even more graphic games, such as my all-time favourite, Resident Evil 4. So I'm willing to partake in video game violence but I balk when the violence is in the name of political causes that are too close to reality. Not a stance for which I would expect to be added to the Bible as a good guy. But at least it's a stance. Ilkay Silk, wonderful woman of the theatre and friend to many a St. Thomas student, once told me a very simple truth that I retain as one of the important lessons of my university experience: 'People are interesting for their contradictions.'
5 comments:
Ryan, I hate to break it to you, but EA Games is closely tied to McDonalds. I know this because the Sims can become McDonalds employees, or go on a date to McDonalds. And the Sims is made by EA Games. Ugh. I seem to recall a movie (was it Toys?) with the premise of creating a video game that controlled actual fighter jets (tiny ones, but still deadly) which the children controlled, but weren't aware that they were actually inflicting mass homicide on civilian targets on the other side of the world. Did I dream this? Anyways, I sometimes wonder. The american military, in order to combat "war nerves", developed training almost exactly the way you described it (wait for the man to pop up, then bang!) and this apparently is the cure for mental illness caused by the profound inhumanity of war. Great. I'm so glad you're spending your time this way.
To clarify, I am not trying to say that you are choosing to train yourself into a ruthless killer - I just want you to know the psychological effects of bang-bang video games. I wuv you, and don't want you impervious to shell shock. You're sweet and cuddly, and I want you to stay that way!
Being an avid gamer myself, I know exactly how you feel. But my biggest complaint about the RPG style videogames that I choose to play is the portrayal of women - especially those in romantic roles. I find it so frustrating how they are made out to be these pure, no personality she-bots who need to be rescued from a tree every five seconds.
While different particulars, I think this is similar to your notion that all games are laden with ideology, whether we realize it or not. Obviously it pisses me off that kick-ass girls are always the "best friend who is too independent to love" but I still play the games.
I guess it comes down to being cognissant of these ideologies and critical of their implications. It would be pretty hard to find a game with politics that we totally agree with, but much the same it would be tough to find a book like that. So - keep shooting zombies and Russians. Just remember that they are people too. :)
Ryan, I have to admit that these games have a weird way of growing on you. While I've never played Grand Theft Auto, I've sat by calmly while someone I knew gleefully blew up cars, ambulances, and streetwalkers with a missile thingie on his character's shoulder. And the oddest part? You just stop noticing. I can't even watch monster movies (and don't get me started on slasher flicks) but I can sit there while these little cartoon people are blown to bits. I think it all started with the Roadrunner...
(in your 2nd to last paragraph) You came very close to something I recently learned. The US military are actually sanctioning particular sims which end up in commercial games, directed at children, which teach simultaneous multiple target tracking and most vital military asset: the automatic willingness to squeeze the trigger. They consider this to be the best training they can deliver not only for its cost effectiveness (the kid pays) but also because it imprints a specific intellectual capacaty early on and before that capacity is given up to gardening or someshuch, and that it is pre-vocation training which means they still get to pick and choose from the killer wannabees that show up at Ft. Bragg looking for some Marine woopass.
Studies have shown that the 80/20 rule applies on the battlefield wherein 20% of the combattants do 80% of the shooting. Frequently soldiers die because they "sadly" didn't kill enough of the other guys; there's a stupification that often overcomes them in heavy action (I wish I could cite the source but I can't seem to google it).
From Zoobie (which made your mommy cry) to guns (which she finds thoughtful); you're a good mix I think.
B. Pere.
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