A Week In Comments

I beat (tee hee) the game last night and my dinner still hasn’t arrived…

I just finished reading the full paper. I guess I have a few comments.

First is that it has clearly been written by someone who is almost entirely unfamiliar, not just with violent shooters, but with videogames in general. Obviously there is nothing wrong with that per se, but in this specific case, I think the obvious ignorance about the directorial intent behind a game, or the way in which certain in-game situations are supposed to function, harms the credibility of the report.

Second is that the tone taken is somewhat peculiar inasmuch as that it seems to be taking on some kind of reformist or censorial mantle. Statements such as: “it would be recommendable to avoid putting these kinds of scenes

in video games as they could mislead players in terms of what is allowed to be done” seem to me to assume a pretty low level of capability on the part of the gamer to distinguish between reality and fiction. This is a trap that the mainstream media often fall into and it’s disappointing to see that level of ignorance on display in what presents itself as a piece of academic research.

I think that the way that Rainbow Six punishes the player for inflicting civilian casualties is a good thing, but that is because of it being good game design, not because I think games have some kind of moral duty to be presented in that way. The report reads as if it assumes that the role games should be playing is educating gamers about international law, and that other gameplay or narrative concerns should be secondary. To me, that is bizarre.

But, whatever I think about the (substantial) failings of this particular report, it is attempting to address some important issues. A lot of games are violent. Few of those come anywhere near situating that violence in a realistic context, even when they might claim to be pursuing realism. We live in a world where gratuitous violence is exploited for entertainment potential all the time, but that that doesn’t mean that, once in every ten (or even hundred) titles, a game can’t come along with something more intelligent to say about war or about crime.

In the real world, rules of international law, and the pressures of perceived moral imperatives, act as influences on the behaviour of combatants in a manner that is often lazily caricatured, if not completely absent, in videogames. I think it is well worth asking why that is, and whether some games might be improved if efforts were made to better incorporate those kinds of themes and constraints.