So what does this have to do with video games you ponder? Well obviously this debate took place long before the advent for video game technology, but McLuhan at least believed that the medium of communication (be it spoken, written, or on screen) was as important, if not more so, than the content of the message. I can only hope that McLuhan, were he alive today, would be equally intrigued by the seductive quality of the video game medium, as he was by television and film.
In this debate McLuhan paraphrases a conversation he had with Ray Bradbury (rock). He conjectures that violence is essentially the quest for group or private identity, and that without that 'interface', without that 'roughhouse', that encounter with the world, you don't get an identity. I find this statement especially meaningful taken in the context of an existence devoid of direct violence...
I don't think McLuhan (or Bradbury) means to imply that the only path to self actualization is through violent acts, but rather than violence, in all its forms, is motivated by a desire to define or better understand the self. I think this idea does a lot to explain our fixation, as a species, with challenges, competition, and fighting. Acts if violence, direct and visceral, form peak experiences in our consciousness and our memories. I'm guessing most people can recall at least one experience where a violent act (physical or otherwise) left an indelible mark on their lives. For me, it was punching my best friend in the stomach in 3rd grade; the moment I realized I was capable of seriously hurting others.
I've always had a hard time explaining to people why video games are so violent. People (my mother) always ask "Why not just make it without all the guns and shooting?" The simple answer is "Because then nobody would play it".
I recently heard Dan Dennet speak at a conference I attended. He gave a short talk with a simple message: Babies are not cute because of their big eyes and small mouths. We find those characteristics cute BECAUSE babies have them. If human babies naturally had small eyes and no mouth, we would think THAT was cute. It's evolution.
I think similar logic can apply to violence. Violence isn't appealing because of death metal, Rambo, and G.I. Joe... Those things are appealing because we have a hardwired attraction to violence. The same is true of video games. Once again it's evolution.
There are all sorts of evolutionary reasons why a propensity for violence would ensure survival. Is there still a place for violence at a point in our collective development where it is no longer needed for survival? As a firm believer in the golden rule, I'm certainly not arguing for mandatory violence in the name of self actualization. However I'm not willing to let go of violence completely, as I believe it may have the potential to play a key role in our personal and societal development.
Video games could be the perfect medium for such a role, offering us a structured safe experience of violence, much in the same way team sports are a kind of simulated battle. The structured nature of video games allows for the communication of very specific experiences to a massive number of people. Maybe, if we begin to think about in game video game violence in this positive light, not as a necessary evil, but as an extremely powerful tool of self discovery, game developers might start taking the use of violence a little more seriously.
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Michael,
"Maybe, if we begin to think about in game video game violence in this positive light, not as a necessary evil, but as an extremely powerful tool of self discovery, game developers might start taking the use of violence a little more seriously."
You make an interesting point, and one that speaks to the nature of video games and our relationship to them. I think it's an all or nothing question; either violent video games are "necessary evils" (although, I think your mother, and mine, would dispute the term "necessary evil" when referring to violence in video games and argue rather successfully for "unnecessary evil," in its stead), or they CAN be powerful tools of self-discovery (I think they certainly are not, right now).
Here's my issue with your optimism:
"[McLuhan] conjectures that violence is essentially the quest for group or private identity, and that without that 'interface', without that 'roughhouse', that encounter with the world, you don't get an identity."
In a video game, there is no real "roughhousing." I think what McLuhan is talking about, the violence that he addresses, is violence where there is something at stake.
The reason it was so profound for you when you punched your friend in the stomach in 3rd grade (2nd grade, for me) was that you saw actual consequences; your friend hurt, and crying. What are the actual consequences in video game violence? Getting set back a level? Losing XP? That's not really putting anything at risk.
I agree with McLuhan's idea that violence can shape identity. It was not until Western Europeans encountered the "other" - be it Aborigine, American Indian, black African, etc. - that notions of superiority based on race, religion, and economy could take root. In absence of that contact and subsequent conflict, that aspect of identity, for better or worse, would not foment. But there were consequences and stakes to that violence. Civilizations ended; lives ended.
My brother was asking me a while ago about a writer, I don't remember his name now, who was working on a piece that asked, "Why don't video games make me cry?" My brother asked me that question and I responded, "because there's nothing really at stake." If I die in COD4, I just move back a bit and start over. If I put a controller in my girlfriend's hands and told her to start playing MGS4:GOP (assuming she inherently knew the controls and could play the game) and she died four hours into game play, I doubt she'd care a bit, she'd just move on with her day.
In reference to your post on PTSD for drone pilots, I find that conclusion totally unsurprising. It proves my point, in fact. The pilots are interacting with a medium - one that feels like a video game interface - which they are used to understanding has no real life consequences. And yet, there is a disconnect and somewhere in their brain they know that the footage they are watching has a real human dying on the other end. The medium and the message are totally scrambled. Their stress is entirely understandable.
Here's a question; there's nothing tangible at stake in a novel, either, but when Judge Holden murders the Kid at the end of Blood Meridian, why do I feel like I've lost something? Why was I surprised how much I didn't want to see that happen? Is it because Cormac McCarthy took his violence seriously (as you suggest game developers should do) or is there something about the finality of the unchanging word on the page that a video game cannot, or has not, replicated?
Finally, and this may or may not be a nail in the coffin, in McLuhan's War and Peace in the Global Village, McLuhan writes, "The self amputation which we call 'new technologies' generate vast new environments against which the individual organism is quite helpless."
If that is true, then the real conflict is not our interaction with the quality of the message of violent video games but, as McLuhan said, the medium by which they are transmitted. If the medium is the message, then who cares how good the violence in the game is, the real violence is going on between our head and our machine and we won't win.
In the opening to that Summer Way bit, the mediator says that in McLuhan's "War and Peace" he "firmly nails down his belief that media will eventually herald 20th century man back to tribalism." Video games might just be another stop on that path.
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