Video Game Wars

GUEST POST BY AL ALSUP
Check out more of Al's writing at his blog Almosting It

"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."

Michael,

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:

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.

"[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."

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.

Only one is real. See it full size.

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 be just another stop on that path.

(Ed.'s note: If you want to see an example of what I'm talking about re: the stress of drone pilots, check out those two videos posted above. They're not videos from drone pilots, but from AC-130 gunships. One video is from Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, the other is actual footage of an AC-130 attacking militants in Afghanistan. But the difference between them is negligible.)