Game Security – Part II: Policing

Some games have taken policing more seriously as the core of their mechanics, rather than just using police characters as a convenient dispenser of violence. In 1982, Infocom released Deadline, a text-based police procedural which gave the player twelve hours not only to uncover a murderer, but also to acquire the evidence necessary to secure their conviction. Sierra’s famous Police Quest series, beginning in 1987, were written by Jim Walls, a retired California police officer, and starred the player as a rookie cop in ambitious adventures where procedures had to followed to the letter to achieve success. Whilst depictions of police life of that level of sophistication have been few and far between, there does still seem to be some interest in playing out the life of the cop. In the 1990s, the Police Quest series grew into the more tactical SWAT series, having former LAPD chief Daryl F. Gates as the new police expert on hand. After some foray into the much-maligned world of the interactive movie, the series has matured over the years into probably the foremost depiction of policing in gaming today.

In 2005, SWAT 4 was released, which re-injected some realistic police protocols into gaming. Players were penalised for discharging their weapon in situations where lethal force was unjustified, and the use of non-lethal weapons like CS gas. Though still fairly underdeveloped and uncommon, mechanics like these have the potential to change the way violence is treated and seen in games, and could help make our perceptions of policing more realistic, nuanced, and crucially, less black and white. Too often games have chosen to portray sympathetic police characters as Dirty Harry-esque, uncompromisingly violent cops, but as the medium matures, the depiction may mature also, in the way we might hope that gaming presentations of terrorism should.

//Cops and robbers
But perhaps the single most interesting depiction of cops in games is the Grand Theft Auto series. What has always made GTA most interesting is the fact that it loosely depicts our world – specifically, it takes a satirical, potentially ultra-violent look at urban America. Add to that a sense of freedom – for example, to commit the arguably terrorist acts discussed in Part I – and you have an enormously powerful arena for disseminating messages about everything from crime (drugs, murder, prostitution, burglary, corruption and more have all been depicted) to popular culture. In a very real sense, the GTA games are the most important yet made, because of this closeness to our own world and the potential to comment on it, however abstractly. In light of that, and knowing what DMA (and more recently Rockstar) are like, it’s hardly surprising that the games have met with enormous controversy, not least with regards to the fact that you could shoot, stab, beat and blow up cops for no reason, should you decide to.

This source of controversy was interesting because it showed how depictions of cops, and especially their deaths, could suddenly become incredibly important to commentators and critics outside the games industry. It was a testament to the power of a game’s message that such a discussion could arise in the first place. But there’s something more significant about cops in GTA than the mere fact that they can be murdered. It’s the fact that, in GTA’s cities, the cops have a life of their own. In an admittedly unsophisticated and incomplete way, GTA depicts a system of law and order, and that’s hugely significant. In most of the games, you can see cops chasing citizens, and all kinds of questions can be asked. Is the citizen guilty? Is the cop corrupt? Should I intervene? On whose side? The answers don’t matter, because the game doesn’t know – it’s a random event – but potentially, the questions could be asked, and the more sophisticated games of the future may be able to answer them, or ask them themselves. In some of the series’ games, you could actually be a victim of crime yourself, in an unscripted way. Wait at lights in GTA2 and you could be car-jacked, at which point you could hunt the green-clad perps down and murder them in impromptu vigilante retribution. And in San Andreas, a major part of the main plot concerned a trio of cops, lent enormous showbiz gravitas by two of the voice actors, Samuel L. Jackson and Sean Penn. The ability to push the boundaries of this law enforcement system to their limits has always been one of the series’ key appeals. It’s in our nature to push at constraints.

It looks as though the game that could help revolutionise the videogame depiction of policing in the relatively near future is APB: All Points Bulletin, under development by Realtime Worlds and designed by David Jones, of Grand Theft Auto and Crackdown fame. The game is envisioned as an MMO in which two factions exist – law enforcement and gangs. One half of players will strain against the system and the world they inhabit; the other will police them. Potentially, the game could be a fascinating model and microcosm of our own society, where we are always being protected from ourselves. To emulate that in an online multiplayer context could make a massive contribution to the way our world is understood through games and could be a major stepping stone towards the games of the future, which may more often try to intriguingly and entertainingly simulate the convoluted societies of real life. What is definitely true is that our perceptions of policing will be affected by games so long as they depict it. If the potential for breathtaking societal simulations is realised, the extent to which we may be influenced is anyone’s guess.

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