Sex, Drugs and Decapitations

Cory Zanoni explores the deeper meaning of gore and violence in video games and whether it’s all necessary.

AS AN Australian, I’ve become quite used to video games being something of a sensitive issue for many – if not controversial. Talk to any gamer here for long enough and the topic of R18+ is essentially guaranteed to come up. New studies appear regularly on the effect of violent games on young children (latest reports state that they don’t do a thing), parents are concerned across the nation (apparently) and I recently found out that someone got fired from their job for not confirming that someone was over 15 when they bought a MA15+ game.

I for one find this attention refreshing, regardless of the outcome of the R18+ debate. Whether we get it or not is largely irrelevant to me – what matters is that one of my preferred pastimes has the spotlight for a moment or two as it provides us with a good moment to reflect on the medium. To a certain extent, a R18+ rating for games in Australia will add a certain amount of legitimacy to them, acknowledgement that it isn’t just for children and teenagers, something we’ve known all along. Gaming in Australia is at a crossroads, and I extend that to you, readers in the United Kingdom and worldwide. Let’s look back and see what we’ve come from. By doing so, I intend to question the nature of the games we play and promote a culture where this reflection is commonplace. I hope to step away from a world where the medium is judged purely by its effect on those playing it, but also by what it represents on a broad cultural level. The question I will pose is simple: what does the existence of this game mean?

Y is a crocked letter, nobody ever got it straight

Two things lie at the heart of this article: the word “Why?” and video game violence. Despite there being a range of interesting things in video games to consider, the “why?” of violent media in general has been dug into quite deeply over the past few years with compelling results (albeit with an incredibly limited scope that doesn’t consider the world at large). However, the bulk of it has been based around children. We rarely look at ourselves, particularly when mainstream reporting is concerned. Much research has argued that “creative violence” (cartoons, comic superheroes, toy guns and, yes, bloody video games) has merit in helping children understand, come to terms with and master feelings such as anger and rage – feelings that many of us are taught to suppress or avoid. If used correctly, violent media of this nature can be remarkably empowering.

If that’s true for children, what then for us mature consumers of media? What of us adult gamers?

Ask many proponents of violent games – say an online shooter – why they play and you’ll no doubt hear a select number of responses repeated again and again. I’d wager that “It’s relaxing”, “It’s nice to come home and frag a few people” or variations of the two would rank highly. I can relate, and no doubt you can too. Personally, I’ve done some heinous things in GTAIV in the name of letting off some steam. If you had asked that fantastic question – “Why?” – I would have shrugged and probably said “Because it’s fun”. Looking back, it’s obvious I was doing the exact same thing many children are doing when they pretend to be superheroes. I was acting out frustrations or fears in a manner that I had total control over. It was safe, secure and digitalised. I wonder how many others are doing the exact same thing, whether they realise it or not.

Video games and technology appear to have progressed alongside its predominant audiences. Children who grew up with the cartoon fun of Mario jumping on heads now have Call of Duty and increasingly realistic wars to wage. If we do use violent media as a way to understand or control our frustrations then we’re lucky enough to have our tool develop alongside us, unquestioned and never missed. However, in doing so, this tool may have taken on a role far removed from its position of helpful tool. It may have just become a crutch, and fictionalised violence may have become a drug.

The fight for censorship

Left 4 Dead 2 was going to be banned due to the corpses that littered the ground and the ability to decapitate zombies – a censored version was released. Aliens Versus Predator was going to be refused classification for gratuitous trophy kills. It was released as the extreme violence was stretched across the game and separated by fantasy violence. While the onus was on our right to choose (and understandably so) it is important to consider what sparked this fight – flavour violence that added little to nothing to the experience in terms of gameplay. They add purely visceral thrill that aim to excite – even titillate. It’s a simple device to satisfy simple, base urges. It’s Michael Bay’s Transformers, not Guillermo Del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth. The violence doesn’t make you cringe or question it.

Continues…

As videogames continue to rapidly emerge as a major entertainment medium, increasing year on year in their profitability and cultural scope, games are also becoming an increasingly powerful tool for the presentation and dissemination of ideas and messages. Detractors of the gaming experience have long claimed that games do not put forth any ideas at all, labelling the medium as one which thrives on cheap, meaningless thrills. To some, games are regarded as a sort of cultural pariah, a concept which whilst perhaps not explicitly damaging, could be filed alongside taboo media like pornography, which has long been derided for its lack of what is often called “propositional content”.

The truth, obvious to many, is that despite all the hyperbole of supposedly orgiastic murder simulators and so on, games depict a massive variety of situations through a wide range of diverse gameplay mechanics. Inescapably, any media communicates messages about the concepts it portrays, whether or not those messages are deliberate or consciously delivered. Videogames are no exception – but this article is not designed as a repeat of the endlessly ongoing videogame violence argument being conducted both in the mainstream and niche press. Here, we will look at the variety of perspectives games have given us on issues and situations relating to this millennium’s foremost hot topic so far: terrorism.

Whatever we may be led to believe by the so-called “War on Terror”, terrorism as a tactic is not new. The attacks on New York City and elsewhere in September 2001 might be said to have kick-started a new era of political/religious violence, but the idea of using non-military assassinations, bombings, kidnappings, and so on to try to effect political change dates back hundreds of years at the least. Similarly, the depiction of terror in videogames is not a post-9/11 phenomenon, even if it can be said to have grown in popularity since that time. From Counter-Strike to Soldier of Fortune, terrorists have long been among the lesser pantheon of classic videogame antagonists, even if their unconventional real-life habits made them less fashionable in games than Nazis, Soviets, zombies, aliens, or oppressive space-regimes. With that in mind, it might seem easy to come to a conclusion about terrorism in games – it’s just bad, you might argue, a convenient exponent of violence to be used as the bad guy in games which try to create a modern-day, grim atmosphere. There’s no way a games developer would create a game in which the player could commit acts of terrorist atrocity, is there? They just wouldn’t sell, up against all those depictions of good old-fashioned heroism!

But how many among those of us who played Grand Theft Auto 2 rigged remote explosives to stolen cars and detonated them next to commuter trains as they pulled up at stations? I certainly did, and you could argue that it’s entirely natural of us to push the game’s constraints in this way, especially when the GTA series has always thrived on urban mayhem – the chief currency of terror. Alternatively, you might disregard that example as a piece of unscripted player action discouraged by the game itself. But if we think more deeply about definitions of terrorism, we can find other, more thought-provoking examples. What about Counter-Strike? A seasoned player of that game, like myself, has planted hundreds if not thousands of bombs in (admittedly curiously deserted) civilian locations without a second thought – should we be worried about this disconnection between such acts and their effects? I would confidently say the answer is no, but it is an interesting thought nonetheless. Before long, the terrorists in CS cease to be terrorists; they are just another faceless team, given life only by the players who inhabit their polygons. Ever played a Star Wars game? You will have fought for the rebel alliance, clearly a terrorist organisation to some ways of thinking:

We ought to remind ourselves that Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, Princess Leia and even those fuzzy little Ewoks were undoubtedly terrorists, although of course the story is not told in that way. Skywalker and his alliance friends called themselves ‘freedom fighters’ and characterize the Empire as the ‘dark side’ but really the Imperial forces were simply the powerful (and corrupt) trying to impose their system of government. [...] Star Wars’ feel good factor’ is much diminished if we tell a different story and instead characterize the Empire’s stormtroopers as counter-insurgency forces engaged in their own war on terror.
Terrorism: The New World War
Lloyd Pettiford and David Harding, 2003

By realising that the way a story is told in any medium – whether it be a Star Wars film or a Star Wars game or any other game – fundamentally changes the way we define the concepts at work inside it, we begin to realise the enormous amount of “propositional content” which games actually display to us each time we fire one up. The messages are magnified when they deal directly with current events – most famous for this is the controversial  Kuma\War series. Developed by Kuma Reality Games, these tactical shooters have released dozens of free missions directly based on anti-terror operations in the Middle East, especially Iraq. The games have been episodically, independently, and freely released by Kuma themselves – possibly reflecting the non-commercial nature of the titles, which are both fairly crude in construction and controversial for their perceived insensitivity and tastelessness. But like all games, they contain propositional content, they convey something, betray a position about the places, peoples, forces and events they depict. Arguably, the games depict a strongly pro-western, pro-democratic bias, which in some respects could be said to prop up the legitimacy and necessity of the 2003 Iraq invasion. Coalition troops are the good guys, comprising tight squads of named soldiers, whilst Iraqi troops and insurgents are nameless hordes, just as enemies almost always are in any game.

But just as Star Wars can conceivably be turned on its head and turned into a commentary on terrorism, the portrayal of events in the Middle East as a conflict between the forces of “good” and unquestionable “evil” in the form of terrorism can also be challenged. Occasionally the gaming media has drawn the attention of its readers to obscure, low-budget games developed in the Middle East which allows the player to struggle against Israeli occupation in Gaza, for example.

Terrorism is a complex term which has all too often been used as a weapon of the powerful against the weak. More often than not, games reinforce the idea that terrorism is evil and its opponents are good, but this definition isn’t wholly satisfactory because in the real world, we know (or ought to know) it’s not always so clear-cut. The definitions and uses of the term are far too complex and politically loaded to go into here, but it is not as simple a term as we are sometimes led to believe. Arguably, gaming has thrived on a simplistic, good and evil view of the world, because it is more conducive to entertainment; but as time goes on, perhaps we should hope that lines will be blurred and games will be able to explore rather more grey areas than they have up to now, without sacrificing their entertainment value. But even though games are currently rather shallow in their approach to complex concepts like terror, it would be foolish to deny their potential to change the way we think about such things. Videogames are on the ascendance as a form of human expression. As they continue to grow, they will increasingly look to the world around us for inspiration. Hopefully they can make a challenging, thoughtful contribution, as the “war on terror” makes us look inward and examine the most central tenets of our society.

This is the first in a series of articles about security and related politics within videogames. Keep your eyes peeled for future instalments.

In this desensitised gaming community, it’s weird to think that there are still plenty of individuals out there who would be disgusted and offended by the act of slicing a man in half with a chainsaw. If you decide to play MadWorld (and I strongly encourage you to do so), be sure that none of these people are around to see it. Not because the act of slicing a man in half with a chainsaw is a common occurrence – though it is – but because the acts of violence MadWorld encourages players to perform are so over-the-top in nature that slicing a man in half with a chainsaw is viewed as relatively tame in comparison, and is scored as such.

Manhunt did something like this a number of years ago, and that game’s sad irony was that its ugly exterior and self-serious underlying themes were meant to decry the very sort of entertainment it presented to us; it baited gamers with the promise of grisly violence and then shamed them for enjoying it. MadWorld does nothing of the sort. It knows that we gamers are bloodthirsty, sick-minded individuals who enjoy excessive gore as a visual payoff, and rather than condemn such gameplay, it pats us on the back and drops us into a game world where the violent, brutal possibilities are infinite. This is a game that awards you extra points for impaling a man with a street sign and holding his twitching body up to the blades of an industrial strength fan, just for the spectacle of the thing. No social commentary, no agenda – if the infectious hip-hop soundtrack and hilarious commentary by John Di Maggio and Greg Proops didn’t make it abundantly clear, MadWorld is meant only to entertain. It’s the purest kind of fun there is.

The setting is Jefferson Island as a New York look-alike, except this alternate reality has the city being taken over by a group of terrorists who transform the entire island into the stage for a TV show called DeathWatch, in which contestants murder each other for fame, fortune and an escape route. The city’s redesigned exterior makes painting the landscape red a user-friendly ordeal: hooks and fans adorn the walls, spikes and explosive barrels line the streets, and all it takes is a strategically placed furnace or meat grinder to boost protagonist Jack’s point tally to the sky. One particularly brilliant context-specific scenario has the player using a catapult to launch foes face-first into the blade of a statue’s sword, at which point one of the commentators describes Jack’s location as “the playground of death.” And really, that’s the perfect descriptor. Each level is its own jungle gym of violence, blood and mischief, nearly as open-ended in its methods of mayhem as your mind allows it to be.

MadWorld’s brilliance is that its missions are entirely open-ended in design, with certain events opening only when players rack up a set number of points by bloodily disposing of their indefinitely respawning adversaries. As such, you’ve got to be looking for ways to have fun, and when the twisted locales grow increasingly more varied as the game progress, it’s never hard. The wonderful sci-fi themed Area 66 explores what happens when an enemy is thrown into an airlock, or under a tractor beam, or beneath the engine of a rocket; a later casino level has players using bumpers to bounce their opponents around like pinballs, to decapitating them and gleefully watching their heads roll around a roulette table. Even the early levels give you the opportunity to hold an enemy up to a moving train and watch as his flesh is ground away, and if that’s not first-class, grade-A entertainment, I don’t know what is.

There are bosses in MadWorld, and they are extraordinary, though they hardly take center stage. Far more appealing are the frequent Bloodbath Challenges, which act as diversions from the “normal” gameplay to briefly delve into the sort of violence that, if anything, is too over-the-top to be a common occurrence at all. The first, and still my favorite, has players tossing helpless foes into the vacuum of a jet engine, for no other reason than “because that’s awesome.” Any of the numerous examples – batting men into giant dart boards, golfing with zombie heads – sound laughably gratuitous when taken out of context, until you realize that there’s no context to begin with. MadWorld is simply a celebration of the violence our gaming culture not only tolerates, but has come to appreciate and enjoy. At that, it trumps everything else.

What’s commendable about MadWorld is that, as a Wii exclusive, it’s treated with the level of commitment that we usually only see from the big boys at Nintendo. The game’s control scheme is dependent on the Wii remote, employing buttons when necessary but demanding a swing of the controller to accompany many of MadWorld’s most vital actions. Hold down the B-trigger to fire up Jack’s rechargeable, arm-mounted chainsaw, then give the remote a good horizontal swipe to cut an enemy across the waist, or a vertical chop to slice him down the middle. With each successful swing of the weapon, the roar of the chainsaw travels from the TV screen to the palm of your hand, in one of the few genuinely creative uses of the remote’s speaker I have yet to witness.

Some would say MadWorld is overly reliant on quick-time events, though I’m convinced that Wii is still the one console where such a tactic is acceptable. The reason Wii uses a motion sensor in the first place is to envelope the player, to truly get them involved in the experience, and few games do this better than MadWorld. I say this because MadWorld marks the first time I’ve ever thrown my Wii controller. After scoffing at the frequent warnings about wearing the included wrist strap, I was thrust into a “power struggle” in which a particularly nasty boss had me pinned down, and my only means of escape was to shake the remote and nunchuk like a madman until – without warning – I was prompted to thrust them away from one another. My controller went flying, and while no damage was done, it only comes to show what kind of effect MadWorld has on you. I was so engrossed in the on-screen action that maintaining a firm grip on the controller was not exactly a top priority.

I was hoping to bring up the game’s gorgeous visual style at some point, but honestly, it’s a complete non-factor for me. For sure, the stark black and white color scheme (with more than a mere smattering of red) is new to the video game medium, and I cannot overstate just how well this stylized approach compensates for the Wii’s technological inferiority. But perhaps it’s a testament to how intense and involving MadWorld is that, for the majority of the game, I paid no attention to the game’s visual style. Hell, I couldn’t even be bothered to hold on to my controller while playing MadWorld; certainly something as insignificant as artistic brilliance wasn’t going to divert my eye.

9/10

I sat down to type my instinctive response: that no, it’s not necessarily, but we’re at least given a context in which killing is acceptable based on the rules of videogame narrative. Action games are largely centred around the concept of self-defence – if you don’t shoot the enemies, they’ll still shoot you – and that’s not something you can apply to the sexual abuse of innocent bystanders.

But then, perhaps that’s only something I accept as obvious because I grew up playing Doom and Quake and Duke Nukem 3D. But as videogames strive ever more towards their twisted notion of realism, they seem to be leaving this important issue behind. We shoot to kill, and think nothing of it. We see comrades fall and say nothing more than “bugger, this next bit will be harder now.” We wilfully ignore the fact that you can’t quickload when you die in real life. The issue here isn’t really the age-old debate about whether videogames desensitise us towards violence, but that they perhaps fail to acknowledge the seriousness of their common subject matter. And if the medium is going to be considered mature, something it so desperately wants to be, is this not something that’s going to severely hinder its claim?

Michaël Samyn – one half of Tale of Tales, a developer whose two most significant releases have tackled the issue head-on – is worried. “Our society is so focused on eternal youth that that ageing and dying has become a taboo subject. The way in which videogames try to pretend that death is simply a meaningless game mechanic could be interpreted as a refusal of dealing with the issue.”

Of course, the counterpoint is that “it’s only a game,” something we play with, something to entertain us. But Samyn notes a flaw in the argument. “Play has always been an important tool for learning to cope with things you do not fully understand. As such, games should be dealing with death and ageing all the time, because it’s such a big issue in our contemporary society. So this rampant murdering of enemies is a serious problem. Ever gamer knows that, in essence, the first-person shooter is basically a game of ‘pop the bubbles’. But the fact that these bubbles are skinned as different life forms – often humans – is problematic. It’s not hard to imagine how such kind of play would desensitise players to the value of human life – or at least the life of everyone considered an enemy.”

This all comes down to whether we consider the term “game” a misnomer, particularly with new indie houses like Tale of Tales springing to the fore, producing games that eschew traditional gameplay mechanics in favour of something more artistic and expressionistic. It’s a term that, three decades years after the medium’s inception, has clearly stuck and is usually applicable, but perhaps our reading of it will change if more of these non-games that get people so worked up start to appear. It’s worth pointing to Tale of Tales’ own The Graveyard as an example of death being given real weight: when you die in that, you can’t even bring up the menu, and have to ctrl-alt-delete to the task manager to quit.

Rock, Paper, Shotgun’s Kieron Gillen agrees that the treatment of death in games is often trivial, but is unsure whether it’s necessarily a bad thing. “Why not?” he asks. “It supposes an aesthetic purpose for the developer – that death should be treated like it is when your gran dies or whatever. A serious treatment of death can be powerful and moving, but it’s certainly not the only way to view it, and never has been throughout the history of human art and expression across all media. It’s like saying that being bankrupted in Monopoly trivialises the world’s financial downturn.”

“Pretend is safely pretend,” adds fellow Rock, Paper, Shotgun editor John Walker. “I’d want to see some convincing data before I believed anyone would react to the death of a loved one with less emotion because they’d watched Lara fall off 40,000 cliffs.” It rings true. And surely, if anything can be said towards the age-old violent games debate, it’s that this opportunity for artificial gunplay is in some sense beneficial. Surely the appeal of something like, say, Manhunt lies in its ability to tap into the masochistic side of our psyches, without us having to live out our disgusting fantasies? It certainly wasn’t adored because of its ingenious game design…

Of course, someone predisposed through psychological issues to brutally slaying another human being may be given ideas by a videogame. But equally, this person might get those ideas from the news – that’s arguably far more likely. For the overwhelming majority, there’s a barrier of fantasy, which allows us to experience another world where crazed destruction is fun, not tragic – and the barrier prevents any crossover, because we know what’s real, and what is not.

“Humans like fantasising about killing people,” says Gillen. “There are parts of us which are forever wanton boys, killing for our sport. Violent entertainment serves this purpose. I recall Warren Ellis’ lovely quote about videogame narrative and Soldier of Fortune: ‘No-one’s playing Soldier of Fortune for the plot. They’re playing it so they can stick knives in people’s dicks’.”

Is this ignoring a wider issue, though? Are there more subtle layers of this debate that tie videogame content in with the broader picture of society? Michaël Samyn has noticed what he considers to be a worrying trend. “Videogames basically subscribe to the ideology of the ruling classes of the world,” he muses. “The idea of a single monstrous enemy that needs to be utterly destroyed is an all too painfully familiar one with respect to the foreign policy of the previous regime in the United States. Of course, there’s a chicken or the egg question here: was Bush able to get away with his simplistic rhetoric because we were all comfortable with such ideas thanks to videogames, or are videogames imitating life and as such supporting such extreme policies?”

Tying these two threads together so closely does seem a little tenuous, particularly when the majority of the gaming community – and particularly the specialist press – appears vehemently left-wing. But this oversimplification of ‘the enemy’ is something that’s apparent over a wide range of entertainment media. You have the goodies, and you have the baddies, but this neglects to truly identify how humanity works. As the saying goes, one man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist.

But this doesn’t explain the clinical reaction to our own death in videogames. Joystiq’s Ludwig Keitzmann considers why this may be. “Modern games, which often aim to incorporate an involving narrative and cinematic gameplay, don’t really have a place for traditional death. With most stories presented in a linear manner, it simply doesn’t make sense for the main character to die and then suddenly reappear without any explanation. With the exception of games like Metal Gear Solid, games tend to treat death – and reloading of saves, for instance – as something that occurs outside the game’s world, which is why it doesn’t have much impact.”

It certainly seems, though, that regularly removing the player from the game world leads to a shocking disruption of the immersion that so many titles strive towards. Keitzmann points to Prince of Persia as a title that embraces the issue and works it into the game’s own universe, removing the necessity of fourth-wall breaking. I’ve long heralded the Grand Theft Auto series as a fine example of how to punish the player without resorting to a nonsensical portrayal of death: when your health runs out, you’re taken to hospital, and have to pay your medical fees – resulting in a harsher punishment than any quicksave / quickload combination could ever demand.

“If you assume immersion equals what life is,” says Kieron Gillen, “yeah, it’s totally immersion-breaking. But immersion can also be an accepting of a game’s – and its world’s – rules. If it’s a world which makes player death seem natural through various techniques, immersion can totally keep ticking over.”

“Coming back to life after death is jarring,” adds John Walker. “However, we save before death, and then restore that moment. It’s going back in time rather than coming back to life, and that makes more reasonable sense. I know where it does bother me: multiplayer gaming. I cannot rationalise respawning players on any level, and I think it might be an element of what puts me off such games.”

This is interesting, as it’s a case that doesn’t bother me. Playing a deathmatch game is so obviously submitting to another reality that respawning doesn’t seem to grate. Plus, if death were to be given any gravitas in this genre, it would be extremely troubling. After all, where’s the fun in inflicting actual death on an abundance of other characters? If these characters can pop back into existence after a few seconds, the notion of death becomes more akin a quick ‘time out’ session in sport. It’s not really “death” in the usual sense, so there’s no need for moral constraint.

So maybe it’s just the terminology that’s a little skewed. Not that I have a suggestion for the medium-wide renaming of an intrinsic gameplay feature, but still. Something doesn’t seem quite right.

Indeed, there’s a big gap between the emotional response to death in a multiplayer shooter – complete indifference, essentially – to that evoked by The Graveyard. Obviously, games like this and Jason Rohrer’s thought-provoking Passage take the idea and run with it, but this more serious treatment of death is seeping its way into more mainstream releases as well, which I can only see as a move forward for the industry. “Far Cry 2 had an interesting buddy system,” recalls Ludwig Keitzmann, “where NPCs would rush to your aid but run the risk of being killed – permanently. Their unique characterisations made them quite endearing, and the manner of their passing can be quite an affecting thing to watch.”

It’s an example I certainly identify with. For all Far Cry 2’s quirks, there was something eminently real about its characters, even shining through some questionable acting. But did we feel strongly about our buddies’ deaths because of our connection with them, or simply because it would make the rest of the game more difficult?

“Maybe it’s both,” suggests Keitzmann, “but either way, it’s clearly one of the rare cases where death actually has a real consequence for you.”