Thoughts at 5:58 AM
Nov. 4th, 2007 10:11 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
awmperryI should be asleep. But I'm not, as you may have gathered, knowing as you do that even I am not so attached to my computer as to be typing on a blog at six in the morning... in my sleep.
Anyway, I've been thinking. Do you ever have qualms about your hobbies?
I'm not so bothered about Warhammer, though it involves the wholesale slaughter of troops in their hundreds. Because it's all highly abstracted - and, of course, there aren't a great number of real Orks hanging about the place.
No, what I'm really bothered about is computer games.
Oh, don't worry. I'm not buying into the Guardian nonsense of "OMG LOL WTF Teh Gamez Is Killing Teh Kiddies!!!11!" Okay, violent games might make people more inclined to acts of violence, but only if they're violent and unstable nutjobs in the first case. That's not the point.
What concerns me is the stuff that gets into games, and, more importantly, gamers' reactions to it. Take the furore over Manhunt 2, for instance. Fans have been decrying the developers' decision to blur the execution scenes (if it sounds like I don't know what I'm talking about, there's a good reason for that; speaking as someone who's played a whole bunch of SWAT 3 and 4 missions going through summarily executing suspects Judge Dredd-style, the Manhunt games are a couple of levels beyond even my violence threshold), which apparently makes the games not worth playing.
Then there's the Soldier Of Fortune series (particularly SoF2), where a great deal was made of the GHOUL 2 system which allowed for dismembering bad guys. This had some justification; it gave a new level of consequence to in-game violence, where injuries and their effects were shown realistically (for certain values of "realistically") as opposed to adversaries simply dropping into nonexistence with a vague bullet hole decal on their texture. And sure, that's a fair point; sane people are less likely to commit violence if they know what the consequences really are (though it's arguable that sane, intelligent people should be able to figure out that bullet holes aren't a great idea in the best of cases). But a lot of people played through the game deliberately dismembering the corpses; perhaps because of the novelty of the feature, perhaps as a sort of "I'd never do this in real life, I wonder what it'd be like". But they enjoyed it, and that's the point.
It's a recurring theme. In Bioshock, players are given the option to "harvest" the little girls that go around collecting Mystical Magic Goo from corpses, a process which would entail killing them to collect the MMG they've accumulated. In early builds (as far as I can tell from preview articles), this was shown fairly graphically, with the player breaking the girl's neck on-screen; in released builds, the game employs a fade-to-black technique so only the aftermath is seen. This move has been criticised by some, for various reasons. Some - like a writer in PC Gamer, IIRC - have argued that it stops the player from having to face the effects of their actions, making the choice between "harvest" and "save" a much more abstract one; others (thankfully few) have argued that "Aaw, I wanted to see that".
In Company of Heroes, I send my infantry into battle, watching gleefully as airstrikes scatter the naughty Germans like... well, really scattered things. Up on the screen pops a message: "Medal objective completed: 250 kills!" And then I think "Well, hang on, what am I really celebrating here?" The game's rewarding me - and I'm letting it - for simulating the slaughter of, when you think about it, 250 conscripted, brainwashed propaganda zombies who probably didn't want to be there in the first place.
Don't get me wrong; I think military service is a good thing. I think defending one's country is noble, and a good thing. I think wars sometimes have to be fought, and that some people are evil in absolute terms and have to be stopped. I'm a strong believer in the adage that "Every country has an army; its own, or somebody else's." I think that sometimes, it's acceptable to ask someone to die to protect others.
But I don't think it's something to enjoy.
That's why I get quite worried when I find myself enjoying it.
I should point out that I don't usually; when I play SWAT I go in with the pepper-ball guns, aiming for a 100% clean arrest record. When I play Knights of the Old Republic I keep meaning to try to play as a Dark Side character, but never manage it - after all, that would mean being mean to people. In shooters I have the guns set to single-shot, I minimise casualties, I make sure of my backstop.
Why, then, do I sometimes enjoy just shooting my way through a SWAT mission?
Perhaps all of us, to some extent, have a primitive caveman bit at the back of the brain that enjoys inflicting pain and suffering on others. Or perhaps we've been indoctrinated that ego is all that matters; certainly it is an attitude that many people nowadays have - "I'm more important than anyone else, so I don't need to care about them". It's visible in society, on TV, on the roads, everywhere.
There's a similar phenomenon in films. I can understand the validity of showing gore and violence in film; indeed, I have no major objection to it, when it fuels the plot. But in recent years (and in the past, of course, but it's only in recent years that such films have entered the mainstream), the violence has become the plot. Seven caused an uproar when it came out, but now - while still pretty nasty - it's relatively tame. Slasher films (You know the drill. College kids do stupid things and get gruesomely killed.) have lots of gore and minimal plot. And series like the SAW and Hostel films take the gore to new extremes for no apparent purpose.
I don't usually buy into the stuff about people getting desensitised, but in this I have to say that it seems terribly plausible. We're getting more accustomed to seeing gore and violence, and with fewer of us experiencing it for real - no military service, no really big wars like previous generations faced, fewer of us living in the country and seeing where our food actually comes from - we seem to seek it out. I don't pretend to know why. Perhaps we as a species have evolved far enough to dislike real violence but still yearn to experience violence vicariously, perhaps we're just evil bastards who enjoy watching violence but don't dare take risks ourselves.
But recently it's gone further, thanks in no small part to the internet, digital camcorders and filesharing. Fictional violence no longer hits the spot; people download videos of Russians shooting people in Chechnya, of hostages being decapitated in Afghanistan, of insurgents being mown down in Iraq. Some have legitimate reasons - news organisations, for instance, or intelligence agencies - while most "ordinary people" who watch them... I don't know, and I'm speculating wildly here, but I can't believe that it's out of anything but prurient interests. And that worries me.
At this point I should clarify my own level of interest. I've watched the guncam videos; the Apache chaingunning people loading RPGs out of a tractor, the AC-130 shelling an insurgent stronghold. I could watch them with the detached, objective mindset of a soldier - "These guys are enemies, they're carrying weapons, they're preparing to kill my mates; they have to be taken out" - but I couldn't dehumanise them. I didn't (I was about to write "I couldn't", but then I wasn't trying to) enjoy watching the videos, which is one major difference. I've also watched that video shot from a Humvee in Iraq where an IED under the road goes off, making the road between the Hummer and the Bradley in front erupt, completely missing both; that I enjoyed, because nobody was harmed despite the intent. It's the same with the clip filmed by, as I understand it, an insurgent sniper's observer; the sniper shoots a US Army medic, whose body armour stops the round. The medic and his squadmates turn and return fire, neutralising the sniper and his observer. And then, to compound the irony, that same medic treats the sniper who just shot him. Again, I found that amusing, and reassuring in a way I can't quite explain.
But I haven't watched the others. The executions, the decapitations, and so on. I have no particular wish to, and if I happened to see them I really can't imagine enjoying them. I've heard people giggling over them - "And then he sticks the knife in, and it's like squirting, and it's really cool..." - and that reaction scares me. Violence is a fact of life, an integral part of being human, and a part of human nature that I don't think is likely to disappear any time soon. But real violence is, and should be, always something abhorrent and insupportable. A last resort, an undesirable and unavoidable side effect of protecting oneself. It shouldn't be a source of entertainment (happyslappers, for instance, are just begging for a punch in the teeth), or something to exploit to get your face in the papers, or something deployed just to get something you want.
Now, as people go, I'm fairly comfortable with violence. I enjoy shooting (at cardboard), and I'm confident that if I had no other choice I'd be able to shoot someone to protect myself or those I care about. I'm passably competent at deploying violence in self-defence, though it's competence that I've fortunately rarely had to use. And I play airsoft, a game which basically boils down to "Meet new people and shoot them". But there it's all voluntary; everyone's in on it, safety precautions are taken, and nobody is seriously injured, and rarely if ever even injured to a level sufficient to remove their enjoyment of the game.
But there's one more aspect to be considered, and one which I've touched on in this column before. The disparity of taboos.
Modern society has a lot of taboos; manners, drugs, toilet jokes, political incorrectness. And the big two: sex and violence. The curious thing is that violence has become accepted, commonplace, even making it into children's TV. In The Lion King, the murder of Simba's father is shown on screen - but beyond a bit of affectionate nuzzling, there's no reference at all to any sexual interest.
Okay, so none of the characters are human. Bad example.
But it's a pattern that crops up again and again. The Harry Potter books contain huge amounts of graphic violence, but apart from kissing, the closest potential reference to any sexual activity is "a particularly pleasant hour by the lake". I've even heard someone criticise CSI - you know, the show with lots and lots of violence, autopsies, and clinical discussion of sexual topics? - because "during the autopsy scene, a nipple was gratuitously shown for several seconds on two occasions". On the whole, it seems that you can pack a whole lot of violence into a "family film" and still keep the rating, but the merest hint of sex and up the ratings it climbs.
But I've discussed that before. I don't think graphic accounts of sex are suitable for kids, but they're a damn sight more suitable than graphic depictions of violence. I don't think there's any good reason to put foul language in films, but I don't mind it as much as I mind the implications that precocious kids being snotty little delinquents are "cool".
But that's the deal, it seems. Violence is fine. Disregard for other people and their property is fine. (Don't get me started on those "protesting" morons who vandalise things and justify it with "Things belonging to people is wrong, they should belong to the people". Guess what? It's not their opinion that matters.) But heaven forbid that it should be suggested that there are bits under those stupidly over-sexualised clothes that are apparently perfectly fine to promote in kids' programmes!
Ah well. Guess I got sidetracked there... Ah well - can't say you don't get value for money!
To quote someone clever, "Wouldn't it be nice if everyone was nice"?
Anyway, I've been thinking. Do you ever have qualms about your hobbies?
I'm not so bothered about Warhammer, though it involves the wholesale slaughter of troops in their hundreds. Because it's all highly abstracted - and, of course, there aren't a great number of real Orks hanging about the place.
No, what I'm really bothered about is computer games.
Oh, don't worry. I'm not buying into the Guardian nonsense of "OMG LOL WTF Teh Gamez Is Killing Teh Kiddies!!!11!" Okay, violent games might make people more inclined to acts of violence, but only if they're violent and unstable nutjobs in the first case. That's not the point.
What concerns me is the stuff that gets into games, and, more importantly, gamers' reactions to it. Take the furore over Manhunt 2, for instance. Fans have been decrying the developers' decision to blur the execution scenes (if it sounds like I don't know what I'm talking about, there's a good reason for that; speaking as someone who's played a whole bunch of SWAT 3 and 4 missions going through summarily executing suspects Judge Dredd-style, the Manhunt games are a couple of levels beyond even my violence threshold), which apparently makes the games not worth playing.
Then there's the Soldier Of Fortune series (particularly SoF2), where a great deal was made of the GHOUL 2 system which allowed for dismembering bad guys. This had some justification; it gave a new level of consequence to in-game violence, where injuries and their effects were shown realistically (for certain values of "realistically") as opposed to adversaries simply dropping into nonexistence with a vague bullet hole decal on their texture. And sure, that's a fair point; sane people are less likely to commit violence if they know what the consequences really are (though it's arguable that sane, intelligent people should be able to figure out that bullet holes aren't a great idea in the best of cases). But a lot of people played through the game deliberately dismembering the corpses; perhaps because of the novelty of the feature, perhaps as a sort of "I'd never do this in real life, I wonder what it'd be like". But they enjoyed it, and that's the point.
It's a recurring theme. In Bioshock, players are given the option to "harvest" the little girls that go around collecting Mystical Magic Goo from corpses, a process which would entail killing them to collect the MMG they've accumulated. In early builds (as far as I can tell from preview articles), this was shown fairly graphically, with the player breaking the girl's neck on-screen; in released builds, the game employs a fade-to-black technique so only the aftermath is seen. This move has been criticised by some, for various reasons. Some - like a writer in PC Gamer, IIRC - have argued that it stops the player from having to face the effects of their actions, making the choice between "harvest" and "save" a much more abstract one; others (thankfully few) have argued that "Aaw, I wanted to see that".
In Company of Heroes, I send my infantry into battle, watching gleefully as airstrikes scatter the naughty Germans like... well, really scattered things. Up on the screen pops a message: "Medal objective completed: 250 kills!" And then I think "Well, hang on, what am I really celebrating here?" The game's rewarding me - and I'm letting it - for simulating the slaughter of, when you think about it, 250 conscripted, brainwashed propaganda zombies who probably didn't want to be there in the first place.
Don't get me wrong; I think military service is a good thing. I think defending one's country is noble, and a good thing. I think wars sometimes have to be fought, and that some people are evil in absolute terms and have to be stopped. I'm a strong believer in the adage that "Every country has an army; its own, or somebody else's." I think that sometimes, it's acceptable to ask someone to die to protect others.
But I don't think it's something to enjoy.
That's why I get quite worried when I find myself enjoying it.
I should point out that I don't usually; when I play SWAT I go in with the pepper-ball guns, aiming for a 100% clean arrest record. When I play Knights of the Old Republic I keep meaning to try to play as a Dark Side character, but never manage it - after all, that would mean being mean to people. In shooters I have the guns set to single-shot, I minimise casualties, I make sure of my backstop.
Why, then, do I sometimes enjoy just shooting my way through a SWAT mission?
Perhaps all of us, to some extent, have a primitive caveman bit at the back of the brain that enjoys inflicting pain and suffering on others. Or perhaps we've been indoctrinated that ego is all that matters; certainly it is an attitude that many people nowadays have - "I'm more important than anyone else, so I don't need to care about them". It's visible in society, on TV, on the roads, everywhere.
There's a similar phenomenon in films. I can understand the validity of showing gore and violence in film; indeed, I have no major objection to it, when it fuels the plot. But in recent years (and in the past, of course, but it's only in recent years that such films have entered the mainstream), the violence has become the plot. Seven caused an uproar when it came out, but now - while still pretty nasty - it's relatively tame. Slasher films (You know the drill. College kids do stupid things and get gruesomely killed.) have lots of gore and minimal plot. And series like the SAW and Hostel films take the gore to new extremes for no apparent purpose.
I don't usually buy into the stuff about people getting desensitised, but in this I have to say that it seems terribly plausible. We're getting more accustomed to seeing gore and violence, and with fewer of us experiencing it for real - no military service, no really big wars like previous generations faced, fewer of us living in the country and seeing where our food actually comes from - we seem to seek it out. I don't pretend to know why. Perhaps we as a species have evolved far enough to dislike real violence but still yearn to experience violence vicariously, perhaps we're just evil bastards who enjoy watching violence but don't dare take risks ourselves.
But recently it's gone further, thanks in no small part to the internet, digital camcorders and filesharing. Fictional violence no longer hits the spot; people download videos of Russians shooting people in Chechnya, of hostages being decapitated in Afghanistan, of insurgents being mown down in Iraq. Some have legitimate reasons - news organisations, for instance, or intelligence agencies - while most "ordinary people" who watch them... I don't know, and I'm speculating wildly here, but I can't believe that it's out of anything but prurient interests. And that worries me.
At this point I should clarify my own level of interest. I've watched the guncam videos; the Apache chaingunning people loading RPGs out of a tractor, the AC-130 shelling an insurgent stronghold. I could watch them with the detached, objective mindset of a soldier - "These guys are enemies, they're carrying weapons, they're preparing to kill my mates; they have to be taken out" - but I couldn't dehumanise them. I didn't (I was about to write "I couldn't", but then I wasn't trying to) enjoy watching the videos, which is one major difference. I've also watched that video shot from a Humvee in Iraq where an IED under the road goes off, making the road between the Hummer and the Bradley in front erupt, completely missing both; that I enjoyed, because nobody was harmed despite the intent. It's the same with the clip filmed by, as I understand it, an insurgent sniper's observer; the sniper shoots a US Army medic, whose body armour stops the round. The medic and his squadmates turn and return fire, neutralising the sniper and his observer. And then, to compound the irony, that same medic treats the sniper who just shot him. Again, I found that amusing, and reassuring in a way I can't quite explain.
But I haven't watched the others. The executions, the decapitations, and so on. I have no particular wish to, and if I happened to see them I really can't imagine enjoying them. I've heard people giggling over them - "And then he sticks the knife in, and it's like squirting, and it's really cool..." - and that reaction scares me. Violence is a fact of life, an integral part of being human, and a part of human nature that I don't think is likely to disappear any time soon. But real violence is, and should be, always something abhorrent and insupportable. A last resort, an undesirable and unavoidable side effect of protecting oneself. It shouldn't be a source of entertainment (happyslappers, for instance, are just begging for a punch in the teeth), or something to exploit to get your face in the papers, or something deployed just to get something you want.
Now, as people go, I'm fairly comfortable with violence. I enjoy shooting (at cardboard), and I'm confident that if I had no other choice I'd be able to shoot someone to protect myself or those I care about. I'm passably competent at deploying violence in self-defence, though it's competence that I've fortunately rarely had to use. And I play airsoft, a game which basically boils down to "Meet new people and shoot them". But there it's all voluntary; everyone's in on it, safety precautions are taken, and nobody is seriously injured, and rarely if ever even injured to a level sufficient to remove their enjoyment of the game.
But there's one more aspect to be considered, and one which I've touched on in this column before. The disparity of taboos.
Modern society has a lot of taboos; manners, drugs, toilet jokes, political incorrectness. And the big two: sex and violence. The curious thing is that violence has become accepted, commonplace, even making it into children's TV. In The Lion King, the murder of Simba's father is shown on screen - but beyond a bit of affectionate nuzzling, there's no reference at all to any sexual interest.
Okay, so none of the characters are human. Bad example.
But it's a pattern that crops up again and again. The Harry Potter books contain huge amounts of graphic violence, but apart from kissing, the closest potential reference to any sexual activity is "a particularly pleasant hour by the lake". I've even heard someone criticise CSI - you know, the show with lots and lots of violence, autopsies, and clinical discussion of sexual topics? - because "during the autopsy scene, a nipple was gratuitously shown for several seconds on two occasions". On the whole, it seems that you can pack a whole lot of violence into a "family film" and still keep the rating, but the merest hint of sex and up the ratings it climbs.
But I've discussed that before. I don't think graphic accounts of sex are suitable for kids, but they're a damn sight more suitable than graphic depictions of violence. I don't think there's any good reason to put foul language in films, but I don't mind it as much as I mind the implications that precocious kids being snotty little delinquents are "cool".
But that's the deal, it seems. Violence is fine. Disregard for other people and their property is fine. (Don't get me started on those "protesting" morons who vandalise things and justify it with "Things belonging to people is wrong, they should belong to the people". Guess what? It's not their opinion that matters.) But heaven forbid that it should be suggested that there are bits under those stupidly over-sexualised clothes that are apparently perfectly fine to promote in kids' programmes!
Ah well. Guess I got sidetracked there... Ah well - can't say you don't get value for money!
To quote someone clever, "Wouldn't it be nice if everyone was nice"?
