Accidental Blogger

A recent article on MSNBC discussed games that ‘push our buttons’:

Danny Ledonne has been called a “disgusting
and sick individual,” a “monster” and the “Antichrist.” The press has
grilled him for three years running. His life has been threatened
multiple times.

Ledonne’s offense? He made a video game.

Granted,
the 26-year-old from Colorado created one of the most controversial
video games of all time. No, I’m not talking about one of the “Grand
Theft Auto” sequels. I’m talking about “Super Columbine Massacre RPG! ”
— a free computer game that lets players step into the black boots of
the two teens who gunned down dozens of their fellow students at
Columbine High School.

(As an aside,the above article refers not to a recently released game, but one which has been floating around free on the internet for the last three years. This sudden blaze of publicity has come in the wake of a movie release earlier this year of ‘Playing Columbine’ in which the motivations of the game creator, players and general public in their reaction to the game are examined in depth, as well as that of other violent role-playing games.)

The issue of violent games with the gamers
role-playing sequences in which they imagine themselves committing
various acts of violence has always been disturbing. Some regard it as
harmless fantasizing, others are not so sure- does it incite or
encourage violence that might otherwise not make it into the light of
day?

Why is the gaming version of fantasized
violence given more publicity than, say the violence depicted on film
and TV, or described in books. I suspect that it’s because of the ‘me’
factor involved. A gamer is reacting with his/her mind directly to the
situation depicted in the game, and the reactions (shooting, running,
jumping, whatever) are in many ways more immediate than the way a movie
is perceived. Book-induced fantasies are a degree further removed from
the immediacy of the visual media, which are a degree removed from the
in-the-now experience of the gamer.

That’s not to say that there aren’t games with more pacifist kinds
of role playing: Food Force and Peacemaker for instance, though even
these  do contain some bang-bang elements and fake firepower.   From the New York Times in a July 2006 article:

Video games have long entertained users by immersing them in
fantasy worlds full of dragons or spaceships. But Peacemaker is part of
a new generation: games that immerse people in the real world, full of
real-time political crises. And the games’ designers aren’t just
selling a voyeuristic thrill. Games, they argue, can be more than just
mindless fun, they can be a medium for change.

The proposition
may strike some as dubious, but the “serious games” movement has some
serious brain power behind it. It is a partnership between advocates
and nonprofit groups that are searching for new ways to reach young
people, and tech-savvy academics keen to explore video games’
educational potential.

Together they have found some seriously high-powered backers. Last year the  MacArthur Foundation
began issuing grants to develop persuasive games, including a $1.5
million joint gift to James Paul Gee, a professor of educational
psychology at the  University of Wisconsin, and GameLab, a New York firm that designs games. Meanwhile the   United Nations
has released Food Force, a game that helps people understand the
difficulties of dispensing aid to war zones. Ivan Marovic, co-founder
of Otpor (Resistance) — the Serbian youth movement widely credited with
helping to oust  Slobodan Milosevic
— helped produce A Force More Powerful, a game that teaches the
principles of nonviolent strategy. And the third annual Games for
Change conference in New York, held earlier this month, attracted
academics and nonprofit executives, including several from the  World Bank and the United Nations.

Even
then, from purely personal observation (of my teen son’s reaction to
both types of games), I would say that the element of being in the
moment, fully and totally engaged in the adrenalin pumping action of
the virtual world is the main draw of the bang-bang-you’re-dead games
over the cerebral equivocations of the likes of  competing ‘good
games’. But the latter do have their uses, for instance,  in training
select groups of people to see both sides to a conflict, as a professor
did by having the Israelis play the Palestinian role and vice versa for
the Palestinians.

When Mr. Burak first showed Peacemaker to Israelis and Palestinians, he
found that they were most interested in playing as their own “side.”
But when he pushed them to switch positions they developed a more
nuanced sense of why the other side acted as it did. In Qatar several
people told him that “they kind of understood more the pressures the
Israeli prime minister has.”

The
world of gaming is a kind of double edged sword, like many other
constructs in our media and entertainment driven society. Lacking the
immediacy of actual experience, we recreate the real world with all of
its excitement and none of the danger, molding and melding our minds
with the experiences. Is this for the good or the bad?

My opinion: It depends. It does provide a relatively harmless
fantasy outlet with a more visceral experience. But in disturbed
individuals, it might be encouraging a greater tendency to act out the
violence in real life. So we have a host of happy gamers, and the
occasional Columbine or Virginia Tech which may not entirely be
blamable on the games, just, maybe a little on the inability of those
disturbed individuals to compartmentalize real and fantasy lives.