Ah. Killer 7. In gaming circles, this title is highly controversial. It embodies the “game-as-art vs. game-as-entertainment” debate more than any other. Sure, games like the worthy Okami and Ico both qualify as “artistic,” while also being engaging, but no other game I can think of wears the look-at-me-I’m-art-with-a-capital-A badge with such brazen pride as Killer 7. You either love it for its loopy, entrancing story and its quirky graphics, or you hate it for its weird control mechanics and obtuse nature.
Of course, it didn’t sell very well. You can still find it in the used bins, and I highly recommend at least trying it for the sake of experiencing something unique. That’s probably where it would have ended for Killer 7, as a weird cult title with major stylistic ambitions.
That is, until Jack Thompson got ahold of it.
You’ve gotta love Jack. Depending on who you ask, he’s either a menace to free speech, a champion of (misguided) moral purity, or a bumbling joke of a lawyer whose every public utterance seems to be something scripted by the Daily Show in advance. In an odd sort of way, his odd crusade and subsequent failure and downfall strongly echo that of litiginous SCO piranha Darl McBride (remember when he tried to sue Linux out of existence?)
In both cases, the wolves ended up with chipped teeth, public humiliation and mountains of legal debt. Of course, neither man went down quietly. McBride still insists that he owns “Unix,” while Mr. Thompson continues to rail against the evils of the videogame industry, even as his license to practice law in several states falls into jeopardy.
In the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings, Thompson was the first out of the gate to blame “violent videogames” for Seung-Hi’s rampage. Even Dr. Phil joined in the choragos of ignorance. Of course, an inventory of Seung-Hi’s belongings was taken after the incident, and it turns out he didn’t own any videogames.
Come to think of it, neither did the perpetrators of the two previous most deadly shootings in American history, Charles Whitman and George Hennard. Deprived as they were of pixellated gore and violence, both men were more than capable of 17 and 23 people respectively. Though the Columbine shooters played videogames, neither was nearly immersed in the hobby as many other people are.
You know what? I play more videogames than all those guys put together. Add in Stalin, Pol Pot, Mussolini and Hitler if you want. I’ve still spent more time with a controller in my hands. I could frag Atilla the Hun and be home before lunch.
And we’re talking violent games here. Games like Grand Theft Auto (in several incarnations), God of War, the aforementioned Killer 7, and heck, I’ve even played Bullet Witch (though I regret it). I get a kick out of chainsawing other people in half and blowing them up with rockets on the big screen. Heck, if I’ve committed horrible acts of violence in the virtual world, who knows what I’m capable of in real life?
Oh, did I mention I own guns?
So, why haven’t I begun my reign of terror yet? By Jack and Phil’s logic, I should be a lit fuse. I’ve got the training and the means. I should be “desensitized” to violence, right? How on earth have I made it to adulthood without inflicting greivous harm on my fellow man?
Perhaps, because like the overwhelming majority of gun owners and videogame players, I’m not a sociopath. I’m an adult, with the ability to discern moral polarities. I enjoy the intellectual challenges and reflexive hurdles that videogames provide.
Some would argue that the violence in games is a “pressure valve,” allowing people to vent off their otherwise violent impulses. I say phooey. There’s a vast divide between pushing a button to eradicate something on the screen and causing carnage in reality.
There is a level of detachment in vicarious media, no matter how “realistic” it may be, and no amount of “desensitization” will prepare someone to cross the line into physical violence. The factors contributing to real-world violence are completely different. You can play Bonestorm 3D 18 hours a day, but essentially, you’re just interacting with pixellated content. There’s still a “leap of faith” (I can’t think of a better phrase) from that to inflicting violence on living things.
A videogame is just that: a game. The alien/zombie/ninja you’re “killing” on screen is just a blob of pixels generated by the CPU, and on some level, the subconscious mind knows that. The things I do in the game are simply analogs for artificial stimuli and response. I’m not emulating things that happen in real life, I’m responding to cues from a computer program.
In this respect, something like Command & Conquer is no different than playing chess, except that the former has a layer of abstraction and some pretty graphics. To take it any further would be to lose touch with reality. If I’ve gone that far, I doubt a hobby playing videogames would be the largest symptom I manifest.
There’s also the old saw that goes, “violent videogames are training simulators for real-life violence.” Wrong again. As I pointed out, the most violent people in history (and even in the modern world) don’t play videogames. They don’t need them. Sure, you may think that playing Time Crisis in the arcade prepares you to pick up and handle a real gun, but in truth that’s just not so.
Real guns have recoil that can’t be simulated by a rumbling gizmo in a controller. They let out a bang that registers ~150db, and they do their best to jump out of your hands when they’re discharged. I’ve seen “gamers” at the range. They fire once, then stop and freeze up. You can see the look in their eyes that says, “holy crap, this isn’t what I expected.”
A real gun has a gravity and seriousness that can’t be approximated in the digital realm. Real violence is a sickening, terrifying thing. People don’t just grunt and disappear when they’re shot. Real blood has a smell.
We need to look past the pat and easy answers to find the root causes of violence. The plain fact is, man is a beast, as Hobbes once said. We still have that leftover clannishness and the inclination toward violence that we inherited from our primate ancestors. True, society is supposed to distance us from our baser instincts, but they’re still there. Perhaps guys like Thompson and Dr. Phil could pool their resources towards researching that.