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[Gaming is the medium of communication and self-expression that this generation has adopted as their own. Is it time to start thinking about the images and perspectives it presents us with and treating the games we play as more than meaningless escapism?]
In my slightly odd habit of catching snippets of other people's
conversations, I've been hearing a lot of videogame references this
week. Two World Cup discussions at my local pub have brought up
football games as a means of judging a player's talent. In the new A-Team film, a villain gloats "This is just like Call of Duty!"
after he calls in an air-strike. I also overheard posse of students, in
a discussion about Greek mythology, mention Kratos from God of War without batting an academically-dubious eyelid.
Games are an increasingly influential part of our modern lives and
culture. It is the medium which has been adopted by this generation of
children and young adults in the same way that rock music and film were
adopted by their parents and grandparents. Every new wave of children
and teenagers look for a way of finding meaning in the world and
expressing themselves that their elders do not understand. When we are
young, we see the world as it is and long make our mark on it, build
new landmarks so that we can prove ourselves and our peers as worthy
successors to those who have gone before us.
By doing so, the nature of life and morality undergoes changes,
sometimes slight and sometimes great, with every passing generation.
Think of how different life was for the average person only fifty years
ago, in terms of culture and social interaction. Take that back a
hundred or two hundred years and the gulf widens enormously again. The
inevitability of new generations finding new media of communication and
understanding is as inevitable as the previous generation resisting
them. Gaming might get labelled as Satan incarnate by zealous parents
nowadays, but their eyes rolled just as hard as ours when their parents
had identical reactions to loud music and hippie culture. Even the
written word, now the bastion of high culture and learning, was
lambasted by Plato as the end of oral traditions and the beginning of
the homogenisation of philosophical thought – although given the
dispiriting intellectual standards of the university degree I've just
spent four years trudging through, I can't say I entirely disagree with
him.
I doubt that it's an especially original thought to suggest that
much of what we see as reality is just a matter of perception. When
Francis Ford Coppola released his adaptation of Mario Puzo's The Godfather,
he intended it as a damning indictment of the Italian-American mobster
way of life. Instead the real-life mob were hugely impressed by what
they saw on-screen and started imitating the characters' way of talking
and dressing smartly. More recently, the debate over civil liberties
that raged in the UK over the past decade, in reaction to the previous
government's fierce belief in authoritarian social law, drew heavily on
George Orwell's book 1984. In other words, the biggest
continuing British political debate was strongly directed by a work of
fiction. These experiences, as books or films or games, change the way
we see and react to the world. What was fiction can take over the
reality. How one generation sees an event can be completely different
to their children, because they are using a different set of reference
points.
The point I'm rather circuitously getting to is whether we can
continue to treat gaming as nothing more than escapist entertainment
when its influence on our lives and way of thinking is growing. Of
course the idea that gaming could turn any remotely mentally stable
person into a killer just because they've seen or caused a few too many
virtual deaths is completely specious: people have had access to
violent entertainment for centuries (many of Shakespeare's plays are
sadistic in ways no game could get away with nowadays) without the
planet descending into blood-thirsty anarchy. If anything, the stress
relief of escapist gaming can offer an excellent means of satisfying
aggressive feelings in a non-threatening way. But what gaming can do is
change the way we react to certain images and events, subtly revising
the moral boundaries of what is deemed acceptable and unacceptable
behaviour.
When a young person sees war through the context of Call of Duty, for example, it is given a mental association with meaningless entertainment. What
messages about wartime losses does that game's multiplayer send out by putting players in a nihilistic cycle of war that has no
goals and will never end no matter how many soldiers they kill? While
it's ridiculous to suggest that the game could or should ever be viewed
in such real-life contexts, as a situation it has a strangely sinister
quality that's hard to shake. That does not mean they will not
understand the implications of what is happening, but it will take more
powerful scenes for them to have a strong reaction to it than for
someone raised without access to such entertainment.
When something seems commonplace, we become desensitized to it no
matter how unpleasant it may be. Can we honestly say we react to
hearing stories of murder and rape on the news with the horror those
events deserve? Many of us will sigh and perhaps voice a pithy sadness,
but as soon as a fresh report begins, the previous one is forgotten.
The events that truly horrify us are those whose images don't have a
precedent in our minds: I don't ask this question to demean the tragedy
of the events or lessen the loss of the victims, but would we have
reacted to the equivalent number of deaths from 9/11 (or perhaps the
7/7 bombings in Britain) with the same despair had they taken place in
more sadly-familiar scenarios, such as civilian wartime deaths, murders or a
motorway pile-up?
I use representations of violence and warfare because they're such a prevalent part of the Western gaming culture mainstream - and thus easiest to see how gamers exposed to those images are affected by them. That's not to suggest those are the only ways in which games can shape players' perspectives on the world around them. Perhaps it would be interesting for someone living in Japan to observe whether the Love Plus dating game phenomenon is changing the way young men are interacting with women and what their expectations are. In South Korea, where MMORPG addiction is considered a genuine social problem (and where deaths have been reported as a result of players not leaving their monitors for days at a time), could it be said that the most fervent players (those who spend more time online than interacting with the world outside their homes) are treating the game world as their 'real' lives and every moment away from the screen as the short-term escape most of us get from playing our videogames?
Gaming seems stuck in adolescence in terms both historical, it
being forty years since the first commercially released videogame Computer Space
(nearest rival television being eighty years since an equivalent
landmark) and cultural, its content fixated on the aesthetics of
violence and sex with none of the complexities. I have no problem with
violent games as escapist entertainment (I own Modern Warfare
and play it online quite regularly), but as the medium grows in
importance to people's lives, it needs to offer a more fully-rounded
range of experiences, tackling subjects from many different
perspectives so that when young gamers see parts of the world they can
only relate to through their gaming experiences, they have a more
complete basis on which to form an understanding. An air-strike is not
just a kill-streak reward, but results in the losses of many real
lives. Equally so, what political or personal reasons did the pilot
have for pushing the 'drop' button? These sorts of questions don't need
to be asked all the time, but do need to be asked sometimes.
As much as previous generations may continue to resist, gaming is
as vital and relevant a part of modern life as any other medium,
perhaps moreso to the children and young adults who have grown up with
it. Maybe it is time for the games industry to grow up as well and
start reflecting reality, just as reality is starting to reflect
gaming. It's a medium that can offer great opportunities to escape into new lives and worlds, but we must
be sure we're asking the right questions along the way so that escape doesn't turn
into a trap.
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There are plenty of games that offer serious content, but sometimes they do not get proper recognition. Forget Modern Warfare and similar titles as they are not intended to offer serious consideration. Generally speaking, many films are meant for entertainment, not serious introspection, and we don't watch "popcorn movies" such as the latest action blockbuster in order to seriously reflect on the content portrayed. In contrast, a games like Xenosaga I, Tales of Vesperia, and Star Ocean: The Last Hope, as well as titles such as Bioshock, Mass Effect, and various others invite introspection about some very serious and complex issues. I would argue that I can offer examples that virtually (pun intended) demand introspection, and that this is precisely why such titles do not have the same "popularity" of certain other works such as Modern Warfare, even if they are successful business products.
With respect to romance games in Japan, I think that it is critical to understand that the genre caters to both male and female players just like other areas of Japanese popular entertainment such as manga and anime. There are otome and yaoi games for girls, and the otome ("maiden") genre in particular has seen a good deal of popularity with broad audiences, just as shoujo anime and manga have male audiences despite being targeted for females. There's an important cultural element, though. Japan tends to have a very segregated society, so such works offer the opportunity to explore a world and relationships that may not normally be experienced, or at least not as "freely" and unstructured as some other cultures. It isn't so much a question of whether or not a game like Love Plus or Tokimeki Memorial changes how Japanese males interact with Japanese females, but rather how the females and males interact with each other in general regardless of those works or others targeted for female audiences such as Angelique or Crimson Empire. Some Japanese stories (games, manga, or anime... take your pick, even live action) will even humorously state that "this is just like a [insert media format]!" and thus knowingly wink at the audience because the general population knows that real life isn't usually like a story regardless of the medium used to present such a tale. Anyway, guys follow works targeted for girls and have done so for a long time (Mask of Glass, Witch Meg, and Rose of Versailles are just a couple examples from decades ago) just as girls follow works targeted for guys (Dragonball and Macross are a couple examples for this cross market).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWr4htYp9dM
As for the 'introspective' titles, the likes of Modern Warfare pretend to be introspective through the single scene of your being dying among the wreckage of your downed helicopter, but nullify it by spending the rest of the game championing warfare as consequence-free macho entertainment. As stated in the article, I have no problem with games, movies or books written to provide mindless fun, but gaming seems to do little else but that. Little responsibility is taken for the carefree way it reflects serious and morally-challenging images, when many of its gamers may subconsciously use them as a reference point to judge events in real-life.
As for Love Plus, my point was more speculative as I don't know a huge amount about it (the reason the topic was phrased as a question rather than explored in any depth), hence my ignorance that there was a 'female' version of the game. The phenomenon as I've read about it does seem primarily linked to male players though. You are clearly far more informed regarding the intricacies of Japanese culture than I am, but I would argue that if Japan is as sexually segregated as you say, a dating sim like Love Plus may well end up having an effect on real-life in breaking down the barriers between male and female interaction. But I'm just speculating, having not spent enough time there to make an adequate judgment.
@Luis Blondet: I did see that P&T and while it wasn't exactly what I was getting at (my article was more about violent games subconsciously altering the way people view or react to events, rather than causing violence directly, which it clearly doesn't), it's always an enjoyable watch and disproves a lot of the prejudices people have against gaming, so thanks for the link!