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The Day the "Fun" Became Real "I
can't take it in," said my English friend. "You have to understand.
To us in Britain, this looks like something out of Hollywood." Like something
out of Hollywood, it rang true; the attacks on the Pentagon and the World
Trade Center sound very much like the plot of a grade-B action film. "Shadowy
foreign arch-villain commits monstrous act of terrorism in an attempt
to ignite a world war, resulting in an apocalyptic explosion and the death
of thousands." It resembled many a sight that we've already watched
on the silver screen. However, this time there was no Steven Segal or
Jean-Claude van Damme around to save the day. It wasn't fiction, it was
horribly real. But, If the terrorists'
objective was simply to kill people, they might have been able to kill
more of them by other, less dramatic means. After all, the Hutus in Rwanda
managed to kill nearly a million Tutsis in only a hundred days, using
little more than AK-47s and machetes, a rate of slaughter that dwarfs
even the Holocaust. However, the terrorists did not simply want to kill
people; they wanted to create a public spectacle. Not an entertainment
spectacle, to be sure, but a spectacle nevertheless: one guaranteed to
shock, horrify, and amaze. In this they succeeded, perhaps even beyond
their own expectations. And who are the arbiters of what is and is not spectacular these days? Who establishes the standard for really bitchin' explosions? We do. We in the entertainment industry have the dubious privilege of setting the world's expectations for calamity. How many times have you looked over a colleague's shoulder, playing a new game at the office, and said, "Wow! Cool!" after some particularly impressive piece of destruction? Our works were the example that the terrorists were trying to live up to. After blowing up a couple of embassies, murdering a few GI's in Saudi Arabia for practice — tutorial mode, you know — they've just made it up to our level.
Three years
ago, in my column Bad
Game Designer, No Twinkie!, I wrote that one of the things I disliked
in games was neat, tidy explosions:
No, this
isn't another hand-wringing piece about the social cost of violence in
video games. Video games don't motivate Osama Bin Laden — I doubt
if he has ever even seen one - and plenty of people play video games without
turning into Bin Ladens. What concerns me is not the violence per se,
but our attitude towards it. I'm sure
we've all sat in production meetings that sounded like this:
Don't cringe;
if you've been in this business more than six months, you know perfectly
well this is exactly how those meetings go. If it sounds in bad taste
now, after it has really taken place, why wasn't it in bad taste before
it happened? Why is mass murder just good fun in prospect, and bad taste
in retrospect? ______________________________________________________ |
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Introduction
Features
