WAR GAMEZ:

Video games do reinforce violent tendencies by simulating a reality wherein violence is a viable and strategic option. This may be novel for the sort of introverted person who begins playing games as a way of coping with social anxiety. In so far as the developers themselves are afflicted with antisocial tendencies, the design of the game may in itself be the expression of a violent, antisocial tendency, the likes of which we find in such delusions such as survivalism, as well as the veneration of armed conflict and organized crime, all common cultural themes that have a place in game design as well as a “target” audience (no pun intended) in those adults and adolescents who already exhibit these neuroses as conscious attitudes. It follows logically that it is ridiculous to try to separate the “fantasy” of video games from the “reality”; in fact, that is already a violent line to draw, and often gamers draw it violently.

There is no mistaking the fact that the leading franchises in game development hinge upon Immersion, the sensation of a game’s virtual environment being “real”. In effect, a game cannot be said to be experienced totally without the suspension of disbelief. In theatre, the actor has to suspend his or her own disbelief and identity in order to “disappear into the role”, and it is out of both empathy for the actor and sympathy for the character that auditors forget their own lives, except perhaps by analogy to the simulated world.

Yet can this be called “escapism”? When composers innovated Program Music in the nineteenth century, they abandoned “absolute music” in favour of compositions which “told a story”. Narrative immersion was thus introduced into a medium that previously only explored drama in opera, oratorio, and the occasional lute ballad about crying. Composers wrote programs that were printed for the audience to read and to contemplate as they listened to the music. Hector Berlioz managed to woo a woman who had previously spurned his advances by composing an entire Symphony in her honour. The Symphonie Fantastique used experimental orchestral techniques to invoke the quality of a heartbroken young man’s drug trip; some instruments are even believed to represent the fall of a guillotine’s blade as the vision becomes more and more nightmarish. The effect was miraculous: his light of love was so moved by the composition that she agreed to marry him. (Though perhaps this was more of a testament to the beauty of the music than the plot of the story, since too much immersion might have offended her once she imagined herself depicted as a witch. The marriage ended quickly, probably as the spell faded.)

What’s remarkable about music and what sets it apart from theatre is that it is Imminent. No one goes to a concert just to “escape” reality; one goes there to experience reality more intensely and immediately. Every note is Absolutely What It Is, even if the music is not “absolute music”. When you hear the percussive crash, you may imagine a falling blade, but there is no denying that a cymbalist smashed two cymbals together; everyone in attendance saw it. Nothing is truly “hidden from the audience” in formal music; even something as Byzantine as Mick Gordon’s sound experiments for the Doom Soundtrack did not take long for audiophiles to unriddle, with hilarious dramatic irony.

This hints at an important trend known to philosophers as “naïve realism”. When gamers tell you that they can discern “reality” from “fantasy”, hoping to save the integrity of the fantasy by disidentifying with those who cannot adequately comprehend “reality”, they are already waging a sort of virtual warfare, on behalf of their own communities and lifestyles, which is fought on a philosophical battlefield. The pretension that a TRUE gamer CAN be trusted to discern “reality” from “fantasy” is already a form of fantastical escapism. Yet this is not only because gamers MUST escape “reality” in order to enjoy the “fantasy” of the game. I don’t mean to imply that, like a method actor who is too good for his own good, they forget how to “turn off the fantasy”, even though the history of extreme method acting would make this tendency to “leave it on” embarrassingly relatable and forgivable. My contention is a metaphysical one: that this “reality”, as distinct from this “fantasy”, does not exist.

Gamers of an extremely rational temperament already escape, on a daily basis, into the nineteenth century. Rationalism suggests a Hierarchy of Reality that is comprehended only by the most “rational, discerning” adult minds. Roughly summarized, it can be laid out like this:

1.         Hard Facts.

2.         Collective Knowledge.

3.         Individual Experience.

4.         Fiction.

Yet suppose we dispossessed ourselves of this conditioned prejudice. Consider, again, Music: we know it to be REAL; that it makes us feel as though we were somewhere else is no more an illusion than the feeling that we hear a loved one’s voice over the telephone. Sure: we should question the integrity of the medium, as well as those who use it, but perhaps not to the point of outright paranoia. Berlioz seems to have adequately communicated his feelings through his Symphony, and for some short time his fantasy became a socially accepted reality. (Thankfully, minus the witches’ sabbath.)

What if we saw games in the same manner? Philosophers such as Lacan and Zizek attest to the reality of virtuality, even delineating several layers of each. Instead of plagiarizing them, however, I would like to take advantage of the novelty of the gaming medium in order to introduce a model of my own:

The realm of Fact CONTA!NS the domain of Fiction. All fictitious works are produced, reproduced, and experienced in the Real World. What is hidden from the audience, to various extents, is the Fundamental Nature of the Artistic Work. Yet this is ALSO hidden from the DEVELOPER, who learns how to synthesize new realities by entering into established traditions. Often, the point of entry is totally arbitrary. When a college student tells you that she is “learning the basics” of programming, sound design, writing, et cetera, she is bluffing, though she may not know it. There is no “foundation” upon which learning occurs; we just start coding, writing, and composing at some point arbitrated by the teacher. It’s the same way with all languages, and any language plays such a radical part in shaping our “realities” that it seems daunting, if not impossible, to look Reality directly in the face. Life can be understood almost entirely in terms of communications. In context of this, those inputs which we deem to be the products of the “Real World” are no more reliable than those which are produced through the consumption of Art; it is purely a cultural conceit to treat Art as though it had come from the Heavens instead of from Earth. All information passes the threshold of personal Imagination. If there is any Reality to hold on to, it is ensnared not by the force of Reason alone, but by the force of Will.

Now let us return to the question, therefore, of Violence.

Something like Warfare, especially of the Modern kind, may be understood by analogy to the Law. Franz Kafka writes, in his seminal novel The Trial, that no man has access to the Law. This principle applies in Vince Gilligan’s prequel to Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, wherein several young but established lawyers grapple with the labyrinthine complexities of the legal system and what it means to them.

The same can be said of war. There is no true “specialist” in armed conflict. Young men and women are “thrown into” a war zone, whether voluntarily or involuntarily, with only their orders and their national identity intact. Even the highest-ranking members of any military cannot say for certain what the Absolute Nature of violence is; they have become so accustomed to it as a justifiable means, whether noble or a necessary evil, that their very instincts have become biased in its favour, and any universalizing philosophical claims which they might make about the Gods of War and where those Gods might stand within a larger Pantheon are bound to be the product as much of willpower and conscience as of deduction.

This is why war games have so much replay value. It’s become a joke between myself and my sister that most first-person shooters are practically the same game: you parachute into a warzone and you shoot things. Very few games in the industry, such as Doom, BioShock, and Half-Life, deviate from this format. It’s not just because this format works as a recognizable design formula; the REASON that it works is because it mirrors the actual conditions of (the) military occupation so well. Everyone is “thrown into” it without much preparation; bootcamp is only a tutorial, which is offered as sort of a stand-alone demo in the form of R.O.T.C. training. Why, then, would you play a game over again, if each time you must start from the bottom ranks? (so to speak, at least.) Wouldn’t the novelty and the mystery wear off by the end of the first playthrough? The answer is an overwhelming “Sir!! no, Sir!!”

The truth is that reaching the final objective and dispatching the last enemy are not sufficient to comprehend the experience. Yoko Taro uses this to ingenious effect in his masterpiece Nier: Automata. The same story is presented in the first two playthroughs from two different perspectives; a previously nonplayable character switches places, so to speak, from our perspective as mere players, with the principal heroine. By the end of each consecutive playthrough, the same conflict is revealed to be more absurd than it had appeared previously, and the same ending is made to appear less heartbreaking only to the extent that the final, disillusioning blow has been forestalled for a short while longer. Players watch adept soldiers, overwhelmed by armies and monoliths, turn into seasoned warriors, only to become powerless before the sheer meaninglessness of the entire crusade for which they were designed to fight. Nier: Automata is the sort of game that can turn a pacifist into a freedom fighter, only to spite his commitment to the cause by using the same initial pacifism against the heroes in a tragic fashion whose brutality is augmented by its cosmic and ironic justice. In the same manner, most other war games, such as Call of Duty, can give a young man who never stood a sizeable chance against bullies the experience of killing terrorists and becoming a hero to the ostensibly Free World. It’s not a fantasy that one can easily dismiss in the contemporary media; entire dynasties pledge themselves to such a cause, disowning their children who would go off in search of another way.

Yet can a game alone turn someone into a Special Operations officer? Perhaps not. The kid might just as easily become a first-person shooter. Don’t get me wrong; he probably won’t. All that the game supplies is the EXPER!ENCE OF using violence, communicated from the point of view of the Developers and their contributing consultants, through the interactive medium, to the player. The rest is up to the player. Most players are presumably too stupid to comprehend the impact of the games they play upon their own decisions, though in many ways Life Itself is a game which can only be understood by analogy (really, by metonymy) to its various sub-games, only a fraction of which are formally referred to as games and even fewer of which are “video games”. Only the subtlest players will comprehend the fact that, even in the virtual world, they have willingly reduced others to objects and used force and dexterity to silence those objects. Video games can serve the same function, therefore, as combat training, wherein previously conscientious, life-preserving civilians become professional killers by practicing on human-shaped targets.

If it works in conditioning soldiers, can a consumer not use it to the same effect? The clever, metaphysically enlightened players may do so consciously, using the Reality of the Game to warrant the conflict in Actual Life, though they are met with anti-intellectual opposition from law enforcement and clinical psychiatry. The ordinary minds will simply internalize the experience and confine it to the dream realm, until some trying and demoralizing situation compels them to be seized by an unintegrated archetype and they act out a subconscious, violent fantasy with such stunning accuracy that they themselves might not believe it afterwards. Who is the greater danger of these two parties? The jury is out on that, as is the Court Martial.

Games are a wonderful learning tool. Playing through even the first run of Nier: Automata helped me to recover from line hypnosis and abuse at an overwhelming and physically demanding job. My reflexes were heightened; I found within myself the capacity to communicate clearly and efficiently while running from objective to objective within a very narrow time limit, honing in on every moment. War games are not alone in training us. The Curse of Monkey Island taught me to scan my environment, both immediate and macroscopic, for clues and opportunities, though I’d like to say I never stole anything. Braid taught me how to rethink my assumptions, trying the same thing over and over again but in different ways until the underlying secret was revealed. Sonic, one of my first games, taught me how to run and jump, but also when to stop and to pace myself. Beyond the mechanics, a game’s narrative can tell a story that a novel or a film cannot convey. By the second playthrough of Nier: Automata, I was shaky about my place in the Universe; by the third, I had lost all moral and romantic hope for the future. I do not regret this, since several playthroughs later I had the opportunity to make a sacrifice that would at once impact a stranger and test my altruism in the Real World. Though I will respectfully abstain from spoiling this ending, suffice it to say that it’s an ideal example of the Game Becoming Real, in a manner that reveals how it was Real Already. But I’ll leave that up to you to decide, especially because that ending is optional.

I can already begin to imagine the counterarguments regarding violence. Somewhere, somehow, there may be a Navy S.E.A.L. who only plays Animal Crossing. While such news, presented as a retort, would be an impressive observation, it’s hardly a logical argument. It would sooner be an instance of correlation masquerading as causation in an attempt to use an exception to challenge a trend. It is not enough, however, to find one professional killer who only plays a notoriously nonviolent game. One must expose the internal logic of the connection. I have demonstrated, on multiple grounds and through multiple disciplinary lenses, the MANNER IN WH!CH video games and other art forms, including those dating back hundreds of years, can influence human behaviour. The man who kills at work but fishes at home does not prove by so doing that games are inconsequential. Supposing that that same gamer had chosen, instead of a career in the military, to catch rare fish and to sell them in order to pay his mortgage. Such an example would certainly act as overwhelming evidence for my hypothesis, for he can easily be accused of having learned the habit from Animal Crossing, though his defense might attest that the realism of Animal Crossing lies in the fact that you can do that anyway. (In traditional societies, perhaps so.) It is not that games are the ONLY road to violence, nor that they are ONLY a road to violence. Yet a game CAN be a road to violence, notwithstanding, and unlike examples to the contrary my argument illuminates the path and its internal workings. I am almost afraid to do so, knowing how it might be used, though I do not doubt that those who would abuse it have already begun to do so, so I seek to illuminate this as much to expose them as to offer strategies.

In summary: Yes. Games can and do make people violent.

The real question, therefore, is this: ought they NOT to?

Games like Nier: Automata compel us to think of violence in different ways. I am told that the same can be said of games like Spec Ops: the Line, and I can say with some certainty that God of War, Half-Life, and Grand Theft Auto use different styles of storytelling to elicit sympathy for mercenaries. The best war stories tend to be told towards this end, regardless of whether the proffered thesis is a pacifist one or a martial one. What sets games apart is that you do not only watch the simulated violence; you enact it, and you live with the consequences. Considering that modern warfare forces recruits to treat their targets as THOUGH they were mere objects, the microcosm of three-dimensional digital models, animated only by artificial intelligence, is not very far off from the truly postmodern battlefield, and the very nature of postmodernity makes it anyone’s guess where one front ends and the other begins. Between the violence in games and the violence on the streets, who is to draw “the Line”? We have the privilege, in the United States, of marginalizing the threats to our immediate safety as we venerate our representatives in foreign wars. Whenever a civilian snaps and commits violence in the homeland, it is a media tragedy, yet it also exposes the fact that we are never TRULY safe from our own culture, and perhaps we should sympathize more with those cultures whose constituents might have to ban video games to prevent children from becoming extremists. The subtlest thinkers do not presume upon nonviolence, even if they might arrive at it. Yet if we are to defend our generation’s greatest Art Form, let us not underestimate its power to create new, Real Worlds.

[({Dm.A.A.)}]