On Violence

NOTE: This is a long one. It's also a lot more theoretical than conversational. If you have a question, please feel free to post so that I can try to be more clear.

There is little debate on what the greatest debate is when it comes to video games: Does the imaginary violence of the game translate into violent behavior in the real world? It seems to be very much a 'depends on your point of view' type of argument. Not only does it depend on one's point of view, but also the particular study itself, what it focuses on, and how well it's managed. It is also important to note the rhetorical tricks of the debate*, since most of the data are coming from second or third sources. But I am no statistician, so numbers do nothing to help me to understand the issue. In fact, numbers about this argument are superfluous, since the entire point of gaming (whether the gamer/designer/critic is aware of it or not) is the individual as the ideal. Let's look at violence, then, shall we?

Violence Within the Digital

The 1980s and early 1990s: Within the dark cave of the video game arcade comes the perpetual sound, flashing lights, and endless shouts--a child-sized spectacle. Skeeball, Whack-A-Mole, and Ticket Wheels are relegated to one corner, the 'child-friendly,' benign entertainment that provides the paradigm for gambling in later years. This is the Big League Chew of Las Vegas, the innocuous imitation of a larger social entertainment, one that is arguably destructive in and of itself. This is the addiction of the game but with bumpers and rounded corners.

Separated from the rest of the glitz are the free-standing black boxes with instantly recognizable controllers, molded plastic that is shaped to look like an uzi, a sniper rifle, a hand gun. Sometimes they're painted a pastel pink or a boyish blue to disperse the judgment that the toys are really trying to imitate what's outside the walls of the arcade, that instead they are pain free, consequence free, and repercussion free--all for the price of a quarter.

The decades shift; the games find a new home at home. No longer is the violence isolated, no longer kept within the cave of the arcade. Like MMA and UFC, the fight has lost its law, every hold is allowed. The possible perniciousness of what violence argues, what it demands, what it is can now be viewed and seen and felt endlessly. Even the price of the quarter is swallowed up in the overall price of the console system. Violence has come home to roost--more chillingly, perhaps it has simply come home.

The vulture of violence is perhaps what is most to blame here. Violence has long been embedded in us. Humans killed, kill, and will kill again for as long as they are humans. Wars have progressively sought to establish a type of order, a type of reality in which what was done within the war became right. Interpersonal, domestic, and civil violence has always been propelled by this same urge. Perhaps it is intrinsic--if so, how does one exorcise it? Perhaps it is extrinsic--if so, why has it yet to be fully censored? Violence, a malignancy and a virus that simultaneously debases and empowers those who use it, is indeed vicious, indeed necessary. Violence overpowers and destroys so that reconstruction can come. Destruction is the fertilizer for growth--or so the animal kingdom operates. This argument is part of a mask, an attempt at abdication for violence's heavy claims, a deficit-spending model of meaning. While it may be true that violence is inherent--perhaps even inherited--it does not make it right.

Rationality is of no use against violence bent on expression. There is no recourse in words when actions are given full sway. The world itself, every life lived, suffers a type of violence--language, relationships, eventual death. Violence can lead to death, but it isn't violence's fault. Death does not lead to violence per se; rather death is violence par excellence. And if ever there is something that the West wants, it wants it par excellence.

Perhaps the focus then is Westward. Perhaps it's part of the American way of thinking. 'Go big or go home.' 'Don't mess with Texas.' The idea that the rightness of one's cause is directly proportional to one's mightiness may be an indicator of why violence is prevalent. The simple premise of many war games helps to underscore this. When a problem arises for the gamer, the response is unequivocal and uncompromising: violent retaliation. Often, games will invoke a 'first-strike' mentality, or take any slight hostility as purposeful. Accidents happen in real life, but not in games. Attacks against the protagonist are wrong because they are wronging the gamer, not because of a moral 'wrongness' to them. Any assault upon the avatar is grounds for total war, in which the end result will be a pile of corpses left in the trail of the protagonist. Like the movie Iron Man, the insult of abduction of a rich white American male is grounds for utter obliteration--done thanks to the endlessly superior technology of America.

Accidents happen in real life, but in the game they are ignored or never forgotten, nothing in between. Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion has the option for the gamer to sheathe her weapon and attempt to open up a dialogue in the case of accidentally striking a benign NPC. Full forgiveness; insult forgotten. Resident Evil 4 has no apology feature for having accidentally knifed Ashley--the Game Over animation bleeds across the screen, the insult of violence utterly unforgiven. Diplomacy rarely rears its head, almost never inserts its rational approach to potentially violent situations. No ambiguity remains, for in a digital world where everything is ultimately encoded in a yes or no answer, there isn't space for diplomacy and shades of gray.

Hence war as spectacle and war as drama and war as theater and war as game. Ambiguities become irrelevant when the war is a just war (if there is truly such a thing). Resistance and Halo provide the gamer as the victim first, the victor at any cost. The body count rises based upon the gravity of the original insult, the original attack. War as game has pushed into history, recreating the wrongness of Nazism for its perpetual destruction (Wolfenstein); war as a spectacle has been explained into existence thanks to technology, allowing it to become a blood sport that ends in no lives lost (Unreal Tournament III). Violence has become something else, no longer outward across social lines but inward through personal boundaries. Jean Baudrillard: "A whole other violence appears today, which we no longer know how to analyze, because it escapes the traditional schema of explosive violence: implosive violence that no longer results from the extension of a system..." (71-72) But new systems come to mold this form, new systems that go by many names: PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, Wii...

Still, there is a shadow of a mask on the face of this argument--a reflection of reality is claimed, yet it's argued that it can only flow one way. Violence is absorbed into the game from society through a type of conscious osmosis, but proponents argue that society doesn't absorb the violence back from the game? The question then becomes whether or not violence and art (or violence in art?) can be reduced to a one-way valve, like the chambers of a heart. Does the traffic flow from society and into games where it pools and festers? If this is so, then the game is the paradigm for release, purely emancipatory and escapism in every significant way. All attitudes, all mores, all restrictions should be challenged and given over to play. If all negative humanity can be released and expressed in a game, then all games should be given. Religions of every type should lose sacred space to the game, for the rebellion of them in the digital does not translate to the analog of reality. All that humanity holds as being of value--from priceless works of art to even the fragility of the human life--must end up on the screen. For me, these things cannot be. Erotic games, getting so much press as of now, raise questions about what the difference is between play and reality. Should such games be banned? Not if the traffic flow is only one-way.

Complete social reduction into games can only be answered if violence has finally found a resting place inside of the digital, a place where it is infinitely confined by the delimited storage of hard drives and networked servers. If the answer, however, is that violence is nature and it will, as Dr. Malcom quips in Jurassic Park, "If there is one thing the history of evolution has taught us it's that life will not be contained. Life breaks free, expands to new territory, and crashes through barriers, painfully, maybe even dangerously." Violence contained? What naivete is this? By its very nature violence breaks free--much like life. To assume that the game is the haven of violence is to assume that the game provides a simulacrum for violence, putting it into a constant self-refferential loop that prevents it from harming anyone or anything. With such destructive power, it doubtless will shatter its bounds and push outward both painfully and dangerously. And yet the game is necessary.

Baudrillard brings this to light indirectly with his comparison of remainders to mirrors. He says, "Perhaps only in the mirror can the question be posed: which, the real or the image, is the reflection of the other?" The real life violence or the image of violence that is contained in the game? This is the 'chicken or the egg' question of the digital age, and it is to the digital that we must look.

Shrugging away the violence portrayed within many games is not the correct response to the question. Pointing out comparisons to other recreations (hunting, high-impact or extreme sports, gambling) does little to clarify the responsibility that games have to society and society has to games. Monocausational accusations will do little to correctly respond to the question, too--bad parenting, violent video games, too much caffeine, and any other lazy label to explain human behavior will never do. Viewed as a whole, we must consider whether or not violence is permanent, if it is worth accepting, and what it shows of humanity.

Let us ask: Why does violence matter? Is it natural? Should it be avoided? Even if we take the claim that violence is a part of being human, we fall into a worry when it comes to games. Games participate in a type of 'harmless violence,' as McKenzie Wark argues in Gamer Theory, "[F]or here is violence at its most extreme--and its most harmless." (23) Hence the problem with video game violence: It is new. Because it is new, the tools to analyze it are lacking. The idea of a game becoming an indicator of violence is real: The recent case of Daniel Petric and the murder of his mother because she took away Halo 3 has provided a post hoc fallacy for anti-gaming proponents. (I most wonder: What if Petric's parents had taken away his copy of Nintendogs or Animal Crossing? Would there be as much of an uproar?) The tragedy of this is less that Halo 3 is maligned and more that within Petric the violence swung from its most harmless to its most extreme. When it comes to violence in games, understanding whence the violence comes makes it all right (capitulatory) and right now (instantaneously), though hardly right.

Explored well enough violence in its negativity, is there any positivity within interactive violence that makes participation therein worthwhile? Admittedly little, it seems, for the very reason that Baudrillard states: We do not have the tools with which to analyze the problem. We can dismiss it or defend it only partially.

Natural appeal: Violence has always been part of human- and animal-kind. Classical appeal: Ancient poems retraced the daring-do of heroes, sometimes describing in graphic detail the results of the battles and fights. Commercial appeal: Action movies frequently make significant money through box-office revenues (and, unsurprisingly, they cost the most, too). Imperial appeal: Wars fought to ensure the proper spread of civilization--usually a group that claims to desire peace. Patriotic appeal: Because of revolutions against despotism, the world we enjoy now was created.

No matter how we reshape the idea, we are always left with the rank hypocrisy that mars all of the current wars: war on terror (when war is terror); war on drugs (to prevent the violence inherent in illicit drug use, we will use force); war on gangs (lest youth lead astray by gang teachings react with violence...); war on the family (a war of words, yet incitations to great violence against abortionists and those of different sexual orientations).

From destruction some creation occurs, and from that comes a large justification for the violence that games embrace. We will never know if reality would have been better if the world had grown without bloodshed. We do know it would be different. Because of the game, the harmless violence of the digital can be experienced and learned from. Further, the impossibility of knowing what a world would be like without one of mankind's greatest vices (violence) can be briefly simulated: When Master Chief lowers his weapon, the Covenant wins--violence upon the avatar is guaranteed. Perhaps the reason for violence in a video game stems just a little bit from the desire of the gamer to be recognized as having worth--a worth that is worth defending.

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*In a simliar vein, the USA Today posted a story about video games being addictive, and that there is actually a percentage of children who can become addicted to video games. Its statistic is "8.5%" or, as the opening paragraph states, "Nearly one in 10 kids" has an addiction to video games. Looking closely at the verbiage, it could just as easily be said "less than one in ten kids" or "less than ten percent" of children have an addiction to video games. More optimistically: "More than 90% of kids do not suffer from video game addiction." The oft-quoted statistic of divorce being somewhere in the 50% range should be a greater worry for the children. I would much rather have a class where 1 in every 10 students struggled with something as crippling as addiction, rather than 1 in every 2 students suffering with something as difficult as their parents' divorce.

Further: the idea that games are inherently addictive is often used to enforce the anti-gaming violence argument, though the idea that kids could be addicted to something else with that sort of consistency is apparently unthought of. A casual Google (and Bing) search for the phrase 'how many kids are addicted to sports' pulled up, on the first page, a number of stories reporting the same statistic I mentioned earlier--about video games. It's an unfair comparison to put sports and other recreation against video games--they are different things, and no one needs an 'apples to oranges' accusation--but it should be kept in mind that the studies have their inconsistencies, too.