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Why Gamers Can’t Be Politicians
As I’m forced to point out from time to time, nobody complains about hours wasted on recreation like watching sports (and reading about sports, and talking about sports, and dreaming …) or watching TV. Many responsible adults devote entire weekends to such activities but are not thought childish or lazy for it.
Affluence has enabled people to regain the abundant time for leisure that primitive hunters enjoyed before the rise of agrarian and industrial societies. In our society, video games are a normal activity of Generation X — respectable in moderation — but have yet to gain the respectability of being practiced by elders.
Yes, there remains a stigma, in some settings, against happily admitting one plays video games (or “interactive media,” as many developers prefer, to indicate the inclusion of serious themes). But that’s not why no avid gamer will be elected to high public office anytime soon.
The real reason is quotes like these, so easily misunderstood if pulled from an old Facebook or Twitter post by some unscrupulous campaign reporter and shared without context:
“I really need to stop driving over pedestrians.” (Watch Dogs, GTA, Saints Row)
“I’ve got a date tonight with a Big Daddy!” (Bioshock)
“I took his head off with my chainsaw!” (Gears of War, Dead Rising, Dying Light)
“I must have killed twenty sunflowers last night.” (Plants vs Zombies: Garden Warfare)
“Diablo is awesome!” (Diablo 3)
To our non-gamer friends: These aren’t quotes from games, but rather the sort of things gamers might say while playing those games. A Big Daddy, for example, is a particularly ominous enemy in the popular dystopian thriller Bioshock.
And yes, this post is thoroughly tongue-in-cheek. C’mon, fellow gamers! Add your own. What might you say in reference to a video game that could be damning if separated from its context? Be brave!
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P.S. The reason so many video games involve shooting and hitting things is because that’s much, much easier to simulate in fun and surprising ways than challenges that rely on language such s diplomacy and persuasion. Action gameplay is also less labor-intensive than conversation for developers to multiply into hours upon hours of content. Exploration-oriented gameplay is becoming more common now that emerging technologies have enabled easier, faster, and more compelling production of settings and experiences. And companies like Bioware have made considerable progress in streamlining production of conversation-based gameplay.
Published in Culture, Entertainment, General, Science & Technology, Technology
I dunno, at this point I’ve saved the country and the world from Nazi’s and Terrorists singlehanded a dozen times over. That’s got to count for something.
On a more serious point, there is some utility in this. I grew up before it wasn’t ok to play “cops and robbers” or sword fight (lightsabers really, lets be honest) on the school playground. These days unless you’re in pretty rural environments boys don’t get to play out being the hero anymore. I was awed the first time I played the game “Medal of Honor” on a friends PC where I got to storm the beaches of Normandy and break through the Nazi “wall”. Something I would have pretended as a child a few years before was available to me as a young adult that would let me be, at least in a game, a hero. There were follow up’s that essentially let you fight as one of the Band of Brothers. Boys and Men are generally hard wired to want to be the hero. Cont…
This is not to say that in all the variety out there there aren’t outlets that let boys play the villain, but such is the nature of freedom. I never enjoyed playing games as the villain, at least not for long periods of time. Never got into Grand Theft Auto or other similar games, though this is not to say that if you do someone is immediately a bad person or something. There are a lot of other social things involved but I do think that gaming often allows men and boys an outlet that otherwise isn’t either available or socially acceptable today.
Grand Theft Auto is to carjacking and murder what Monty Python’s dismembered black knight is to ISIS. As John Cleese said, the absence of pain and drama in the fictional scene makes it comical.
I agree, and I’m definitely not a person that thinks that it turns kids into thugs or anything, I promise :) It just wasn’t something I could get into.
There may be some depth here that you folks are probing. I think the most obvious thing about GTA is that it is a mockery of American freedom. The most low-class or under-class or underground things are brought into broad daylight. Suffering is turned into fun. But then there are stirrings–reflection on what it is the liberation or freedom looks like to people who are strangers to law-and-order America, to the part of America where crime is an aberration rather than the norm. So in one of new games you have a few characters–I think the one who could turn into a good guy is black, isn’t he?–but another character shows you another view of freedom–chaos–he’s a psychopath. In another one, it’s immigrants in a version of NYC that are the protagonists, no? I’m not sure these games can ever escape the fact they encourage people to fantasize about immoral things while they’re serious enough to try to get things done & win, but there are stirrings…
Some more stuff on GTA. For obvious reasons, GTA was one of the games that liberated people from morality: A computer is where you get to do horrible things–you’re free from the world, which is the world of morality. Put another way, computers are technology & science: Finally allowing people to exploit the world, to think of the images of objects as theirs to control in the most inhuman way.
The later GTA games show an ugly world of crime & horror to point out that there is something really wrong with this view of computers & games, the world’s yours to take or manipulate, without moral rules except the rule, be free, show off! This criticism of liberation is dishonest: GTA is itself part of the view of consumption as tyranny! I’m not sure there is any way out of it for this sort of game.
The Grand Theft Auto series has been popular for three reasons. First, it is a giant, dynamic, wide-open playground with guns and cars. Second, it is full of witty satire, much of which is funny even when it’s biased and inaccurate. (It’s worth noting that the developers are British, even though every game focuses on America.) Third, it features the culture of the urban poor in America.
I mainly enjoyed the open playground aspect and the silly atmosphere, which is why I haven’t enjoyed a GTA game since Vice City. That reminds me that the Generation X music on the in-game radio stations is another appealing feature to many gamers.
When the GTA series became more serious, the Saints Row series copied the original formula and made a couple fun games. But by the third game, that series too was spoiled. Its fault was extremely libertine and perverse humor that made the gameworld overwhelmingly ugly.
Both series took jabs at conservative politics and culture, though there was to a lesser extent mockery of their fellow leftists as well. But the childlike, cartoonish silliness in the early games was a lot of fun.
My favorite mini-game in Saints Row was insurance fraud. Your character had a limited amount of time to rack up impending lawsuit profits by stepping in front of vehicles and getting bounced around like a pinball. He could be hit by as many as 20 or 30 cars before the time ran out.
So I think you’re not talking about the first two GTA games right? Old, 2-d stuff–sort of like a bad pitch for the new stuff. Those were adventure games basically. Then this new stuff came up: A combination of action-comedy & rap videos.
This was a big deal at the time–Need for Speed turned into this urban thing, too, which it was not for its first three or four iterations…
But it was the movies that show you what was changing–Fast & furious turned into a franchise of people who are not white living a lawless, but honorable & inclusive life of danger & hot cars & hot babes. Mr. Vin Diesel, the guy at the center of the franchise, also had another hit with XXX or Triple X or what have you. That got a sequel (with Mr. Ice Cube, recently glorified in a bio-pic, but who in that movie is all political about the White House) that’s getting a sequel with Mr. Diesel.
You’re right about the music. That may be the most important thing. The fun of the game ultimately doesn’t matter; that’s a waste of time & maybe profitable business, but nothing else. The stuff I’m writing about is important, I think, but it does not explain the psychology. The music does that. It’s individualism cool–rootless, feckless, defiant for no reason, I-don’t-like-the-world-&-there-no-future politics.
I think that’s a huge problem with Civ. There is no explanation as to why your friendly ally feels like attacking you. I feel like every three turns you ought to get a diplomacy update where your spies tell you what’s what.
The Brits are good at being crude and satirical.
In Europa Universalis you get the same thing, except they do at least have a screen where you can see how every (and I mean every) nation feels about you. That doesn’t always mean a nation who likes you won’t attack you, but you can at least get an idea of where you stand.
An old DOS game called Nuclear War communicated each national leader’s shifting preferences with a simple percentile. Click on any leader and you would see every other leader’s estimation of that leader with a number between 0% (“Die, scum!) and 100% (“Nobody touch my friend”).
Bother an ally of your ally and your relationship would suffer for it. Also, it was okay to anger a rival leader if that leader was already occupied with another war.
That’s real diplomacy. It’s not just estimating competing interests, but anticipating priorities and personalities.
History buffs might be interested in an upcoming open-world game focusing on simulation of medieval Europe, called Kingdom Come: Deliverance.
http://www.onlysp.com/kingdom-come-deliverance-onlysp-spotlight/
On a more serious note. It seems like all these simulations of war and killing don’t move the needle too much but internet jihadi propaganda seems to create alot of violence. Before the internet, communist and anarchist propaganda seemed to create alot of violence. It seems that causes are much more violent than entertainment.
Interactive graphically brilliant, highly entertaining stylized violence apparently doesn’t have the punch of a utopian argument. I’d like to know Claire’s take on this.
Ricochetti might also be interested in Operation Dark Winter, from which the upcoming Tom Clancy-series game The Division by Ubisoft (based in Paris, Claire) continues.
The thought experiment explored the possible ramifications of a bio-terrorist attack in American cities. Their conclusions are certainly not undeniable. But the study group’s basic determination was that modern American life is so complex with so many interdependent systems that something like a smallpox attack could completely incapacitate our civilization for a while.
The Division is based in a post-epidemic New York City and involves various small groups — soldiers, vandals, civilians trying to simply survive, etc — exploring and competing for pre-collapse resources to scavenge. In other words, it’s about fighting to reestablish civilization in a modern urban setting.