Bang Bang, Your Dead!

As a red-blooded American child, I played as most male kids do, with heavy doses of violence. Walks though the woods were only to find a bigger stick, which could be a sword, gun, or rocket launcher. I owned enough Nerf guns to arm a small country of 7-year olds. That play continues to this day in the form of replicas of real-life guns that shoot plastic pellets (airsoft guns).

But I'm not the only one, nor is society today the only people to be obsessed with fake violence. It's part of our darker nature. Or, more appropiatly, it's an exploration of our darker nature.

We can see all the on-screen murder we want, but the real thing is far different. A fellow CAP cadet once ran upon a grizzly motorcycle accident, and he related to me how it was so completly different from anything on TV or in a game. It was real, and he knew that. Case in point, the youth violent crime rates have dropped since the advent of the dreaded first-person shooter, the bane of all self titled "protectors of America's youth".

Now for my rant. While my parents are cool with most fake violence, I know of people who are so anti-violence it's scary. I know of a mother who prohibits all guns or gun-like forms from the house. She was horrified to find that her son had bit his toast into the shape of a gun. I know of another family who prohibits all video games with any physical violence (aside from sports titles, which in my opinion are just as violent, albeit abstractly), even Zelda, as if has a sword in it. Yet their children play with improved swords and guns all the time. Face it, it's in their nature.

This weeks Escapist has an article about this very topic. While short and not all the well developed, it has points that are very valid. The best part is the ending; "The people who want to censor and condemn should remember one very important part about television, the internet and media in general: The power button also turns things off." Democracy should stop at my doorstep, as that is were my freedoms begin.

Now it's easy to say that fake violence does not lead to any direct social harms, i.e, play killing does not lead to real killing. But we cannot forget that the physical real is not all there is. What does this do to the mind? To answer that question, we have to look to the great enemy of modern discourse: context.

Saying that x game features the killing of other human beings is like a bad sound clip. War and violence is not inherently bad, it's why it's done. David was a warrior, nor does the bible shy away from depicting his decapitation of Goliath. There exists "good" killing and bad killing.

Lets take Call of Duty for an example of the "good" killing. You play as a solder in the allied armies (an American, a Brit, and a Russian.) thrown in the middle of WWII. You mow down hundreds of Nazis in the name of freedom (ok, the Russian campaign muddies the waters a bit, but you know what I mean). More importantly, it isn't about the killing, it's about what happened. I've studied quite a bit on WWII, but never was it made so gut-wrenchingly alive to me. I first-hand understood the horror of war.

Now contrast that to "Manhunt", a fun, family friendly game where you play an escaped mass-murderer as you, you know, do what ever mass-murderers do. This game got poor reviews, while Call of Duty won best game of the year in 04. People complained about the lack of fun in Manhunt, mainly because the "fun" was in randomly slaughtering innocent bystanders in vile ways. The purpose was no longer noble, and people despised it. Yet they both feature the murder of hundreds of people.

In summery, it's the the depiction of violent acts does not lead to real-life violence. Only the context, and how it fits with our values, can do anything to us, and in the end, it's only our fault. I'd like to explore what we can learn from such fake acts, but that's for another post.