Brush Your Teeth, Finish Your Raid, and Go to Bed

by C.T. Hutt

Childhood videogame addiction has become the new darling scapegoat of fussy PTAs and politicians; the phenomenon is blamed for everything from slumping test scores to childhood obesity. When a new and pervasive problem like this is introduced to society, what can be done? Who could possibly step in to save helpless citizens? Say hello to our hero: a half-baked piece of domestic legislation.

The South Korean Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism announced this week that they will be implementing a country wide internet service restriction for six hours every night to curb online videogame addiction in minors. The so called “nighttime shutdown” will apply to most online video games available to young people in the hope of promoting better sleeping and study habits. This decree comes in the wake of a widely syndicated news story in Korea about a couple who let their infant child die of malnutrition while they played online games. Despite its good intentions, this decision sets a disastrous precedent for the place of government in our digital lives.

BioShock 3

by Daniel Bullard-Bates

With two successful games in the BioShock franchise on store shelves, the writers and designers over at 2K Games are likely turning their minds to what comes next. Many, myself included, were concerned that BioShock needed no sequel, but BioShock 2 – while it may have lacked the raw originality of its predecessor – showed that there were great stories yet to be told in the city Andrew Ryan built. I offer up these suggestions, free of charge, for future BioShock iterations.

Some spoilers follow, major ones for BioShock, and lesser ones for BioShock 2.

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
(William Shakespeare, from Hamlet)

The villains in the BioShock series, at least thus far, have been defined by their philosophies. Andrew Ryan, creator of the underwater city of Rapture and antagonist for most of the first game, was a Randian objectivist who trusted entirely in the free market and individual self-interest. Frank Fontaine, the secondary antagonist, was the kind of villain who would thrive in such an environment. In BioShock 2, Rapture is being rebuilt and reformed by a collectivist, Sofia Lamb, who leverages her personality and knowledge of psychology to gather the remaining citizens of the sunken city under her wing.

There are, of course, a number of political philosophies that have not yet been explored by the BioShock series, but Adam Serwer makes the excellent point in this post for The Atlantic that one of the weaknesses of BioShock 2’s premise is that:

“The collectivist cult of personality Lamb creates in the aftermath of Rapture's destruction is so clearly inspired by real-life monsters responsible for the death of millions (i.e. Stalin, Mao) that there's little payoff. It's not hard to imagine how Lamb's dream got twisted.

Ryan's fall is more interesting because we've never actually seen a society completely based on extreme libertarian ideals, so the reimagined sci-fi "Galt's Gulch" is fascinating.”

So instead of turning to yet another video game Machiavellian or Marxist gone horribly awry, BioShock 3 should look to some lesser known and infrequently explored political philosophies. How about a society ruled by Plato’s philosopher king, a figure who values wisdom and a complete understanding of every situation above all else? Social contract theory has worked its way into most modern political philosophy, but Rapture is a spectacular example of a place where lives are “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” as Thomas Hobbes wrote. An antagonist who offered protection and stability in exchange for the relinquishing of all personal rights might make for an interesting character, something between a mob boss and a parent.

What about a society based on a twisted version of John Stuart Mill’s principle of Utilitarianism, in which every major decision is made so that the greatest number of people will be the most happy, regardless of any overarching ideas of justice or morality? The things that would make the remaining citizens of Rapture happy could be twisted indeed. Just thinking of the outcome, I worry for the poor little sisters.

“He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”
(Friedrich Nietzsche, from Beyond Good and Evil)

Perhaps an even more exciting prospect is to make the player play the part of the political reformer, either working directly for someone who seeks to redeem Rapture through a new approach to governance or by giving the main character a voice and the means to influence the lunatics and splicers that roam the hallways of the underwater city. Their intentions could be noble and easily recognizable. What if they wanted to create a simple, direct democracy, and establish a system for voting? How about a few hints of socialism to help get Rapture on its feet, like healthcare to help citizens get over their Adam addictions and back into the workplace?

Seeing a political dream that became twisted over time can make for a compelling story, but seeing your own dream and your own decisions become corrupted over time could be even more powerful. Gone would be the simple, binary moral choices of the first two games, to save or harvest, spare or kill. Each decision would change the face of Rapture itself, at least for a little while. Moral quandaries would be so much more complicated; instead of deciding whether to be greedy or merciful, the player would be deciding whether it was in the common interest to kill an enemy of the new republic. Perhaps it would save many more lives in this time of transition, but then what would have become of their dream of peace and justice?

Regardless of what 2K Games decides, I am confident that there are many more exciting stories to be told in the world of BioShock, and I’m glad that there are such talented people behind the helm of one of the best original franchises to grace the video game medium in recent years.

War Game Theory

by C.T. Hutt

Recently, I’ve been playing an open world game where the main character is a member of a secret organization outlawed by the puppet government which is propped up by an occupying foreign power. As a member of this organization, you are dispatched on a variety of missions to destroy this occupying power using any means necessary, with an almost total disregard for civilian casualties and property damage. Your methods include car bombs, assassinations, and hiding amidst the general populace to avoid detection. Interestingly, this game is not the latest recruiting effort from the Al-Qaeda R&D department, but rather an open world shoot ‘em up based on the French resistance to the Nazi occupation of Paris. The game is called The Saboteur and it was produced by the now defunct Pandemic Studios.

Before I’m hauled out of my house and beaten to death for the comparisons I just made, let me say that the French resistance was a heroic endeavor undertaken during impossible times by some of the truest patriots in France’s history, I have nothing but respect for the men and women of the United States armed forces, and Al Qaeda are a collection of fanatics who have chosen violence of the most depraved and indifferent sort. The Saboteur is played from the perspective of a character who utilizes terrorism to achieve his goals, and as such I believe that it is a highly relevant piece of work given the contemporary “war on terror.”

Your character in The Saboteur is named Sean Devlin, a stereotypical Irish rogue based on an actual WWII English operative, William Grover-Williams. Whatever else this game may be, I have to give the developers credit for publishing a historical piece loosely based on a real person; we don’t see nearly enough of that. Visually, the game is quite striking: sections of Paris which have yet to be liberated are black and white, with the exception of the burning red surrounding every swastika and propaganda poster. The game play is adequate, the controls are intuitive, and the game flows from combat to sneaking to driving with few seams. There are a few impressive action set pieces in The Saboteur, and more than enough free-running mayhem to keep any open world fan busy for hours. With the exception of a few glitches, The Saboteur is a solid, if unremarkable, gaming experience.

What struck me about The Saboteur was not the game itself, but the perspective from which it is played. Sean Devlin is a video game cliché, his motivation is revenge, and he’s tough but rather charming, in a mass murdering kind of way. It’s not who he is, but what he is that sparked my interest. Sean Devlin is an insurgent, a man who uses violence and naked aggression to harass his enemies and win over the general populace. What’s more, despite the horrors of everyday life in occupied France, Sean has a grand old time doing what he does best: blowing up Nazis. Every time a player bombs one of the hundreds of viable targets in the game, Sean chuckles and mutters some ridiculous catch phrase in an over-the-top Irish accent. The Resistance is really just an excuse for Sean, a chance to let his inner demons loose. The fact that he is fighting for a good cause is purely incidental. Terrorism is an inherently immoral and unethical activity, and just because Sean Devlin is on the right side of a conflict doesn’t make him a hero. On the contrary, if he were a real person we would label him a megalomaniacal butcher, not a hero.

Since the September eleventh attacks on the United States, I have struggled to understand why a group of people would be willing to dedicate themselves to terror and destruction without a tenable long term strategy or goal. And through this title and a little research into the matter, the answer became clear.

It is widely and incorrectly assumed that religious and political terrorists carry out their attacks because they are working toward some kind of broad social change. Hamas fighters who launch rockets at people’s homes from the Gaza strip claim that they are doing so for Palestinian independence. Timothy McVeigh who blew up the Murrah Federal building in 1995 claimed he did so in retaliation for the U.S. Government’s handling of the Waco Siege two years earlier. The terrorists who brought down the world trade center reportedly did so because of a disagreement over U.S. foreign policy towards Israel and a general disapproval of our way of life. Whether each particular brand of justification leaned toward religion or politics, all are equally fallacious. I will grant that terrorism has often been a bi-product of social movements, such as the French resistance or even the American Revolutionary war, but it has never been the central goal of those movements. The employment of terrorist methods to further a given goal is neither effective in the long term nor ethically sound. No matter how many rockets are fired, Israel will not be packing up and moving to Europe. No matter how many buildings are destroyed, the federal government will remain the federal government. And finally, no matter how many of our planes are destroyed, Americans will keep on eating cheeseburgers. In short, terrorism alone is not an effective means of achieving anything beyond the spread of chaos and fear.

Why then do Al-Qaeda and similar organizations carry out these terrible actions? I believe that they do so because their supposed causes are merely a means to an end; terrorism itself is their very raison d'etre. Like Sean Devlin in The Saboteur, terrorists commit terrorism because to them it is a game. Unlike Sean Devlin, they have not attached their proclivities toward violence to a feasible or genuine social movement. Because they are unbound by any drive to achieve a productive end, but rather to simply perpetuate the game, they feel justified in every action they take because within the confines of their perceptions, it’s fair play, and what’s more, it’s good sport. To them, pulling off a particularly devastating attack under the nose of our modern security is a great triumph. It doesn’t matter if no positive change occurs as a result of their actions because they have already taken everything they wanted from the event. As time goes by, the game changes, maybe it gets harder, but because there are no real long term objectives for them, it will never stop. It’s a frightening concept to consider in its entirety.

Our national response to international terror has been to try to beat terrorists at their own game. Sadly, by engaging them in an endless conflict with no specific goals, we haven’t lessened the appeal of terrorism; we’ve simply upped the difficulty and provided them with additional excuses to perpetuate the contest. We can’t kill them into seeing our side of things anymore than they can kill us out of our way of life, but we both keep trying. I think we would have greater success if we were to concentrate on removing the conditions necessary for the other side to play the game. For example, if Al-Qaeda were unable to recruit more young people to its cause, it would be incapable of perpetuating itself. If the victims of suicide bombings were to receive more media attention than the bombers themselves, public sentiment could turn against the insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan. If a generation of young people were to receive contemporary levels of education and access to other points of view, it could help to reduce the viability of terrorism as an option for solving their problems. It’s the digital age; our greatest weapon is our enhanced ability to communicate and disseminate information, but for some reason we have not been employing it effectively in the war on terror, and I can only guess as to why.

I believe that The Saboteur was created primarily as entertainment rather than social commentary. Furthermore, it is a work of fiction; no one gets hurt by playing it and it doesn’t teach children how to become insurgents or any other such nonsense. That being said, I think that Pandemic Studios made a bold choice in releasing this title during a period in our history during which some of the greatest military, political, and judiciary minds in our society are struggling to find the lines between terrorists, enemy combatants, and freedom fighters. All operate in very similar ways, but without truly understanding why our enemies do what they do it may be impossible to bring the “war on terror” to an end. In any case, The Saboteur provides an interesting perspective on the subject and an enjoyable gameplay experience. I think it is worthy to note that without restraint, purpose, and critical thought, war becomes an endless game where people like Sean Devlin may have a chance to shine, but where most of the population and civilization as a whole can only lose.

Trigger Pastime

by C.T. Hutt

Politicians and concerned parents often criticize video games for encouraging insensitivity towards violence. Children should not be allowed to play violent video games and it is incumbent upon parents to make sure that they do not do so. That being said, it is an undeniable fact that action, and often violent action, is the central mechanic of many video games. Without a dragon to slay, a cause to fight for, or a horde to overcome, many video games would be too boring to play. This precept might explain why the romantic comedy genre has not yet found a place in the popular gaming market. Action games such as Uncharted, Half-Life, Mass Effect, and Gears of War are among the most popular games in the medium and all rely on the challenge of being an effective killer and survivor. Developers are receptive to the player’s desire for realistic action, but are also fairly sensitive to growing concerns that kill crazy violence with no moral compass is not well received by mainstream media (please see every news story ever written on GTA). As gamers we want to square off against the most dangerous prey, humanity, but also want to believe that our characters are the good guys. As such, violence in action games is usually directed at enemies which walk and talk and fight like people, but for whom we feel little pity when blowing away en masse, such as:

Robots

Automated human beings are the optimal target for ethically clear mass murder. Unfeeling machines probably don’t have children back at home and, better still, they can’t even register injury on an emotional level. If you blast the arm off a Geth in Mass Effect, not only will it not feel pain, it won’t even take it personally. So long as developers shy away from issues like programmed self awareness and virtual personality, a robot is nothing more than a toaster with a gun. Gamers can sleep very soundly on a pile of dismembered cyborg limbs without so much as a nightmare (well, they would probably have a few).

Goblins/Subhumans/Aliens
In Gears of War, gamers are called on to do a whole lot of killing. Since pushing a chainsaw bayonet through the chest of a screaming human being might be considered mentally scarring to anyone, the Cogs in Gears of War square off against an army of human-like (but not quite human) monsters called Locusts. In Dragon Age: Origins the protagonist slaughters their way through thousands of demonic Darkspawn to reach their goals. Whether you are facing off against orcs, aliens, or genetically engineered freaks, what you are really fighting against is a personification of the dark side of humanity.

Dehumanizing one’s enemies is a propaganda tactic as old as war itself. So long as we can refer to our enemies as outsiders, whether we label them as a separate species or use a racial slur to describe them, we can justify taking their lives without feeling as though we have done anything wrong. Video games let us take this idea a step further and change the actual image of adversaries rather than just our perceptions of them, allowing us to pull the trigger again and again without stopping to ask why.

Zombies

Now we’ve made the cross over from inhuman to human, but zombies just barely fit the category. When you put a bullet through a zombie’s rotting brain you are really doing it a favor. They are not, in the strictest sense, alive to begin with. As such, re-killing them is not only an action done to preserve your life, but to restore the natural order of things. No matter how many of the shambling corpse folk you mow down, the actual number of human beings you’ve killed will always remain at a family friendly zero. A zombie is, for all intents and purposes, a skin robot, and all the same robot moralities apply. The rag tag survivors in Left 4 Dead don’t need to say a Hail Mary for each of the infected they destroy; they are in the clear.

Nazis
Since the end of World War 2, Germany has gone to great lengths to live down its recent past. Every nation on the planet with a shred of decency or ethics must eventually come face to face with its share of national shame. As leaders in the international effort to secure transnational peace and liberalization, I’m sure this feeling is especially acute for the citizens of modern Democratic Germany when games like The Saboteur and Call of Duty are released to serve as a reminder of the terrible events perpetrated by the National Socialist Workers Party under Adolf Hitler. As the current U.S. president is fond of saying, the Third Reich was on the wrong side of history. Whatever a protagonist does to a Nazi in a video game seems justified because the people playing the game are presumably aware of the atrocities the Nazis committed during the war. Hypothetically, when you shoot a video game Nazi you are working to prevent or punish an unseen video game holocaust. Developers use a similar mentality in almost all games where you are up against some kind of army or paramilitary force. The Inglourious Bastards standard of ethics in video games (i.e., anything I do to you is alright, because you will always be worse than I am) has been an industry standard since the original Wolfenstein.

This gets into some fairly shaky ethical territory; all war is morally ambiguous to the people fighting in it. Again, children should not be playing these games and before anyone picked up a title like this I would encourage them to at least become acquainted with the basic history behind the game. Modern political discourse is littered with ham-fisted references to fascism and Stalinist communism on the part of both the major parties in the United States. Telling impressionable people in one area of society that it is okay to kill Nazis and telling them in another area that “the X party are a bunch of Nazis” could lead to some very foolish consequences.

Someone Wearing a Mask
If developers feel that they absolutely must include a mass of antagonists who are dead to rights human beings (and not goose-stepping swastika jockeys) they often at least have the decency to cover their faces. You may have used an X-wing to crush swarms of storm troopers in Star Wars: The Force Unleashed but they all wore their giant face covering helmets so you never saw the fear or anguish in their eyes as you did it. Similarly, the full plate mail worn by the knights in Demon’s Souls robs them of all character and individuality. You also can’t see them spit blood when you stab them. Hell, they could be smiling under all that steel for all you know. Whether you are fighting ninjas, knights, terrorists, assassins, bank robbers, or whoever, more often than not developers will cover their faces with something.

Sometimes, instead of a literal mask, developers choose to pan away from the worst of the violence taking place or, as in Empire Total War, make the characters so small and ill defined that we cannot make out their individual expressions. We are not the Joker, we don’t savor the little emotions in an opponent’s face when they expire.

This guy is just asking for it

No matter how developers dress them up, the hundreds of bad guys we waste in video games are representations of human beings. Since this is fairly apparent to anyone who stops to think about their gaming experience for a moment, one might ask why developers even bother with such elaborate disguises. I find the answer rather heartening. I believe that developers have come to realize that, while violence is often a necessary part of the action in many games, most people feel put out at the prospect of ending other peoples’ lives, even digital ones. While there are plenty of games that don’t adhere to the general categories I mentioned, most do. It’s the action and excitement of a scenario that draws us in, death is usually just an unintentional byproduct, but even so some effort is made to separate the gamer from what would be the terrible consequences of their actions. Developers do this because we are, despite what so many political blowhards and half-wit news anchors would have us believe, sensitive to violence in the real world.

Orson Scott Card’s Complex

by Daniel Bullard-Bates

Last week, I discussed Shadow Complex, a derivative action/platformer based on classic games like Super Metroid and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. It’s a very well-designed, fun little game, and an incredible value at fifteen dollars. If you like the “metroidvania” style of games, you’ll probably like it. That’s the good news.

The bad news is that if you buy it, some small amount of money is going into the pocket of Orson Scott Card, who is an anti-gay activist. The storyline of the game is loosely based on one of his books, Empire, which chronicles the rise of a group called the “Progressive Restoration,” a far-left liberal organization which attempts to take over the government of the United States.

Now if the game itself were clearly a propaganda piece, purchasing it would be far more questionable. But, having finished the game, I can confidently state that the dialogue and story present is entirely apolitical. The villains are classic, rote evil: they think something’s wrong with the country, though they don’t say what, and they are going to take over and fix it, their way. Card’s anti-gay speech and political agenda don’t figure into the scenario at all.

So the remaining question is just one of financially supporting homophobia. Even though Orson Scott Card did no actual work on this game (the dialogue and story is only based on his book, and written by Peter David), some of the money from each sale is going to him. Since a great deal of Card’s time and money goes into groups like the National Organization for Marriage, where he is on the board of directors, that money may be directly contributing to an anti-gay agenda.

The question of a boycott has been raised on the forums at NeoGAF. A very thoughtful discussion of the idea has been posted by Christian Nutt at Gamasutra. Both the discussion thread and Nutt’s article make one thing evident: the issue is a complicated one. Yes, one anti-gay rights activist will be receiving money from the sale of this game. The people who actively worked on the game, however, are also reliant on the sales of this game to continue to do the work they love. And apart from someone making the decision to work with a controversial figure like Card (and I can’t help but wonder who made that call), they’ve done an excellent job.

Personally, I’ve decided to take the advice of Dawdle over at gaygamer.net. I paid fifteen dollars for Shadow Complex and donated fifteen dollars to the Human Rights Campaign, a group that works for gay rights. This is considerably more than Orson Scott Card will make off of my purchase, so hopefully this tips the scales in the other direction. Sort of like a carbon footprint, I’m hoping that this keeps my homophobia footprint low.

Orwell and the Xbox

By C.T. Hutt

I suppose it was inevitable that my personal politics would eventually dominate one of our discussions here at Press Pause to Reflect. Still, I find descending from the lofty and comfortable towers of intellectual discourse on the arts to the mire of politics to be a sobering decent indeed. A matter has come to my attention that I feel must be addressed. While I take no pleasure in this task, I feel that it would be a greater disservice to the gaming community at large were I to remain silent. Today I would like to reflect on the impact of censorship in video games and its implications.

There is nothing more crippling to art, nor to the community that surrounds it, than censorship. To have the twisted and inconsistent morality of a few people applied to our entire society through sclerotic institutions such as the FCC is surely oppressive enough. But as our technology outpaces itself with each subsequent year a very disturbing trend has emerged which threatens not only the artistic medium that we love but the very root of our cultural heritage. The very same corporations which deliver us our beloved video games have taken it upon themselves to impose a set of moral restrictions on us wholly outside the law. I truly cannot stress enough how dangerous this concept is. A non-government body with a monopoly on a given means of communication is dictating to people what is, and what isn’t acceptable to say or write. That is more than an irritation; it is a recipe for corporate control over our personal lives.

This issue came to my attention after reading an article on Penny-Arcade. Apparently, Microsoft’s Orwellian “decency policy” on language control is not content to simply censor commonly recognized swear words but has also taken it upon itself to dissect the ever expanding lexicon of modern slang and cherry pick words or phrases that it finds to be offensive, or even potentially offensive. This list of banned words or phrases is not available to the general public so we are simply forced to accept the premise that the Microsoft corporation, an organization that has been sued by businesses, NGO’s, and even the United States Government for its multiple violations of privacy laws, fair business laws, and legal misrepresentation, has our best interests at heart.

The Xbox Live Code of conduct appears to be designed with the noble intention of providing a safe and fair gaming environment to gamers. I can hardly fault them for this goal, but the fact remains that it is simply not their place to legislate morality to the world. Who is to say where that type of censorship ends? Microsoft just recently announced its intention to merge with web-searcher Yahoo. How long before we are punished for what we type in the search bar in the privacy of our homes? How long before our real names, rather than just our game handles, start appearing on banned lists?

No one elected the people who are making these decisions and there is no functional oversight to moderate their behavior. Make no mistake, if we, the community that made gaming what it is today, make no move to resist these policies they will continue to grow. I urge you as a writer, a gamer, and an ardent believer in a free and democratic society to take action. Write your congressional representatives in the House and Senate (they really do read what you send in), send a letter to Microsoft, and light up the blogs and forums and chat rooms with your dissent. Do your part for the gaming medium and the community we’ve built around it.

Thank you.