Farewell to arms

I’ve been alluding to this post for quite some time – indeed, it seems, every time I write about a game involving shooting, especially when shooting is the primary means of interaction with the game’s world. I am absolutely, positively done with this form of gaming, and it’s completely baffling to me that the metric by which we judge a console’s success seems to hinge, now, on its ability to deliver the highest fidelity shooting experience.

The fact that this is considered a genre at all is worrisome. As gamers, we’ve collectively assented to the idea that we want to organize our passion into, broadly, two categories: those with shooting and those without. That’s problematic for a number of reasons, namely that the simulated murder of people, whether in particularly gruesome ways or in more normalized ways as is more predominant now (the latter form of game being more popular, I think, in the late 90s, when “xtremeosity” was the order of the day), will never, ever sit right with me.

Now, let’s get this straight: I’m not some kind of evangelical moralist. I do find shooting and gunplay reprehensible, to be certain, but from a sociological standpoint rather than some ephemeral, likely Judeo-Christian position untethered from any real-world connections. I don’t think that video game violence leads to real world violence, and while I’m perhaps a bit more regulatory than most, the idea that the ESRB is any kind of authority on the “maturity” of a game is worrisome and could border on censorship (their puritanical views on sex, for instance, while allowing the bloody dismemberment of human beings in games, is backwards to say the least). I can recognize that North America has a gun problem, but on the list of factors that play into that, video games are pretty low on the totem pole. Obviously, the effects of colonialism, socio-economic circumstances and education play a much larger role.

But simulated killing is still deeply awful to me. There’s no form of release there – I never want to murder a person in real life, so why should I have any kind of power fantasy about doing in a virtual space? Games that have killing be their primary form of interaction have taken that original concept of the video game – that is, objective + obstacle = video game – and made human beings the obstacle. I don’t understand why so few people see the problem in that. And in modern video gaming terms, there's very little playfulness to any of this. Outside of Vanquish and a few other instances, developers are treating their shooty games with the gravitas reserved usually for Miramax Oscar contenders, and that's something that's patently ridiculous.

Indeed, the issue of modern video gaming, as concerned with murder as it is, is in my view one of the largest barriers to progress and social acceptability for gaming as a whole. We’re largely not moving the kinds of interactions we can have with a game forward because we’re content to shoot at things as the only form of interaction.

Let’s move beyond the (probably mostly personal) feeling that shooting and killing is weird and unnecessary. What’s potentially even worse is the blasé acceptance with which so many “modern classics” treat this as a means of mainstream acceptability. Last year’s two overwhelming choices for game of the year were Red Dead Redemption and Mass Effect 2. Both games were praised for their world building, their interactions with people, the amazing stories and vistas they both presented. But there’s no getting around the fact that, completely independently of any particular narrative need for it, the primary gameplay of both of those games (besides running from point A to point B) is shooting things. How can gamers reconcile the fact that we’re supposed to identify with the main characters of these games while simultaneously racking up a body count that would make the craziest serial killer in the world wipe a tear from his eye? The worst part is that in both of these games, shooting shouldn’t even be necessary. Sure, guns were a big part of the old west, but even famed gunslingers from that era probably didn’t kill more than a dozen people. And in Mass Effect 2, there’s the idea that diplomacy can be used, forefronted in all of the protracted speaking segments, but every single section of the game ends in some sort of overlong corridor shooting segment.

Oh, but shooting is a part of this world? Well, that’s a pretty clichéd setup to build your game upon. This fundamental unwillingness to go outside of the rather strict bounds in place for the question of “what is a video game” has created a stagnant creative pool, one where it’s acceptable to continue pushing the bounds of “bigger and better” shooting and action segments, instead of doing anything at all interesting. There’s a real god complex to a lot of these games; not in the ActRaiser sense, but in the sense that gamers are being given the ability to take life at will. There’s a lot more from life than that that could be integrated into our video game experiences, but when we’re complacent,  we get the video games we deserve.