Can Games Become ‘Virtual Murder?’
You know, I used to laugh at the term “murder simulator” when it was bandied about by knee-jerk opponents of video game violence some years ago. Preposterous, I said: video games are video games — easily distinguishable from reality, and reasonable people know the difference between fantasy and reality. That was in the Mortal Kombat and Doom era, where the violence seemed cartoonish. And I love those games.
Then I played BioShock. For the first time, hell started to freeze over, and I found myself beginning to understand the critics’ point of view. As real-time computer graphics inch ever closer to absolute photorealism (which some industry professionals believe to be no more than 10-15 years away), violent video game critics’ arguments are slowly beginning to look more sane. And yes, you’re reading this from a life-long video game fan who staunchly opposes institutional artistic censorship.
But censorship is peanuts compared to the conundrums we’ll be facing in the future with our favorite hobby. Once our computer simulations of the real world (still called, somewhat quaintly, “video games”) begin to effectively duplicate reality, the issue of video game violence won’t be a matter of artistic merit or censorship anymore. It will quickly become a matter of morality, ethics, and law.
The coming storm is inevitable: turn one way, and you’ll see ever-more realistic portrayals of graphic, gratuitous human violence in games like BioShock, Grand Theft Auto 4, and Fallout 3. Then turn the other and observe the exponential explosion of computing power and graphics rendering potential driven my Moore’s law. Put two and two together, and you’ve got quite a mess brewing.
Welcome to the Slippery Slope
Within the next 10-20 years, your virtual victims in Grand Theft Auto 6 could look, sound, and behave exactly like a real human would if you stabbed him in the neck or shot him in the gut. There’d be plenty of blood, screaming, and carnage to go around. You could watch as they bleed to death in agony.
The funny thing is — and I’m just guessing — you wouldn’t want to do that in real life to a real human, so why would you want to do that in a video game? The violent scenario above seems silly now, but the stunningly realistic, PS3-era violent games we play today would have seemed unthinkably graphic just fifteen years ago.
At the moment, we rationalize our simulated violence with statements like: “It’s just a game. It’s not real. The people don’t suffer.” All this is true (at the moment); but as the experience of virtual murder becomes ever more realistic, I believe that we as players will begin to suffer emotionally every time we cause realistic suffering to any virtual person, just as if we caused suffering to real living creatures.
With each act of violence, a piece of us grows cold, calloused, and uncaring towards the well being of others. Repeat that, and we become slowly desensitized to pain and suffering.
As gamers, we’ve already begun desensitizing ourselves to simulated murder, or else we wouldn’t be able to play the violent games we have now. Games featuring endless killing for points are nearly as old as video games themselves, with Space Invaders, (1978) probably being the most influential. Back in 1992, Wolfenstein 3D was the most graphically realistic simulation of murder you could find in a video game. It shocked people (including the author) at first.
But as the body count racked up, each Nazi became easier to kill until we no longer had a second thought about the act. The same desensitizing effect stretches back to every violent video game that pushed the limits of realism — all the way back the early arcade title Death Race (1976), where players mowed down human-like “gremlins” with a car.
Today, we see older violent games like Wolfenstein 3D as primitive and cartoonish, but technology didn’t stop there. As the years went by, graphical realism in violent games continued to ratchet up as each generation of software took advantage of the increased computing power available to it.
As violent graphics have grown more convincing, we as a gaming populace continued to de-sensitize in tandem. Despite leaps and bounds in graphical rendering power, Death Race‘s kill-everything gameplay stayed the same. We’re still killing those gremlins and Nazis, but today they look a lot more like people you’d find on the street.
In fact, due to our continued cultural desensitization toward violence in video games, certain game developers kept pushing the limits culturally thematically with ever more violent, gory, and shocking gameplay than before — what was once forbidden was forbidden no longer, so it took a greater controversy to get attention. Thankfully, this quest for controversial violence is not a universal goal of the industry, but there are always the standouts who effectively “push culture forward” by testing the boundaries of what we consider acceptable.
So, for the moment, we’re ok, right? Photorealistic graphics aren’t here yet, and we continue to justify our violent entertainment by saying “it’s not real.” But if we’re not careful, we’ll be justifying our consumption of violent games all the way to, say, 2030 when, thanks to photorealistic graphics and improved mind-machine interfaces, the experience of virtual murder may be nigh-but-indistinguishable from reality. Read more ›
