Martin Nerurkar posted a short opinion piece on his personal blog and Gamasutra that I think most gamers can relate to. He describes his frustration with a certain ethical quandry posed by Kane and Lynch: Dead Man. The game's introduction provides the player with a seemingly empathetic, redeemably flawed protagonist and then forces the player to kill several no-name police officers during the course of story. For Nerurkar, this didn't just represent a narrative disruption, but a gameplay one:
Again my image of the protagonist as the narrative had presented him to me was diverging from the game mechanics. My Kane was not a peaceful man and he'd have no qualms about gunning down "bad guys" but he wouldn't shoot cops. The problem though is that the game forces you to kill cops. A LOT of them. Almost the entire first half of the game is entirely made up of firefights with the police.
The first thing that came to mind when I read this was my recent playthrough of Grand Theft Auto IV, in which protagonist Niko Bellic is presented as both morally ambivalent and wildly sadistic, sometimes depending on the supporting cast present in a given scene. Even the two similar endings of that game (**SPOILER ALERT**) stress the irony of this inconsistency: Niko rants to the dying baddie about how either Kate or Roman (depending on who gets killed prior to the final mission) never meant anyone harm and didn't deserve death. But how can someone who has taken so much innocent life in the name of money and vengeance claim a moral stance?
This seems to solidify the story writers' point when we are presented a final shot of the Statue of Liberty against the Liberty City skyline: The American Dream requires compromise, sometimes of one's morals.
Yet I left that game largely irritated by Niko's waffling. I think Nerurkar's post hit it home.
Don't the police matter?
Of course, there's never the pretense that Niko Bellic is a good guy, or even a particularly sympathetic one. We get flashes of compassion, but that is always quickly extinguished when Niko feels threatened. Still, the game has a heavy moral presence, even if it's not always bought into by the protagonist. Many characters in the game talk about right and wrong; sometimes this is satirized (as in the case of the fame-hungry Manny Escuela) and sometimes it is presented very straightforwardly (via Kate and Mikhail's wife, Ilya). It would be incorrect to assume that GTA IV never puts the idea of innocence out there for the player to consider.
Unfortunately, the police are never factored into this. As in many similar crime games, GTAIV's police are enviromental obstacles--nameless, faceless cardboard cutouts (with the sole exception of the extremely corrupt Francis McReary). During the bank heist mission, Niko has to kill A LOT of them... and never once does the game compel the player to reflect on this.
Sure, supporting characters are killed off and the situations are either played for bittersweet moral gravity or black humor. But what about the cops? If the game were skewed more towards dark black humor as with the previous entries, this might be forgivable. In GTAIV, however, a game in which the consequences of one's actions are all too often the subject of long cutscenes, the absence of such reflection about killing police officers rings particularly false.
Okay, so these are crime games.... What about other types of games? I began to think about how many games seem to lionize the exploits of the common military man--in the age of Rainbow Six, SOCOM, and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, the military squad shooter has become a genre unto itself.
But what kind of roles do police officers play? On the villain side, you have your standard dirty cops, symbols of oppressive government, or cardboard cutouts. On the hero side, you tend to have rogue or outcast cops (Max Payne, Death to Rights, Condemned, True Crime) and/or completely unrealistic superhero cops (Crackdown, NARC). I strained to think of a game that portrayed the police as a heterogeneous group of individuals, many of whom can be considered heroic. The only ones I could come up with were the Sierra Police Quest/SWAT series... a series born largely out of the Dirty Harry films and the flashy cop dramas of the '80s.
How did this happen? If a game had a character kill hordes of U.S. soldiers, you would think it would also give the player pause to reflect on the severity of this task. But gamers are often forced to dispose of police officers without a second thought. Why aren't police officers ever really considered one of us?
The first answer I could come up with was that an ordinary police officer was considered too banal to be a protagonist. Game heroes are either superhumans or tortured souls, right? But then I came back to the military example. Ding Chavez does some extraordinary things in the Rainbow Six games, but no one could accuse him of being a despondent, suffering drunk or a pumped-up Schwarzenegger ripoff.
The way I see it, it comes down to two things:
1. We just don't romanticize the police force in a positive way anymore. The days of CHIPS and Miami Vice are gone, replaced by the turgid melodrama of Law and Order and CSI. On the other hand, despite counterprogramming like the brilliant war film Jarhead, the life of a soldier is still romanticized... probably because that's how we still recruit many of our children to get excited about the prospect of dying for the whims of old men. (Before you write in with hate-mail, please consider this a criticism of the impetus for modern warfare, not a condemnation of the brave men and women in our military.)
2. Games are too often marketed as countercultural and subversive (ala the GTA series) to buy into the idea of trust in authority.
These are just theories. I don't pretend that everyone will get on board with these ideas or start rallying for more games with cop heroes. After all, not all cops are heroes. They're human beings, with very real flaws, just like your average soldier. And it's much easier to see the flaws of the ever-present police authority if you're, say, a rebellious youth or an oft-castigated minority... prime targets for entertainment marketing.
But many cops can be considered heroic. Every day, men and women of our police force are asked to do things that would test the boundaries of other citizens, and they are compelled to do their jobs with the utmost dignity and courage. (Side note: Have we so quickly forgotten the public sentiment following 9/11?)
I'm reminded of a Communications class I took as an undergrad. During one lecture, the professor claimed that the police department was an inherently racist construct. I argued that that was too broad a generalization to cast upon a group of individuals who often have to make crucial decisions individually. While police are indeed asked to adhere to a common code, it would be unproductive to imagine every officer as an amoral pawn in a collective. (Incidentally, that college class was the only one I ever got a non-A grade in.)
I'd ask game developers to remember the same thing. Over-generalizing or marginalizing a group of people for the sake of cheap action is just that: cheap. There's a certain amount of generalizing that has to be done in order to create a game's "bad guys," but if we truly consider video games to be a socially relevant medium, it's time to reflect on all aspects of society, even the seemingly banal and hard-to-market ones.
Hey Matthew,
glad you found my little post intriguing enough to inspire you. I don't think I have much to add to your article though.
Posted by: Martin Nerurkar | 06/29/2009 at 12:51 AM