Of Game Controllers and Mind Control

While I appreciate the mention, it's a little disconcerting to have a single sentence separate me from Benj Edwards' recent screed against violent video games.  Edwards channels the old slippery slope argument that as games get more and more realistic, the violence portrayed therein will become further inextricable from our psyche:

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.

Call me a stalwart proponent of the common sense of the individual, but I've always believed that the player brings the persona to the gameplay, not the other way around.  Congresspersons, writers in cyber-psychology journals, and staunch moral advocates have argued for too long that games are seemingly overpowered rhetorical tools that act upon the passive individual like mind control.

Games have meaning and rhetorical power, sure, but that operates within the active mind of the player insofar as the player is a willing recipient of some forms of meaning over others. 

That is, whether you're talking about children or adults, gamers are not a blank slate.  If I kill umpteen innocent people in Grand Theft Auto 4, I'm actively reflecting on the meaning of their deaths, even in a very minor sense related to an overall goal (e.g., accidentally running them over on the way to an objective, fulfilling the game's perverse sandbox mentality, or killing in relationship to a particular goal or achievement).

That doesn't make Edwards wrong, however.  There very well could be, and most likely are, many game players who over-imbibe the signs of violence portrayed by pixels and polygons and under-imbibe the signified of "What am I supposed to make of this heinous act?"

My question is, Doesn't that depend on the individual?  One's psyche in an exceptionally complex thing, created from an inestimable number and varying quality of experiences.  [Edit: My fiance rightfully pointed out that innate factors contribute to the human psyche as well.  Furthermore, one could argue that both Edwards and I claim that experience shapes the psyche.  That would be correct, although my point is simply that one should not be so reductive as to claim that one experience absolutely WILL directly shape the psyche, and will do so in a predictable manner.]

Moreover, we carry our baggage with us.  When I play a game, I lug around the baggage of amateur art critic, peaceful humanist, and Levinas-style ethicist.  No matter how realistic the graphics or violent acts portrayed, it would take more than 30 hours of gameplay to somehow override the latent impulses formed from 27 years of life on this planet... or even 8 years, if I were only a child.

None of this is predetermined.  You'd most likely have to be me in order to accurately anticipate how I react to a given game.  Hell, being good or bad in Fable 2 might be a choice predicated, not just on my baggage, but also on the kind of day I was having.

It's not a bad thing to theorize correlations between the artifacts of our culture and the culture itself.  Such is the work of rhetoricians, film scholars, literary critics, and so on.

But we have to move past the fallacious assumption that we know exactly what will happen when something as terrifically mystifying and complex as human violence is put in front of an individual's psyche.  We can't know.  That's partially what makes it so fun to tell stories to one another.

Comments

[Erik Hanson]

It looks like you're poised to strike at something good between your disagreement with Benj and your comments last week in your "Eff the Police?" post -- providing you don't slip into the easy escape of "it's OK to kill bad people." I look forward to reading your differentiation.

[Matthew G Kaplan]

Well, in the Police post, I wasn't really trying to insinuate that marginalizing the police as a faceless entity was bad for children or the human psyche... it was more a criticism of the quality of the games as an artifact of our culture. There was something about GTA4 that felt ethically inauthentic to me given the world the game was trying to construct, and the Police argument sums it up. That isn't to say, however, that I can (or should) predict how GTA4 does or does not adjust an individual's disposition with regard to the police force.

Thanks once again for looking this over, Erik! :)

[Dan Barthel]

You're on target. We grew up alongside video game violence, television violence, lyrical violence, violence in gym class, violence in history lessons, violence in nature, and in general, violence anywhere it can possibly fit. Things have likely been that way since the dawn of humanity--the only thing that changes is the number of available outlets. As far as I can tell, we're no crazier than anyone else.

[Benj Edwards]

You raise some very interesting points, Matthew. I'm glad that my editorial has made smart people like you (and no, I'm not being sarcastic) stop and think about these issues a little deeper. That was my main intention with the piece on Gamasutra, and it seems like it worked. All the best. -- Benj

[Matthew G Kaplan]

Thanks for taking the time to read the reaction post, Benj. I hope you found it to be more constructive than critical.