It’s up to us to shape the industry

Opinion by Matt Wadleigh, published on Thursday 2nd July 2009

Benj Edwards, a freelancer for Gamasutra, recently wrote an opinion piece for the site that really got me thinking.

The article, titled “Can Games Become Virtual Murder?”, wonders out loud about the direction our industry is headed as violent video games become more popular and improvements in technology make games more realistic. The piece is pure opinion and includes no evidence to support the claims, but the goal of Edward’s argument isn’t to say that something bad is happening, just that it might and that we should all discuss it before it does. Edwards argues that while the more cartoon violence of DOOM or Mortal Kombat could be excused because it was very clearly a cartoon, games like Bioshock and others feature recognizable, realistic humans that the player is forced to kill in order to progress.

The article goes on to argue that, as technology improves (as it always does), the representation of human beings in games are going to become more and more realistic, not just in terms of their graphical representation as we approach photo-realism, but also in their behaviors as artificial intelligence improves. Add in the fact that Microsoft is developing a natural user interface for Project Natal on the Xbox 360 that reacts to your motions instead of inputs on a controller and you could, in Edwards’ opinion, be moving closer to something like the Holodeck from “Star Trek.” And when/if that happens, is killing still acceptable when what you’re killing is “a 99 percent realistic virtual human?”

It’s an interesting argument, particularly when it comes from someone in the industry, instead of some outsider. Personally, I think the point is probably moot simply because of market forces. While Edwards only hints at it towards the end, I think the market wouldn’t respond very well to realistic murder simulators. Commercially, I think future games that really, really simulate murder, making it personal and forcing players to bear witness to the suffering and pain and gamut of emotions that come when killing a human being, just isn’t marketable. I certainly don’t want to do that. There are already people that can’t watch movies like “Hostel” because they’re too hard, too real and painful. Those people can’t watch actors do it in movies for pretend, so I don’t think they’re going to line up to do it themselves in a situation that’s even more realistic than the one presented in “Hostel.” I’m sure that there are people out there that will be into that, but these products will exist in the same place that rape simulators like RapeLay do now: little played and nearly universally shunned by the large majority of players.

When mainstream future games incorporate murder, I imagine that they’ll only be able to “get away with it” if the death isn’t gratuitous and there’s a point to it. I imagine smarter games in the future, ones where we’ll be chased by madmen through photo-realistic virtual worlds, and the game will climax with a finale where you’ll have to finally take them down (your one and only murder in the whole game). The smart, well-crafted games of the future will use the fear of death and manipulate the players natural emotional and physical repulsion to inflicting violence and pain on others to create compelling experiences. The genocides that we as gamers commit now when we play Call of Duty 4 or BioShock will be a thing of the past as we’ll move toward a future that makes death a powerful part of the narrative. We’ll certainly still see violence and death in our games, but it will be smarter and serve a point in the future.

If anything, I don’t think the violence and death are things we need to be concerned with. I think realistic creations of sex are going to cause much bigger headaches. This is an area few video games are even willing to explore at this point, even games filled with rampant depictions of murder. Sex simulators aren’t that far off and I imagine that there’s a market for rape simulators and “games” that recreate other acts of sexual depravity.

As of now, these products represent an incredibly small portion of the gaming market. But in the future, when the experience of sex is recreated to “99 percent” accuracy, when a person can experience, with sight and sound and proper reaction thanks to graphical and intelligence improvements, the experience of raping someone, of living out deviant sexual behaviors that were previously left to fantasy for fear of repercussions and shame, that’s when we will slide down the really, really slippery slope. While I like to imagine that few people really enjoy killing other human beings, most people get enjoyment out of their sexual fantasies, and some of those fantasies really clash with mainstream acceptability. I think it’s only inevitable that there will be spill-over from sex simulators, more so than murder simulators, simply because sex simulators will appeal to a much wider audience of participants than a murder simulator would. Alarmist news media of the future will report that the next serial rapist spent dozens of hours before his or her first rape in some seedy, back alley store that caters to that type of clientele.

But even then, I don’t think you’ll be able to “blame games” for that. There must be a point, coming sooner than later, where video games will be completely accepted as a valid form of entertainment, where they aren’t considered by mainstream society as a curiosity, a fad or the weaker sibling to movies and books. There’ll be a point when mainstream society can separate what is a “video game” and what isn’t, just in the same way that people don’t scorn all magazines because Hustler exists, or boycott all movies because Debby did Dallas. There will certainly be products that blur the edges, but I think games will reach such a level of ubiquity that legitimate games will be very easily differentiated from those products that cross the lines of morality to such a degree that they’re unacceptable to most everyone.

As gamers, it’s our responsibility to embrace and protect the products that blur the lines, but we must also be careful to not embrace the ones that do cross the lines in our fever to protect the medium. We need to respect the creativity of the artists creating our games, both now and in the future, but we also need to recognize that there are products that don’t deserve the same freedom. What are those products? That’s not for me or the government to decide. That’s left for you to form your own conclusions on and respond appropriately.

We sometimes forget that, as gamers, we have an important role in shaping the foundation of this industry, one that’s only coming into fruition at the same time that many of us are in the real-world. Though most of us do not create the games that we play, what we purchase and support now has a direct result on the games that we see in the years to come. It’s our responsibility then to make sure that we shape this industry in a way that will allow it to continue to flourish in ways we’re comfortable with. The point of this article, and Edwards’ piece, is not to push you to think one way or another, but to hopefully help you (and in a way, us) recognize how we’re impacting the industry and what the consequences of our behaviors now could have on future gaming.