Max used to play videogames, but now his training and full-time work devour his time. When I asked if he thought game violence was comparable to the real thing, he answered “No, real life is worse. Games are made for fun and I never felt any anger when I played. The emotions from playing games, compared to real confrontation are worlds apart.”
If your average gamer were to witness a gunshot wound, I’m sure they wouldn’t ‘woop’ like they may in-game. It’s just a case of the government patronising our intelligence, not trusting us to separate fantasy from reality.
For a more balanced debate I spoke to a pacifist, Fredrik deBoer. Freddie, is a graduate student at Purdue University, where he studies literacy education and also writes for the New Inquiry.
He had quite the story to tell regarding his feeling towards pacifism: “Like any political orientation, I came to pacifism through a variety of sources: my upbringing was generally that of the socialist left, coming from both of my parents. My grandfather was an old-school pacifist who opposed the USA’s entrance into the first world war”.
“In my early twenties I was more of a typical left-wing critic of US intervention than a full-fledged pacifist, but during a period when anti-war organising was a 30 hour a week job for me, I saw how dedicated the Quakers (a Christian sect) I knew were. I was reading books by Martin Luther King and Thich Nat Hahn, and I thought, there's a moral challenge here, and if I'm going to say I have beliefs, it's time to stand for them”.
I asked his opinion towards martial arts, and surprisingly he watched it. I questioned whether this conflicted with his beliefs and he cited “consent” as the differentiating factor.
I enquired the difference between two fighters consenting, and two squadrons of paid soldiers at war, “Soldiers may consent” he said, “But everyone affected by war does not. There has never been an armed conflict that has not involved the projection of violence against those who have not consented”. His point was valid, and there’s a huge gulf separating the two.
“Also, consider the conditions of an MMA fight”, he continued, “It's vastly safer to fight in an organized competition than to get into some random fight on the street: there are coaches, refs, doctors, paramedics… If people have aggression that they want to express through fighting, I'm much happier if they do it under those conditions. No one has died, that I'm aware of, in professional MMA”. I believed he was correct, but when I checked the facts, it seemed that three have died since the sport’s inception – the most recent being 11 August 2012.
Freddie said that he enjoyed videogames, and was currently playing XCOM.
I asked if he was worried about violence in games escalating in tandem with graphical fidelity. “I think videogames are like any other kind of artwork, in that they should be evaluated on multiple levels, particularly when it comes to portraying violence or cruelty. One thing I realised when I was first moving in the direction of explicit pacifism, is that many of us have the problem in America of only interpreting violence as a distant or unreal idea”.
The problem isn’t fantasy manifesting as violence, but violence itself has become a twisted caricature. People aren’t becoming desensitised, but it’s something seen on TV, in far off wars, fought by strangers. All media turns violence into a myth for privileged cultures, so why are games scapegoated?
The parallel has been drawn before: comics, rock&roll…We live in a society terrified by change, or people with different interests; maybe this stems from the desire of previous generations to justify their own passions.
“I think that some videogames should be portrayals of a realistic world, and sadly the real world has a lot of violence in it”. He continued, “At the same time, that's not an artistic excuse, and I think a responsible critical evaluation of a video game should consider its stance towards violence”.
Indeed graphic content in games should be analysed, but you see much worse in your local cinema. “But as far as blaming video games for violence,” he continued “I think it's a classic symptom of our current, which is that we mistake the virtual for the real”.
The big question is: are games responsible for the glorification of violence? “The conversation, at least as far as I've seen, tends to boil down into two extremes: either video games are directly responsible for desensitizing children to violence and should be regulated, or video games have no effect on the people who play them.”
