Note: I wrote this entry during December of last year. Jasmine no longer plays Halo 3 with me, she says it's too hard. We play Lego Star Wars on the Wii instead. If I'm playing Halo 3 or Call of Duty 4 and they want to watch then I'll let them do that, but most often they would rather I turned it off off and put in Lego Star Wars. Also, I downloaded the demo of Bioshock in order to evaulate whether or not I wanted to purchase it. I had heard a lot of buzz and this game does have amazing graphics. But it also has an incredibly disturbing storyline and is filled with horrific images and scenes. After playing it for 15 minutes I turned it off and deleted the demo from the hard drive. I just can't justify owning a game in which I wouldn't feel comfortable if the kids walked in while I was playing it.
Kyle Wilson over at GameArchitect.net wrote an interesting piece titled "The Flow of Intentional Gameplay (or why the Wii is winning, yet people still don't play Rock Paper Scissors Lizard Spock)". You should read it. Kyle weighs in on the discussion of violence in games with some great insights and observations. In true Coding Horror fashion I've paraphrased a few of my favorite comments.
Because I work in the game industry, people I meet from outside the industry frequently ask me, "Oh, aren't video games today really violent?" And the answer is yes, they are, as far as it goes, but that's really missing the point. Games aren't movies or books. They're not about the violence. They're games, like chess, or checkers. As Johnson writes in Everything Bad is Good for You, "De-emphasizing the content of game culture shouldn't be seen as a cop-out. We ignore the content of many activities that are widely considered to be good for the brain or the body. No one complains about the simplistic, militaristic plot of chess games." Even though the body count in chess is on par with the average Splinter Cell game.
That's an interesting comment about chess. My little 7-year-old girl is in a chess club at her school. I should mention that Jasmine views chess club as an extension of school, and while it is fun, it doesn't quite qualify as "play-time" in her mind.
Games are about violence because you can't have flow without challenge and the most natural expression of challenge is conflict. Look at the games children play, look at team sports, and you'll see over and over again simulations of hunting and small-scale tribal warmaking. That doesn't mean we're programming our children to be monsters. It just means that the human race spent most of the last hundred thousand years in small nomadic hunting bands that were constantly at war with one another, and that the people who were hardwired to enjoy football and Unreal Tournament were the ones predisposed to survive.
Heh, I don't have to program Tyler, my little 3-year-old boy, to be a monster because he already is one.
When you shoot other characters in a modern first-person shooter, they erupt in great gouts of blood. "Isn't that horrible?" the soccer moms wonder. And the answer, of course, is no, it's feedback.
A game isn't a movie. In a movie, explosions of gore exist to elicit a visceral response from the audience--disgust, or bloodlust, or satisfaction, depending on the movie and the character spilling the gore. In a game, explosions of gore exist to communicate to the player that he's successfully engaging his target. The impact particle system may be bigger or smaller depending on the weapon used, to let the player know how much damage he's doing. In F.E.A.R., there's a weapon called a plasma rifle that dissolves enemies, leaving behind nothing but a charred skeleton. The effect is rather like what happens to the *** at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. But in Raiders, the effect was designed to inspire the audience's awe at divine justice. It was part of a narrative. In F.E.A.R., the effect is designed to communicate to the player: this is a devastatingly effective weapon on unarmored targets.
In Half Life 2, levels are populated with two varieties of barrels. There are bright red barrels that explode when shot, damaging any living thing nearby. And there are drab brown barrels that don't explode, no matter how many times you shoot them. HL2 has garnered a lot of praise for realism, but this clearly isn't a realistic conceit. In real life, I go weeks at a time without seeing explosive barrels, and when I do (usually on the back of a truck festooned with hazmat warnings), they look just like non-explosive barrels. Explosive objects look different in games because their appearance provides feedback to the player. A player who can recognize explosive parts of the environment can plan more effectively. The feedback of a bright red barrel allows the player to better realize his intention, and the cost in realism is a small price to pay for better gameplay.
This article was great food for thought, but don't let me bias you with my own predispositions, read it yourself and come to your own conclusions. Either you'll agree with Kyle or you'll be saying that chess isn't the same as Halo 3 and we shouldn't be comparing apples to oranges (or something else along those lines). You'll be surprised to know that I agree with both of those positions, which is why I occasionally let my kids play Halo 3 with me. 