What Game Violence Can Teach

An anonymous reader writes "Julian Murdoch from GamersWithJobs asks the question 'Can game violence be good?' in a provocative article entitled The Red Suit. After a week playing Introversion Software's Wargames-inspired nuke game Defcon, his answer is that it can be, if not good, then at least informative. 'I admit that in a rousing teamspeak game of Defcon I am not drawn into bouts of real-time reflection. But on closing down the game for the night, I find myself oddly thoughtful: sad, reflective, a bit fragile. But not upset, and not wanting to wipe the game off my hard drive. Violence in games can teach us things. It can reach us in ways beyond mere titillation. It's all about context.'"

Comments

Defcon is interesting

[Broken scope]

Many people know what MAD means. However they can't quite graps WHAT it means. Defcon can kind of show you that. When it announces a"winner" it almost feel sarcastic to me. Then you look at your casualties.

Re:Defcon is interesting

[vertinox]

Many people know what MAD means. However they can't quite graps WHAT it means. Defcon can kind of show you that. When it announces a"winner" it almost feel sarcastic to me. Then you look at your casualties.

I'm addicted to Defcon and realized I have started to think like the guys at Norad. I consider having more than 50 million people left a victory.

My goal is to simply find and destroy all silos first through conventional weaponry and save my silos for the very last moment... Which means I sacrifice a few cities in the process by not defending them.

Often times this is sucessful and I can use subs and bombers to hit the silos before they can launch more than 5 nukes in which my missle defense units can handle.

However, if they get 6 nukes in the air at any given target, my systems are hard pressed to get them all.

That said, I know that 6+ nukes at any target will get through if I time it so they all fire within 10 seconds of each other. That and if the sub is close enough to the city, I don't even have to shoot more than one nuke.

It makes me wonder if the strategists sitting in bunkers in the Rocky Mountains or in Siberia had pondered on these same issues... How many millions of people are we willing to let die in order to win? Or how many do we need to kill?

Defcon has a neat system of genocide vs survival mode in which one game you try to kill as many wheras the other you try to take as less casualties as possible. I've been doing a few Diplomacy games, but those never work out because someone drops and everyone just hits the AI...

Re:Defcon is interesting

[Dr. Eggman]

Diplomacy is an interesting versus AI mode. The best design idea they had in that mode is not letting allies see your subs without sonar. I wanted to tryout a little cold war style senario today, 2 territories: America and Europe for me; Russia and South Asia for the AI. I intended to make every possible decision towards ultimatly wiping out the AI in a massive first strike, just to kind of see what the whole Cold war scare was. Bombers in Alaska; Navy's surrounding them; subs where their navys were not; I had everything set up. You could really feel the tension; I watched as the AI subtly set all it's silos to launch mode as my navys stopped moving.

And then I broke the Alliance.

Everything seemed like it was in slow motion (mainly because I needed real-time to be able to coordinate a launce of all my weapons at once.) In the end, I won. Or atleast I thought I had. Until I turned on the people overlay...I nearly cried.


Sometimes...sometimes... if you zoom-in reeeally close... you can hear them screaming...

Personal vs. Abstract Violence

[TechDock]

Rather than the question, "Can violence be good?" the more interesting point of the article to me is the difference between real, personal violence as opposed to abstract, wipe-out-billions-with-one-blow violence. The author finds that playing the part of an attacker in a rape prevention class is both draining and emotionally disturbing, as might be expected. Then he compares that to virtually blowing away an entire country, which he finds disquieting in an abstract way, but not particulary emotionally touching.

This demonstrates one of the dangers of discussing violence in videogames: there is no way we can experience the same visceral reaction to videogame violence that we do to real violence. Trying to compare real world violence to videogame violence is like reading about climbing about Mount Everest and actually doing it; a superficial similarity, but not the same thing.

Of course violence CAN be good

[thebaron2]

Of course it can be good.
War sims, like America's Army, can obviously be put to good use in training and preparing soldiers for urban settings, teaching them to think critically in a "big picture" sense and visualize the entire battlefield, etc...
The more important question is does violence "teach" gamers anything in a real world sense of the issue, and I'd say the answer is a resounding no.
Not that they're incapable of it, but rather that games today aren't developed to teach us life-long moral lessons. For the stickler that's going to point me towards a lonely moral-laden game, suffice it to say that popular games aren't made with this intention, or, conversely, games with a moral intention don't become popular.
Until there's an audience of a reasonable size that is demanding this sort of moral game that induces self-reflection, it shouldn't surprise anyone that those types of games don't get supplied, at least not in any significant quantity.

Defcon is *supposed* to make you think

[netcrusher88]

The poster writes that when he comes away from a game of Defcon, he feels reflective, kind of sad, about it. I think that's exactly what Introversion Software wants. It's a great game, yeah, but when you play for a while and then notice, for the first time, distorted coughs and crying played randomly as part of the soundtrack, it kind of makes you stop and think. It's like, damn, I did that.

I think most games are not capable of teaching the dark side of violence. I hate to keep going back to it, but GTA is convenient here. You get points for killing. Other, less controversial games, too. Most FPS's, to an extent. Even that one racing game (Burnout?) where one game mode involves causing as much damage as you possibly can. Most games depict a cartoonish, unreal, detached violence.

Not to sound like an advertisement, but I got the same feeling of the violence making you think in Introversion's Darwinia, too. You get attached to the Darwinians, and then you have to send hordes of them to battle the virus infection. And when they do kill viruses, you have to go collect the souls of virus and Darwinian alike.

Personally, I'd like to see more games that have a more realistic depiction of violence.

Re:I've learned a lot from games.

[kalirion]

I've learned a lot from games as well.

Lightning bolt! Lightning bolt! Lightning bolt! Lightning bolt!

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Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:should teach context for safe outlets

[Anonymous Coward]

Games are supposed to be a way to virtually get out frustrations that are illegal and wrong to do in real life.

Actually I'd have said "games let you me fun things I'd never get to do in real life". Like being a Jedi, or flying a fighter plane, or having sex.

None of these things are necessarily illegal, but I just don't get to do them.

That said why aren't there more sex simulators? (checks to see if "post anonymous" is on)

Violent games teach that in war you get VERY DEAD

[Drake42]

Who in their right mind would enter a real war scenariou after playing a few rounds of counter-strike?
I used to be very good, top of the server for ten games streaks. Almost never did I survive every single round. If I can't survive after extensive in-game training with nerfed weapons what makes me think I'd survive a real war where people are really honest trying to make my life stop.

GTA is a tonne of fun, but how much would I pay it if every wrecked car involved watching my character sit in the hospital for two weeks? Only a moron doesn't make that connection.

Killing thousands of zombies in Dead Rising doesn't make me think, 'hey killing people is easy' except to the extent that I think 'hey, if it's this easy for me to kill somebody, then it's that easy for someone to kill me. Shit.'

Personally I'd like violent games to come with the insane warning stickers you see on appliances:

WARNING: If you try this in Real Life you will LOSE LIMBS, ENTER A VEGATIVE STATE or DIE PAINFULLLY.
WARNING: Save game technology DOES NOT EXIST in Real LIfe
WARNING: Acceptable in-game behavior may result in getting A KNEE SLAMMED INTO YOUR CROTCH in Real Life

Are you kidding me?

[bashibazouk]

GTA teaches two really important lessens:

No matter how good a driver you think you are, if you drive recklessly fast your car is going to get banged up and will probably end in a fiery crash.

If you push the law, you can run but in the end the police are going to bust you and usually in a particularly violent manner.

Re:should teach context for safe outlets

[misleb]

In short, those people are just stupid, and should be removed from the gene pool.

Oh, the irony!