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FPS Gaming and the 'Just-World Hypothesis'
Hugh Pickens writes "When people witness someone subjected to some misfortune, they're susceptible to suggestions that the person deserved it and thus see the misfortune as evidence of karma or justice – hence the 'just' in 'just-world hypothesis.' Now consider the controversial new first-person shooter Homefront, which has you play as a freedom fighter in an America occupied by a North Korean superpower. The introduction to the game goes to great lengths to relieve you of any moral misgivings you might have about plugging away at the enemies it's getting ready to throw at you. 'You see enemy soldiers not only brutalizing American civilians, but outright murdering a mother in front of her children and callously tossing corpses around,' writes James Madigan, a gamer with a Ph.D. in psychology. 'The message is clear: Hey, these guys are evil. When we give you a gun, shoot them and feel good about it.' Madigan says the interesting thing about Homefront is that it's not leaving any blanks to be filled, which robs the game of some narrative depth."
It doesn't matter if it's the North Korean army invading the United States or the American army invading Iraq.
Protect your nation. Kill the invaders.
Make them pay for the theft of your national resources with rivers of blood.
Good heavens. We have to make this right by making it be the US soldiers we're shooting.
Half Life 2 jumps to mind. You kill a guard with your crowbar; they're beating up this guy while his wife scream "please, somebody help". Tha'ts how you get your pistol.
Games aren't the real world. A World War I game that forces you to ask "wait, why am I shooting them again?" just isn't any fun. I think that's why people like WWII so much - by war standards, it was morally unambiguous.
Moral ambiguity bothers people. It's not enjoyable. It shouldn't be enjoyable, and it's good that it bothers us. Is it surprising that we don't like it in games?
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
On Babylon 5, one of Marcus's lines was that he took great comfort in the basic unfairness of the Universe. If it were basically fair, that would mean he deserved everything that happened to him.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
You know, in CoD: World at War, whenever I would play the Soviet campaign missions taking place in Berlin, all I could think about was the fact that, historically, most of the defenders of Berlin were either young teenage boys or men of middle age or older. Some volunteered, others were forcibly conscripted. No military training, with simple weapons that could be mass-produced quickly(google the VK 98 and the VG series of rifles). Conversely, the heroically portrayed Red Army was made up of conscripts and murdered and raped civilians as it crossed Eastern Europe(yes, the Germans murdered civilians as well-mostly Jews and suspected Communists). And you know what? To me, knowing this historical background actually makes these levels a lot more emotional and significant for me. Moral ambiguity has a lot more power to it and makes shooting games more, not less, fun. Read any soldier's memoirs. There is always this watershed moment, where the soldier pauses and realizes he is being told to, encouraged to, and rewarded for killing another person. It is a turning point for them, one that usually becomes a defining moment in their life. War is always at some point morally ambiguous, down to the individual level. If a game can actually accept this and embrace it, it will find itself being labelled as not simply another cookie cutter FPS, but as a legitimate and hard-hitting experience.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Most FPSes are not big on stories and choices. They are big on shooting things. There are games that focus more on story, but shooties are not them.
Heck some of the really popular shooties, the story is completely ignored by most players. Like Battlefield Bad Company 2. It is the online shooty I currently like. I have no idea what the story is, never tried the single player. It is US vs Russia but it doesn't really matter. It is people I am supposed to shoot vs people I am supposed to help. Heck, you swap sides each round.
People need to stop wanting games to be "perfectly real" or any of that shit. No, games need to be fun. Now for some games, that means a deep story, and maybe it means some hard choices. However for others, it means a bunch of baddies of some variety to shoot. Both are ok.
Homefront is an awful game with a couple of very exciting set-piece moments, like a confrontation on the Golden Gate Bridge that is kind of mind-blowing.
Unfortunately, it was touted for being story-driven (written by the guy from Red Dawn and apparently Apocolypse Now), while there is nearly no story at all. Here's the story: The resistance needs pilots. You are a pilot. They need to get you from Colorado to San Francisco. That's it. You do fly a helicopter once, for a brief time. But despite being a pilot, you're actually spending the whole time doing the "go from point A to point B while blowing the shit out of everything along the way". Because, of course, if a pilot is such a precious resource, the one thing you're going to do is throw him on the front line with a machine gun. That's it. There is no story other than "You are pilot going from point A to point B . . . on foot".
It looks fairly dated. Has a very "Half Life 2" feel to the presentation. And the whole "this is something new and you'll be amazed by the deep and thoughtful experience!" thing that they tried to push with their advertising campaign was betrayed by the first couple of minutes of game play, where the guy who fights along side you for awhile hands you a gun and says "shoot everything in the head". Oh, wow. Golly. That's new. I don't do that in EVERY OTHER FPS.
There's no survival aspect to it. No gripping story. The best thing about Homefront is the potential of what it *could* have been. That's pretty meaningless, since the finished product achieves none of that aspiration, at all.
Also, the article is making it up. There is no "controversy" over Homefront. That's just ridiculous.
I use a bit of irony to swap roles for our normal protaganists, and I'm modded troll. Yay.
The mods need to read Mark Twains "The War Prayer". Perhaps that will be blatant enough for getting through heads.
In an FPS, you're usually going to have someone who is portrayed negatively. It's nearly a given in the genre. If it was a game being aimed at a Moslem audience concerning the Crusades, you wouldn't expect it to portray the forces of Richard the LionHeart as nifty neato keen guys.
I do find it odd that people wonder if this is desensitizing people to killing the "other guys". Slashdot has long been a forum that mostly holds that violent video games and movies have no effect on people in the real world. Why doesn't that same idea hold here?