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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.
Homefront - Thrilling Gameplay Experience
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFVz6-A75Fc
Homefront tells the tale of one nation's struggle against the tyranny of locked doors.
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I don't think Slashdot sould dignify some things with a article. This game, probably don't deserve one, has is just another COD clone.
-Woof woof woof!
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.
They'll get their karmic reward for the narrative depth theft by no one buying the game.
Narrative depth, not gameplay depth. Any deep thinker will be unsatisfied with a totally unambiguous set of circumstances and characters. On the other hand, those types tend not to play many video games anyway...
Shooters are rooted in well, shooting. Whatever moral conflict you may have about the taking of a life is quickly resolved and cast aside as you blast your way through hundreds, even thousands of enemies over the course of the game. Any hesitation must necessarily have been overcome in the first few minutes in these games.
This is largely due to the power fantasies that accompany the shooter genre. Players are powerful, and their "shooting" ability must be sufficient to overcome all obstacles thrown at them. Justification is needed to resolve the dissonance stemming from gunning down so many enemies. Uncharted is one example of a (great) game that has received some criticism for failing to address this point. Charming off-the-cuff quips are jarringly out of place after slaughtering hundreds of men. Even after the protagonist is himself shocked at the prospect of shooting museum security guards, and is instead offered tranquilizer darts, these guards are sedated right off walkways to fall several stories down. Or off the edge of rooftops where the fall is almost certainly fatal. The justification for shooting is made necessary by the nature of shooters.
So here's an interesting idea from the "Extra Credits" guys at www.escapistmagazine.com .
How about a game where you're a widowed mother trying to get your children to safety across war-torn Europe? The objective is clear, the motivation even more so. The focus would not be on charging into violence, but avoiding it where possible, or using it as an ugly means to a necessary end. A challenging premise for game design, and for game writers. It offers the potential to challenge the players with things like:
-Dialogue of a mother trying to raise children to be good people in an awful environment.
-Deciding what taboos may need to be broken to get the children to safety. Perhaps she will need to kill a man to protect them...and then explain to them why it was right (or wrong?) for her to do that. Perhaps she will need to sleep with a guard so the kids can slip past...but burdened with the memory of what happened.
-Being asked to risk your safety and that of your children on behalf of someone else, or even someone else's children. (and again, having to justify your choices to your children later).***
-Comforting a child.
Extra Credits offered this idea up as part of a discussion on what it takes to create a "good female character". They posited that a good /female/ character is not simply a gender-neutral character that would be good regardless of gender (which would simply be a "good character"). Rather, a good female character is a character whose femininity is innately tied to who she is. This would be an opportunity for a strong female character to flourish as a result of her femininity, rather than a lack of the same. And sex appeal would not have to factor in anywhere either.
P.S:
***An interesting dilemma came up for me in Fable 2 *minor spoiler ahead*:
Once of the quests involves being tricked by a villain, and finding yourself and an innocent woman, placed in front of a demon demanding life force from one of you. This meant that one of you would be instantly aged into a shriveled husk. In the end, I gave the demon the girl. After all, it was just an AI character, whereas I was a real human being who would feel some regret at having my avatar tarnished for the rest of the game.
But I had a twinge of regret, I had been playing virtuous hero throughout the game until this point, rescuing others, and refusing reward whenever it was offered. But now I was not being asked to be the hero, I was asked to be the martyr. Being defaced was a purely visual effect, but a significant one because this was the first time the player is asked to actually give up something irreplaceable. This was the one time where I was asked to make a real sacrifice, however small it was. I was surprised to find myself a bit ashamed at my selfishness, and the event sparked some brief introspection. Great stuff for a videogame.
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
I noticed the same thing playing the (original) Assassins' Creed. Just before you assassinate someone, they are invariably shown performing some terrible crime; either the commission or ordering of brutal murder, the threat thereof, slave trading, or human mutilation.
Those who fail to understand communication protocols, are doomed to repeat them over port 80.
We fail to realize how much power we control over our lives. I once had a friend go on about this woman who was robbed. I was like she's the victim. He said yes, but she went un-escorted, at dusk, at a place that was known to have several robberies in the last couple of months, and was a known place to avoid for the last several years, when everyone knows there is a good chance you are coming out within 20 minutes, stepping out of a SUV with pearls on.
I don't think his point was that she deserved it, but that she was careless, and I agree. You can't "justify" the robber pointing a gun at her. You just can't. But she could have done some things differently. She is the victim, but she also put herself out there. Some would blame her, and that is perhaps where the "just" part comes in. I try not to pass judgment until I know all of the facts. Maybe she didn't know, but then she was still careless in not making it a point to know. And some therefore might not "feel sorry" for her. I do, she was ignorant more than likely. I mean really, who likes to play with fire unless they don't "really" understand how bad they can get burnt? Only the mentally ill, or someone who wants to get burnt...
As far as the game, I don't play them anymore, but if I did, I'd likely go along with it unless it made me uncomfortable, or just pretend there were different circumstances, as surely others will. I don't have reservations about harming someone to protect an innocent, but I do have reservations about killing someone unarmed, "enemy" or not. Again, we don't know all of the facts. And pushing hate/anger on someone in the form of a bullet is not going to make friends.
“The best way to destroy an enemy is to make him a friend.”
-- Abraham Lincoln
Like a city whose walls are broken down is a man who lacks self-control.
bind "mouse1" "hug"
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.
The Just World hypothesis is appropriately explained in the summary, but I don't think the excerpt describing the game actually works with the phenomenon.
(1) You see people of a certain uniform brutalizing people you assume are innocent.
(2) When you harm the brutalizers, your justification is "eye for an eye" on a national level.
There is no issue there and such judgments are not noteworthy.
What the "Just World Hypothesis" (better referred to as the "Just World Fallacy") actually describes is that pattern of humans seeking a means to place blame on victims while ignoring the free will of the offender.
So, if we're going to actually use the Just World Fallacy appropriately in the context of this game, we would have to personally make the assumption that the dominated did something to deserve their plight.
"Wow, NK is dominating USA in the game. Well, the USA probably had it coming... just look at American Idol." --- Just World Fallacy
Other, more pertinent places we see the Just World Fallacy:
"Ya, you were robbed, but you left your door unlocked. You deserve what you got."
"Ya, she was sexually assaulted, but she was dressed like a whore..."
"The boy was killed while legally crossing a street in a crosswalk. But he was dressed in black, so he had it coming."
"Her car was stolen, but it was her fault-- she left her keys in car."
Any deep thinker will be unsatisfied with a totally unambiguous set of circumstances and characters.
Unless they've been exposed to nebulous gray-area dramas their entire life. Even Scrappy-Doo has been used as a surprise villain recently. Scrappy Effing Doo. I predict that the new Smurfs movie will show complex motivations for both Gargamel and the Smurfs.
I find it funny when I play multi player FPS's I will get all fired up and yell at the enemy at how horrible and disgusting they are and how our team is so awesome and flawless, etc.
But when it comes time to balance teams and I get automatically switched, I'll start snubbing the team I was just on and start rooting for my new team.
I'm exaggerating a bit, but I do notice the whole us verses them attitude that can change in an instant when I switch teams. Always thought it was interesting.
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This is why enemies like zombies and Nazis are so popular in games - because they're unequivocally bad, and therefore, you shouldn't feel bad about shooting them. There are a few exceptions, of course: some games will let you do bad things and those games tend to be controversial (example: Grand Theft Auto and the Call of Duty scene where you're walking through a Russian airport killing civilians). Another common thing games and movies do is not showing you the face of the enemy - showing someone's face humanizes them, which makes killing them seem bad. Examples: Half-Life 2 soldiers have masks over their faces, storm troopers and a whole bunch of other Star Wars baddies have masks, Killzone enemies wear masks. In many cases, even Nazis wear masks (http://ui07.gamespot.com/806/returntocastlewolfenstein_2.jpg). In general, if you're supposed to like someone, they won't have a mask, and if they have a mask, they're probably bad.
(P.S. The Spy and Pyro in Team Fortess are always bad.)
Right on topic: if there's ambiguity, or if you suddenly start realizing that the opposition is human and can be sympathetic, it changes the whole FPS experience. And people know this, too, which is why we engage in demonization of our enemies in the run-up to a war: so we can less badly about killing them because we've already justified it to ourselves. We probably have to do that in order to survive, but propaganda is the least attractive form of advertising.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
My brother always played Panzer General with the Germans. He said they had better weapons. Nice excuse. You better keep and eye on him...
He just didn't like micromanaging. The relevant stat is something like the Germans blew up 10 shermans for every tiger we blew up. The bummer for the Germans is we built more than 11 shermans for every tiger they built. Ooops.
A fake tank "game" is one USA tank platoon vs one German tank platoon and the only difference is the little flags on the tanks. A realistic one, like Steel Panthers is micromanaging 10 or so US tanks as 1 German tank snipes up most of the US tanks.
Arguably by the end of the war, the guys with the best tanks were the Russians, not US or Ger. Everyone remembers the US had the best aircraft. Not so much memory of our tanks, because they in fact pretty much sucked.
The other aspect is in the Modern Crusades or WW3 or whatever you call the last decade or so of military adventuring in the middle east, the US vs islam has been a good analogy for Ger vs USA circa WWII at least solely WRT to logistics tail. Our vehicles can crush ten of theirs in 1 on 1 combat... The problem is they emplace 11 IEDs for each of our vehicles... hmm.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
What the "Just World Hypothesis" (better referred to as the "Just World Fallacy") actually describes is that pattern of humans seeking a means to place blame on victims while ignoring the free will of the offender.
Other, more pertinent places we see the Just World Fallacy:
"Ya, you were robbed, but you left your door unlocked. You deserve what you got."
"Ya, she was sexually assaulted, but she was dressed like a whore..."
"The boy was killed while legally crossing a street in a crosswalk. But he was dressed in black, so he had it coming."
"Her car was stolen, but it was her fault-- she left her keys in car."
Crimes are always the fault of the criminal, but I can't defend complete and utter ignorance of living in the real world. It's got absolutely nothing to do with a "Just World" fallacy, it's because I know the world is an unjust place and you need to look out for yourself and those you care about. If you didn't teach your kids not to play on the freeway and not get in a car with a stranger I'd say you've failed at parenting and eventually if you don't learn yourself you've failed at growing up.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Not just one soldier, two entire trenches. They had a Christmas celebration together, including a mess, a football match and, if I remember correctly, even a Christmas tree. Additionally, trench crews tended to develop a tit-for-tat approach like "we fire two shots for every one they fire" (which, of course, means no shots if the enemy doesn't shoot at all).
I think that in many cases the soldiers in the trenches viewed their direct opponents as much more human than the generals who sat somewhere far away and ordered them to let themselves get shot for no good reason. Which would be a nice concept for a shooter (you shoot many good men for no reason other than that those are your orders and they have similar-sounding ones), although I'd imagine many gamers might not like a game that forces them to justify their actions away or face the fact that they are responsible for a whole lot of suffering.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Short version from the game...
Korea reunifies after the DPRK gives up nuclear weapons under Kim Jung Un.
Worldwide economy gets bad, gets worse as Saudi Arabia and Iran go to war.
Unified Korea dominate the region, take over Taiwan and Japan in sort of a Pac Rim EU.
China has problems as the world economy gets worse.
Korea pulls the nukes back out.
Korea EMPs the US with a 50 MT nuke as they invade Alaska, Hawaii and then the western US.
There was one Christmas truce. Exactly one. The following year the commanders on both sides, those nestled well back, from the actual fighting, issued the order that if anyone tried that again they would be shot for sedition. They knew very well that the men pulling the triggers needed to see the enemy as faceless monsters, or else the trigger would not get pulled.
Well, they wanted to create a game about a global superpower sending in military troops to enforce their way of living against the wishes of the local populace, but they couldn't think of any cases of that happening in the real world, so they had to make one up.
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?
If you won't pick up arms to defend you and your family from evil
There's a hidden assumption here, and it's that evil can be defended against by force of arms.
In reality, arms can only defend you against people. But people aren't evil. People are capable of evil. Evil is a verb, not a noun. And like all verbs, it can apply to multiple nouns. It's not a substance, and you can't stop it by putting up physical barriers. Evil is more like a mental virus: it leaks, it infects, and it self-replicates.
In other words, you can pick up a gun to protect your family from things verbs being done to them and find yourself doing bad things yourself. It's especially possible if you decide that you need to preemptively protect your loved ones by doing bad things before someone else does bad things, because, doggone it, those bad-thing-doers need to be done for.
And before you know it, you've started a war for "security" and you were the invader, not the defender, and in most books, that's evil. Whoops.
tldr: Evil is as evil does. You can't be evil or not-evil but you can do evil or not-evil.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
Or perhaps an adventure game?
Call it: "The Good Soldier"
Follow a young man from his hometown, through training, through war, and back home, and readjustment.
Instead of focusing around the shooting, make it a heavy-rain adventure where you make a series of choices and consequences. Small general ones like skipping on some bonding time to put in some after hours work on your own. Or bigger ones like who do you send to draw out the sniper. Respond to orders in the field from a commander that doesn't understand the situation on the ground. For game purposes, fill it out with game-like choices of tactics in the field to form the gaming "meat" throughout the war, because you need to break up the pacing.
Campfire after-action chatting with the boys, and grim consolation of the last survivor of a squad you sent on patrol last night.
Go back home and see your friends and family who have no idea what you've just been through. Listen to petty complaints about their daily life with flashbacks to life you've just left behind. Snap back and finally tell them about what real shit is all about? Or keep it to yourself, because telling them might push them away, and you want to regrow lost a lost relationship. Pick up a job you don't know and start a new life. Ignore your wife's complaints about you staying out late /again/, because you need to take care of a comrade that's having a hard time readjusting to life back home.
End on a reflective note instead of a big climactic finish.