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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."
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.
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.
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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."
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.