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Why Aren't There More Civilians In Military Video Games?
Jeremy Erwin writes "A columnist for Slate asks why there aren't any civilians in today's military shooting games. Quoting: 'Mostly, they don't want to face the consequences of players' bad behavior. In an interview with the website Rock Paper Shotgun, Battlefield 3's executive producer Patrick Bach explained that he doesn't "want to see videos on the Internet where people shoot civilians. That's something I will sanitize by removing that feature from the game." Bach believes that video games are serious business but that players' irreverence is holding back the form. "If you put the player in front of a choice where they can do good things or bad things, they will do bad things, go [to the] dark side because people think it's cool to be naughty, they won't be caught," he said.'"
(Note that there are civilians in Battlefield 3, you just can't kill them, accidentally or otherwise. Despite this, the author's point stands: "By removing civilians from the picture, developers like Bach are trying to reap the benefits of a real-life setting without grappling with the reality of collateral damage.")
If I wanted to grapple with reality, I wouldn't be playing a video game.
I don't shoot civilians in games.
... every one of those games would be a thematic variation on GTA. Like this. People don't want reality, they want to be entertained.
anyone?
Just imagine the "ammo" this would give anti-game violence arguments. They shot civilians in game to practice shooting civilians in real life!
I believe in Arma2, which is far more realistic than most of this crap (and yet is still nowhere near real) I believe you can shoot civilians. If I'm not mistaken it can also be set up to trigger mission failure. Basically kill a civilian, you break the roe and mission ends failure. Doing stuff like that allows civilians to walk around town and add a little realism while preventing people from simulating a massacre....
Also, it's a game and just pixels. Get over it. I did 4 years in the Marine Corps and it's pretty safe to say it's all unrealistic bullshit. Fun to play and fun to escape reality but its not real or realistic...
Most game developers don't want to show up on Faux News' front page with the headline "X is promoting killing of civilians!"
Combine player freedom with a clueless and/or biased press and you'll see why devs mostly just don't want to deal with the hassle. The only ones that do, do it because they actually LIKE said "scandals". Rockstar's thrived on scandals.
Where do you think the zombie hordes come from?
Just imagine the user generated violent and gory pictures all over YouTube and blogs... no developer or publisher would like the face the resulting outcry.
CH= Civilian Heavy
CN=Civilian Normal
CL=Civilian Light
dev's are limited by the hardware which is why an RPG like Mass effect 3 is limited and sends you on missions which are basically walking in a straight line and shooting stuff as it pops up
once we get a new generation with better CPU's and GPU's we will see more realism if that's what the players want. usually the fun factor trumps reality
There are no consequences. Make the players endure a court martial and maybe their actions would change.
This is another reason why the Elder Scrolls series is so incredibly good: if you're seen killing an innocent, you instantly get a bounty on your head, guards chase you relentlessly, and you have to pay the price (although there are ways around it for cheaters).
But I suspect developers of FPS games aren't that interested in moral realism, just graphics and sound.
dev's are limited by the hardware which is why an RPG like Mass effect 3 is limited and sends you on missions which are basically walking in a straight line and shooting stuff as it pops up
once we get a new generation with better CPU's and GPU's we will see more realism if that's what the players want. usually the fun factor trumps reality
So, your position is that the console hardware is plenty advanced enough to simulate killing an enemy character, but not advanced enough to simulate killing a civilian? Because civilian blood has more polygons or something?
If games now don't have civilians in them is just because the games distributors don't have the balls or the will to take a little heat from stupid people that don't understand that a deaths in a video game are just as bad for your development as seeing a nipple: not at all.
If you put the player in front of a choice where they can do good things or bad things, they will do bad things, go [to the] dark side because people think it's cool to be naughty, they won't be caught
And that's bad because...?
Yeah. The one level in Modern Warfare 2 that people objected to? Yeah. That was shooting civilians.
It seems censors don't like shooting civilians.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
If you want to force your morals on someone, why not penalize for collateral damage rather then removing the sense of realism. Perhaps violence would actually be toned down if there were consequences to bad behavior rathe than trying to remove it and hide the realities of war?
I don't think it's fair that it is just assumed that people will choose to do bad behind closed doors. I think the problem is the reward system is off balance. If a game truly implemented a true eco system of consequences and rewards for doing good vs evil you would see a different picture.
I, for example, played the game "Black & White" and your kingdom would morph to how you portrayed yourself. I actually was good "all the time" while I played that game. I slowly learned that the rewards for being good the whole time was limiting vs what could happen when you were evil. I only tried being evil once the reward for being good seemed to stop the gameplay.
If a game fully implemented repercussions for hitting civilians or doing evil, people would choose to do good. But when there are either no repercussions or just pure "cool eye candy" for killing people without consequence, people are really just looking to explore the dynamics of the game, they're not trying to do evil. So ultimately it comes down to the game designers making evil actions more appealing than doing good. That's the paradigm that would need to shift ...
Just think, if you killed a civilian in a mission you had to sit out a round or two in multi-player ... or if you had to go through an extra training course... This could also playout to be repercussions for 'friendly fire', instead of just disabling friendly fire all together. People would pay more attention to the goals of the game and stay more true to the role they're playing.
With "counter-strike", people choose (or get selected) to be on either the terrorists or counter-terrorist groups... same thing with most all multi-player games. In a way the "counter terrorists" are the good guys, and the terrorists are the bad guys... The bad guys kill the good guys here. Why not put civilians in the terrain and in the city? If a terrorist killed a civilian they would leave a blood trail behind or have to hide the body, or someone would scream and they would be easier to find, etc... There would be real repercussions for doing this. And if a 'counter-terrorist' killed a civilian by mistake or because it was a hostage or something, he would need to sit out for like 2 minutes or something before being allowed back in....
So the long and the short of it is, it's impossible to base people's decisions to do good vs evil with the games designed today. There is ONLY reward for doing anything the game lets you do. And people like to push limits to things to see what the developers created. Once they get their hands slapped for doing it, they probably won't do it again -- and if they do, they will have to work extra hard to undo the damage they had done.
This article is a glorious example of begging the question.
The obvious answer is that most companies don't want to deal with the shit-storm that COD Modern Warefare 2 and Battle for Falujah. It has nothing to do with the supposed moral recrimination of shooting innocent bystanders as far as the actual players are concerned.
Same reason why FPS games don't implement things like realistic injury or stamina. In real life, if you're loaded for bear you're not going to be running around like a jackrabbit wigged out on methamphetamines and crack. After carrying sufficient gear and ammo for a few minutes, if you have any choice, you're going to be looking for someplace comfy and well protected to hole up in. When tired or loaded, you slow down. Sometimes drastically. This means you actually need somebody to cover your ass in a firefight. Certain types of ammo also become a lot more rare and expensive in reality. Without ridiculous rocket spam, things like tanks look like a much much better option for offensive operations. In real life, the landscape isn't indestructible either. Hacking the map takes on a whole new meaning. Likewise if you get shot in the leg and arm, you might not be moving that much or able to wield a weapon effectively until somebody shows up and attends to your injuries.
But who wants to be a camper, waiting for support, waiting for a vehicle, or waiting on the medic before trying to progress the mission and capturing the next spawnpoint? Most FPS players like the balls-out Rambo approach which is far from anything realistic. Often trying FPS strategies in real life is quick way to fill a body bag.
I guess civilians is "having things you're not supposed to shoot". Which for most gamers is less fun. Often the typical FPS player prefers to destroy things rather than protect them. Retarded AI when you're on a babysitting mission doesn't help this any either.
They should make it more realistic than that. If you kill a civillian, your superiors should help you cover it up. If a private leaks it to an international whistle-blowing organization, they then through the whistleblower and the head of the organization in jail on trumped up charges, while you face no repercussions. Problem solved.
The same argument can be said about racing games. You can crash into walls going 100MPH and just bounce off.
The people vs. car thing is a little different but comes down to the same thing. In the car world, a manufacturer doesn't want their car to ever be seen as inferior or have damage to the car. In the war model, we want to always be rewarded for shooting the gun. Negative feedback is bad.
The reality is that until we start enforcing negative feedback we are encouraging and training a new generation of people that will lack a sense of duty and responsibility and instead will lack a certain understanding of right and wrong.
Why aren't there killable children in Fallout 3?
The developers, in general, want to do this. I recall one game designer (for an Iraq-war-setting game) wanting to add a mission where the player went on a lengthy patrol through the city. Civilians would be everywhere, doing normal civilian things. Shooting them, obviously, would lead to a game-over. But the twist was that there would be no actual enemies - you'd go out and see several things that might startle you into shooting (potential car bomb, etc), but it would basically be ten minutes of the player expecting enemies at every corner, yet never finding them. It was supposed to show what actual soldiers deal with daily - almost all patrols go without incident.
The game shipped without it, but that's hardly the only one where the developers wanted to add civilians, either for realism, or for mood, or even just because. But it's almost always stopped by the publisher, AKA the guys spending the money on the game. It's just far too much of an economic risk. Very few military games do it (without doing something like making them invinsible), simply because of all the outrage the media would cause. Modern Warfare 2 really only included it (in one mission) because of the outrage - they wanted the publicity and the shock.
while not civilians in the jeans and tshirt sort of way, you have escort game mode where there are three vips held captive by the terrorist/rebels, and the seal team has to get them an extract them. they can die, but that in turn causes the team that kills them to lose. Many people who are playing on the terrorist side that round will wound them so their just barely alive and use them as human shields so when the seals come in they have to be extremely careful with their shots so they dont take out the VIPs and also so they cant just place C4 to blow a hole in the wall or toss a gernade without taking out the "civilians" in the process
You obviously play arcade style driving games, like Gran Turismo. Maybe if you tried something like iRacing, GT Legends, maybe even rFactor you would think differently about what a real sim is and damage.
I'd bring a gun to work.
And why are the civs always such wimps? I want a crowd that knows their 2nd amendment rights.
I think you could attack people in cities. You could steal and the guards would chase you. that was loads of fun!
It's easier to convince your citizens to go to war if they can't see the suffering of innocents. The bible makes a Big Deal of Herod and all, what would those oh so pious Americans think if he lived in the White House?
Because if it's a shooting game we want to shoot stuff. I didn't load it up to listen to someone's moronic dialog and bad voice acting. I don't load it up to worry about some computer A.I. (and I use that term loosely) friendly that'll run through the through the middle of a firefight getting splattered against a wall. My ultimate goal is to not die myself.
Why do people skip quest dialog in games like WoW, get up and go for a drink when "traveling" through game worlds, etc?... Because those things are not part of the fun.
I'll continue to skip dialog, cut-scenes, and kill any and all A.I. civilians and teammates that get in my way or hinder me in any way. Thanks.
Doesn't mean I don't value human life irl or realize how dangerous guns can be in the wrong hands.
It's just that the added "realism" isn't real and it isn't freaking fun. I want entertainment for my entertainment dollars.
Most game developers don't want to show up on Faux News' front page with the headline "X is promoting killing of civilians!"
I don't think you got the politics of that correct. It was Al Gore and his wife that were behind the 1980's crusade to restrict access to music and movies they thought inappropriate. Parents Music Resource Center and all that crap. They later expanded into video games. I believe that during the 2000 presidential campaign Al Gore threatened the music, movie and video game industry to "clean up their act" or a Gore/Lieberman administration would introduce legislation to *compel* them to "mend their ways".
I'm a little lost over the level of hysteria around some of these games... Why do we have to analyse this to death, in the end it is just a game. Do we stop young kids playing "ring a ring a rosie" because it pays reference back to the black death? Do we stop kids playing foot ball (all versions) because in the past this type of game was used to train soldiers? Do we stop girls from playing dress up with dolls because it reinforces gender stereotypes ..... woops, hang on....
Ok, were officially stuffed as a species, beam me up I want to get off.....
It's a game who cares.
The phone is ringing, I cannot linger, watch out butt here comes my finger.
Why would you choose to live in reality when you can imagine something better?
Hectice, baby, Mercator says hello to you
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvHvYZNtbQQ
I had my first offended adult moment watching my cousin's kid play this level.
And this is why the current, politically correctly risk averse games fail me. I loved the tension of completing the missions in the Syndicate with minimal civilian casualties, inflicted by either side. Not all teens crave mass murder and homicide. Hell, as a person without a drivers license, I would love to play a game where I had to follow road regulations as close as possible while delivering, securing, rescuing or stealing something. Conflicting objectives create suspension.
You're saying people don't want to have the ability to shoot whatever moves?
"Science can amuse and fascinate us all, but it is engineering that changes the world. " - Asimov.
Two words... ...No Russian... ...Infinity Ward ruined it for everyone.
I play video games to do things I can't (shouldn't, wouldn't couldn't) do in real life, is this so surprising?
Pretty much what it says on the tin.
I enjoy story with my games. Games like Serious Sam never appealed to me, and I got bored of the multiplayer content of Call of Duty pretty quick; I was really only in it for the stories. Yes, I played the "No Russian" mission and yes it affected me, but isn't that what we play games *for*? To explore things we couldn't explore in real life?
I don't like the idea that there's no consequences for my actions. The games I've really enjoyed playing: Fallout, Fallout 2, Baldur's Gate II, KOTR, KOTR2, etc etc etc. Games where what you do matters. Games that allow you to force-push civilians off cliffs, but where there consequences for that which you probably won't like.
People argue about the moral issues behind putting killable civilians into video games. I counter that there's a moral issue with *removing* them. To display this false, clean image of war where everyone with their name in red is a bad guy and everyone with their name in green is a likeable hero really doesn't do it for me.
Things start to get ludicrous in games like Fable 2, where a major plot point is your character being almost killed by gunshot as a child, but then as an adult the game won't let you harm children yourself. What the...? Surely the game designers missed a huge potential story arc here; if you kill a child, later, you could (say) have that child's ghost come back to haunt you in a dream. The ghost could point out the hypocrisy of what you've done, and remind you that you're now part of the cycle of violence -- child abusers were often, themselves, abused. This to me is far more interesting and thought provoking than "children are immortal, except when it's you, then it's fair game".
When I have kids, I want them to learn that there are consequences for their actions. No, I won't give them Modern Warfare 2 before they're ready, but I will search out video games such as Fallout 2, Baldur's Gate 2 and KOTR 2 where the actions and choices they make affect them in the future, in ways they may find hard to see at the time.
That, I think, is a much better lesson for them than "KILL EVERYONE AND LET GOD SORT THEM OUT."
Check out my sci-fi book "Lacuna" at http://goo.gl/MVxX8
But I shot 'em all.
The pellets in pac man were 'civilians', and that bastard at them all with no regards for their families. The ghosts were trying to kill him and his wife, they were the enemies so I understood why he murdered them. The power pellets were the elders, probably around since aught 5 with great grand pellets who were just starting school. Since the 80's, so many people have played these violent games and look at society compared to those before pac man?
I have murdered thousands upon thousands of pellets. I have no regards for pellet life, all because of that game! Don't tell me games can't change people.
Thank god that we don't need military games for killing civilians! I recall that Carmageddon's sole target was to run over pedestrians with your car.
That was an awful lot of fun! And believe it or not, I'm driving accident-free since 22 years.
By the way: In the UK the pedestrians got green blood, so they could be considered non-humans and everything was fine again. Good to know that killing innocent life is only bad if it's normal people.
There are two rules for success:
1. Never tell everything you know.
There are lots of shooters with civilians, just off the top of my head, the latest Deus Ex game. You can literally mow down a whole street of people.
Maybe it's not technically a "military" shooter, but whatever.
The real reason there aren't civilians in games is that you have selected only the games that don't have them, and ignored the ones that do. In other words, you totally pulled the "fact" right out of your ass.
Let me think of the games I've wasted too much time on...
Hm.. lately it's been Dwarf Fortress. Most of my dwarves have civilian jobs. The enemies are all soldiers but .. no wait, those elven caravans I keep slaughtering are all civilian merchants, and so are the "moose-men" that happen to live outside my current fortress, which my military sometimes "practices" on. And of course my civilians are fair game to everyone else, which is why I have a military in the first place.
What was my previous time-waster? Ah, Alpha Centauri. You know, the game where I would wait until a solar storm blacked out inter-faction communications and then would send nerve-gas-armed jets to my current enemy's cities, killing lots of soldiers but with tens of thousands of civilian collateral deaths. (That's assuming my probe teams didn't do similar things with "genetic plague." And I almost never used planet busters, i.e. nukes.) After the blackout, it was back to "civilized" warfare (and nobody ever suggested I did anything bad, except for the furious Chairman Yang angrily sputtering that I would pay for the atrocities). Civilized warfare, that is, of course, unless you're a human fighting aliens in the sequel, or an alien fighting humans: then there are no limitations and every military unit belches nerve gas, taking delight in civilian casualties.
What else? Ah, Escape Velocity: Override. Where maybe you join a military force and generally fight other military forces, or maybe you just become a pirate and kill cargo ship crews .. or more likely a mix where you're doing one things in one part of the galaxy and the other thing elsewhere. When you're in enemy territory, everything is a target.
Yeah, I've wasted some life on other games too, but I figure it's about 50/50 games that have civvies vs games that don't.
What you may have asked and what you really wanted are two different things.
In general, DoD is bared by US Laws from enscripting or enslaving US civilians in war and wartime i.e. battefield actions.
There are ... shale we say ... circumstances not envisioned ... whish can ... if grave enough ... overide said US Laws prohibitions.
Such overides would be ... great ... and given to even greater scrunity by DoD, i.e. Army, Navy, Mariene, Air Force Court Marshals.
For computer i.e. video games, don't even think about it.
The game is just a fantasy.
Nothing more.
[][]//--
Of course there are no civilians. Once you start enjoying military video games you start working your way towards your most favorite army, navy or air force position. Civilians would ruin the escapism with reality, and would only help to reduce the effectiveness of these important recruitment tools. The best conditioning comes from a totally immersive environment where negative stimuli is limited or eliminated, and reward is maximized. These types of games will only reward you if you kill George Bush's "evil doers", so you should only be killing soldiers from Iraq, Iran, or North Korea. However, to become fully immersive, it is better to cover more of the recent past and the hopeful future with soldiers from Russia, Libya, Pakistan, China, and Venezuela. This type of conditioning helps create jobs (military jobs) in poorer areas, by giving people an alternative to minimum wage that they won't be afraid to pursue, despite the fact they need to be far away from home, and in the process, it helps to support the Military/Industrial Complex which supports the US economy. So, military video games are vital for our economy. The second important benefit of military video games is their violence. The violence in video games helps give people an outlet that doesn't cause destruction in reality. By people venting their anger and frustration in a virtual environment, social order is maintained, and the country remains stable. Heavy metal music serves a similar purpose (notice much of heavy metal developed after the idealism of the 1960s failed), but heavy metal is not as totally immersive as video games, so they are likely to be combined for a better effect.
Back around 1990 or so I played one of the first Terminator video games on my PC. You got to pick either Kyle Reese or the Terminator as a character. I, being a young lad, picked the Terminator.
Well, the game was pretty complicated and I didn't want to put in the energy to master it. So I ended up stealing a car (in the game) and just mowing down civilians for fun with my stolen car.
I killed a couple crossing the street that randomly turned out to be Kyle Reese and Sarah Connor.
Was I a budding sociopath at the time? No, I don't think so. Why is killing A.I. civilians fun? I'm not sure. Maybe it's the absurdity of it all.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
I just assumed that all of the civilians had already been killed or fled to a neighboring country.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
Probably one of the last games where you could do ultimate rampage of helpless civilians (or cows) and nobody complained. Nowadays in the super whine nature and youtube, twitter, etc this is just unthinkable.
"Freiheit ist immer auch die Freiheit des Andersdenkenden" - Rosa Luxemburg, 1871 - 1919
Take a great game like Fallout 3. Your character is rewarded by experience point. You complete a quest, kill a monster etc. Now, if you want to maximize XP as many players do, you complete the quests, get the goodies and then kill every virtual character and loot them as there is no point for the player not to do that.
The game rewards us with experiences points to level up and get more abilities for our character which we enjoy. It is a PROGRAM it's not there to be moral, judge or jury. We, the people are smarter than the program and find way to do things it was not designed to do. You could say "There! the game rewards you to kill people and encourages you to do so by granting you experience points!" but the game developer did not create that option for that purpose, this is your judgement of it.
It is true that games often do not enforce a morality system on players, firstly because there is no incentive but also because it defeats the point of most games. Often you play a game because you do not want reality.
Here's the thing, people are taking something that is not suppose to represent reality and is all about enjoyment and judging it as if it was real life.
It's mostly philosophical rape. Person X believes Y, finds argument why X is wrong as it opposes Y by some sort of an excuse. Intelligent people can explain similar things in vastly different ways. At the end of the day you can read FCUK anyway you want.
Every single option in a game costs time and money to develop. A game designer has to make a choice, often take short cuts just to deliver a functional game. If you expose his game to all age groups, all ethnicities and worldly views there will ALWAYS be something wrong with the game.
So the moral of the story? don't like what's in the game? Don't buy it! stop excusing the supposed evils of computers games for bad parenting, lacking education and real life safeguards.
A game, like a movie can often represent a world view, an idea. No one told you that you have to accept the idea or like it or agree with it. Should I go out and sue and stomp out any idea I dislike? Grow up.
IF video games really cause children psychological harm and create psychopaths out of them why not demonstrate these findings in strong research case? as a parent I'd love to know that I am protecting my child from becoming a mass murderer by not letting him play World of Wankers. Of course, it's all rubbish because in this generation, one of the things that makes children children is World of Wankers.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 anyone?
On one mission you play as an inside CIA agent whom has infiltrated a terrorist inner circle who go on a shooting spree at an Airport. You get to mow down endless Civilians. Though the mission is skipable. And you actually succeed in the mission, even if you don't shoot anyone and just let your compadres do all the civilian killing.
See for more details: http://callofduty.wikia.com/wiki/No_Russian
You can tell how powerful someone is by the magnitude of the crime they can commit and be able to get away with.
I'd like to see a game show consequences for killing civilians, and I'm not just talking about "losing points." I'd like to see a game, where your permanent reputation was taken down a notch, or where your game progress was lost because you faced court-martial. The only way to get it back was to go through the court process.
A man can dream...
America is one the most sick countries in the world, it is ok to kill but not to have sex. Sick sick and sick. Killing is never ok, diplomacy yes, though I assume that killing is way more 'cool'.
So why aren't there more lawyers, logistics SNAFU's, medical illnesses, auto accidents and pettifogging government bureaucrats in a war-video game?
Why isn't there a video game of Working Pathetic Service Jobs At Low Wages To Pay Off Your Student Loans And Medical Bills?
Unless you get to shoot them, it just Is Not Fun At All.
I'm glad somebody got to the zombies before I did! I mean, I think I'm glad... they didn't bite you, did they? Because sometimes the zombies aren't civilians, they're your buddies who've been bitten, and then you've got to shoot them before they get you. You're not an Anonymous Coward, so you're not a Non-Player Character, but your user number's kind of high - were you wearing a red shirt when you left the house this morning?
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Hasn't Peter Molyneux (creator of Black and White, Fable, and other games with open-ended player ethics) said he's always found in games where players could choose good or evil that most people will choose good? I remember playing Back and White, the most frustrating thing was that the controls were imprecise enough that it was easy to accidentally kill people (this may have been by design) and I felt bad that the people had died.
The GTA series would tend to go against this notion, but I think that's not quite a fair comparison. GTA is a game where evil behavior is the only thing to do in the game.
I saw let them kill civilians, let their character's be evil, but let their be consequences. I don't mean make them get court-martialed (that doesn't sound like a fun game), but let there be a practical effect. For instance, if you had to use informants, killing civilians might mean you can't work with them as much, and have to work with the dangerous mob, maybe your activities result in the end of the game being about installing a brutal autocrat, rather than schools for girls and voting. (As you can tell, I have never played these games and so I don't know what the actual purpose is.)
Well you'd fscking well better not frag Lt. Niedermeyer....
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The professional liars then go on to cherry pick the example of "McDonald's: The Game", made by these guys as a representative example of the sort of games kids play.
And the Gore's didn't cherry pick their examples of the music kids listen too when they started the PMRC and scheduled senate hearings?
The point you are missing is that censorship of movies, music and video games is something that both some on the left and some on the right are engaging in. It is a bipartisan failing. One the plus side, there are also some on the left and some on the right who think music, movies and video games are being used as simplistic scapegoats.
In general, killing innocents is bad luck, unless you're chaotic, in which case it's sometimes really cool, especially if they're unicorns. Killing shopkeepers or robbing shops gets the Kops chasing you, and killing soldiers tends to annoy the other soldiers - in those cases, it can be profitable if you get away with it, but it's more likely to get you killed.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Or horror movies, whatever. More politically correct crap. Everyone has to find something to bitch about.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
Watch real teenagers play a game, and they set up their own rules. Who cares if the games supports their goals directly? In one of the fantasy games my kids have, there are "civilians" - NPCs that you can interact with. If you kill them, many parts of the game become inaccessible - which didn't stop them from having a contest: who could kill the most NPCs the fastest. Needless to say, this provided a reason for an official parental discussion, but that's not the point here.
There are arguments on both sides of the equation, well summarized by other posters. My point here is that official game goals are pretty irrelevant to the question of whether people can slaughter civilians - people will define their own goals.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
The only thing I have against friendly-fire and civilians in military games is when the AI is so appalling that not shooting them becomes the hardest part of the game. E.g. CoD(1 or 2?) I lost count of the number of times the game ended because I shot a Russian comrade because he stupidly ran in front of me.
There's a lot of discussion here saying that all people who intentionally shoot civilians in games are sociopaths, therefore there should be no civilians in military video games...well, that's stupid. Mostly because...it's a game, but also because it's a military video game. If you want to buy a game where you run around and the only people you can kill are monsters, go play Doom 3 or Quake, but some of us prefer realism. Don't get me wrong, I'm not an intentional-civilian-shooter, but leaving civilians (and the potential for them to get hurt) out is to ignore reality. Thirdly, if you have moral qualms about killing virtual civilians, why the fuck do you not mind killing virtual enemy soldiers? It strikes me that a lot of people like to hide behind the pretense that life is black and white, and that good-guys fight the bad-guys in little sterile arenas far away from anything else. If you want to promote morals in a game, then where is the sense in removing the moral choice?! By removing any moral choice from the game, you're not making the game or the players more moral, you're just forcing them to be moral in that particular situation.
That said, I also can't get behind some of the lunatics who think killing a civilian should result in a virtual "court-martial". At worst, killing a civilian should end the game and make you restart/reload but ideally, I think, an acceptable number of civilian casualties should be allowed, to account for accidents/"collateral damage", above which the game ends. I think that strikes a better balance between fun-realism and real-realism. And isn't that the point? Allowing ordinary people the ability to do extraordinary things in a fun way?
A friend of mine is a game designer for a new game coming out called Warco. The basic premise is that you play a video journalist in a war zone, and you have to make decisions about whether to help people, take footage, what you capture on screen.
It will be interesting to see if people embrace the concept, and what sorts of choices they make.
Sara
Designer, Gamer, Macgrrl in an XP World
In video games, I don't expect them to bleed realistically - I expect to see blood splattering all over the place, just like I expect to see cars in movies explode after they crash, even though they seldom do that in real life. If they don't bleed, it's supposed to be because they're melodramatically falling off a building after you shoot them, or something like that.
And yeah, that first Iraqi War started with the video-game-quality shots of the "smart" bomb blowing up the phone company building - which I as a phone company employee took offense at :-) (In real life, in the month or two before the war, I was alternating between going to the UN building for anti-war protests and working on a subcontract for a defense contractor who was bidding to rewire the Pentagon...) I later heard somebody saying that that video had looked really good when they saw it six months before the war started, but even pre-September-97 you couldn't believe everything you read on the net.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
who cares
It is kind of silly to see a game developer for a game where killing people by the truck load is the primary objective force his morals on everyone. The way his message is worded implies given an evil option, all players will inexplicably perform said evil. That's not even remotely true, and if the few who want to kill a few pretend citizens, I'm not really seeing the problem outside of what I think the real issue is: they're too afraid of media hype against the game. Sure it drums up publicity, but some people don't have the stomach to handle the kind of criticism that Rockstar or other studios can.
It would have been so much better if there were civilians, but killing one, even accidentally fails the mission. It gives you incentive not to just blindly fire your weapon everywhere and increases difficulty when you have to actually consider your actions.
Basically this guys moral compass is hindering a good gameplay element all for the sake of make believe humans. Because if he wont stand up for them, who will?
They should put the civilians in. After the player shoots a few the game goes into a military trial and you are executed. Your save game automatically deletes its self and the game uninstalls.
I used to love taking a squad armed to the max with the latest in death dealing goodies, and wiping out everything that moved :)
Anyone remember the mission where you were supposed to assassinate a political figure, and he's giving a speech to a HUGE crowd?
Lets just say flame throwers were truly epic for that mission (evil grin).
Lawyers, MBA's, RIAA? A jedi fears not these things!
I don't know that the gaming world is ready for realistic, historic, sometimes "evil" (whatever that means) and often logical killing of civilians.
Wiping out your opponents does work, which is among the reasons Stalin and Mao crushed their opponents and were victorious.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
People thinking like this is whats holding games back.
Of course people will kill the civilians, people are people, and people are sick.
But just look at movies, books, tv, anywhere else. They don't hold back.
How many government employees died on the death star?
How many ordinary people were murdered in Rampage?
How many cops were killed in Rambo?
How many innocent civilians were turned into monsters,
and subsequently murdered in 28 days later?
Video games wouldn't be very good army training if you can kill the civilians.
When playing games, I play on the dark side and enjoy doing evil things. Like playing the germans in civilization and naming the towns after concentration camps and celebrating the birth of jesus by blasting the first nuclear bomb over the enemy's capital (yes, that can be done in Civ 1).
In real life, I carefully avoid running over slugs with the stroller when I'm taking a walk with my daugther.
Al Gore isn't a news network. It doesn't matter what the parties say, we're complaining about Fox News here.
Al Gore was a powerful Senator who called for Senate hearings to investigate "porn rock". Are you seriously suggesting that what some TV commentator said is even in the same league of idiocy? Gore took the exact same "logic" that you are bitching about with respect to Fox to an entirely new level, the Senate - where it can get turned in law. Not only that he put his message on *every* TV network at the time. Thankfully Frank Zappa and Dee Snider made a mockery of Gore and his compatriots during the hearing.
Everyone knows there are no civilians in US military actions.
Lots of other games have civilians in them - war games even like Command & Conquer (1995) up through Command & Conquer Generals. You can even kill them. Most people can tell reality from a video game, it's too bad that FPS players/programmers are a less intelligent class of people who can't tell the difference.
So it's not impossible to punish bad play while putting some realism in there. For example the penalty could be to withhold promotions / achievements, or to make the population "turn" against you (adding crowds of stone throwers, snipers and extra ambushes) making the game harder to the point of impossible, or even terminating play for deliberate kills. Adding civilians adds realism and probably makes the game more tense too.
If you don't need to be bad, how the hell did you manage to complete the story line? To me the GTA games seem like a marvelous engine created by some of the brightest in the industry with a storyline written by a particularly angsty and hate filled 12 year old. San Andreas was an absolute low point, there is a word starting with n that applies 100% to the character and then some. You could never find such a waste of air in real life. I played it mostly out of a sick curiousity of just how much a low life that character could be and reminded myself that there was an ocean between me and the writer before I could go to sleep at night.
None of the characters have anything to redeem them. Anti-hero's at least got to have something. It is not even as if you got a choice, there is one path and it would make Anakin Skywalker think twice.
It would seem to be a trend, for a long time fantasy meant high fantasy with good versus evil and you were good... then Dragon Age decided to want to find the angst crowd and made a dystopian fantasy game. If you think seeing everything in black and white is bad, then so is seeing everything in greys. Don't believe me? Someone who thinks only in shades of grey (and almost black and almost white isn't grey) is the kind who think the nazi's weren't all bad or that there is something to say for totalitarian regime etc etc. There are rights and wrongs in the world, only not in the minds of the morally vapid.
But I have always had the hunch that if you wanted to clean up the world morally, your best bet would be to kill every single writer. Who but a writer would kill of an entire planet just to give a character a motivation? More people are killed at the hands of authors then by all wars combined... take the sick fuck who wrote the bible, wipe out all of humanity just to make a moral point?
I am not saying that video games turn people into killers but I am entertaining the idea that the reverse is true. Same as a lot of serial killers turn out to have tortured animals in their life. A sick fuck is a sick fuck and give them a chance to show, it they will. So not 100% of sick fucks in games are serial killers but 100% if serial killers would be sick fucks in a game.
And if you are immediately outraged by this and want to kill me for saying this... point proven.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
The reason civilian casualties were so high in the initial years of Iraq is because the US military had been deliberately equipped and trained to fight conventional wars against ex-Cold War opponents. The US military had NO INTEREST at the highest levels in counter-insurgency or "small wars" as a result of Vietnam and Operation Gothic Serpent (aka Black Hawk Down). If you go back and look at Gulf War I the leading Generals tried to get their Arab partners to carry most of the load because they did not want to "get involved" and end up with another Vietnam (and all those guys were Vietnam vets, so they knew the reality). In the Balkans conflicts the US tried to limit its involvement to an air campaign only, despite such an approach probably increasing civilian casualties (as you don't have eyes on the ground to verify targets).
This led in the early 21st century to a military that was not equipped in the slightest to fight either a counter-insurgency OR fight in a way that limited civilian casualties. It was trained in the Cold War style where a commanders number one priority was carrying out the mission and keeping his troops alive, even if this meant dropping a 1000 pound bomb on a village with two snipers in it. In conventional war civilians have always got the worst of it, the various bombing campaigns of WWII mostly did no real military or industrial damage and just slaughtered civilians.
This is way so much of the direct fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan after the invasions fell to Special Forces units as they were trained for counter-insurgency and limited warfare. But Special Forces soldiers take a long time to train.
You can't take an 18 year old, give them 6 months to a year of basic infantry training, and expect them to be able to fight a counter-insurgency with low civilian casualties. Especially when, politically, every friendly casualty costs you more then a thousand foreign civilians dead, which is the reality of the modern media war.
========
CINC, 4th Penguin Legion
Just add the choice to kill civilians, and punish the player for doing so. It's greater realism (avoid the obvious cynical response), and it also adds another level of challenge. Particularly in a game setting where the "enemy" is made up of insurgents or something not trivial to distinguish from civilians, players might actually be forced to think before mindlessly shooting everything that moves.
I have to conclude that this justification is bullshit, and the real reason to keep civilians out is exactly the opposite: They don't want to withhold the ability to commit simulated atrocities; they just want to avoid facing the player with any kind of moral dilemma, because most players hate having to think at that level.
Carmageddon. The purpose of the game was killing civilians. And cows.
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
You never kill innocents while playing for one side. They are either camouflaged GDI agents or NOD Terrorists. Only if you play the other side you realize you may have killed civilians.
And in that respect its may a very realistic game.
"I trained for my terrorist attack with BF15 and no civilian ever died ;_; i didn't know they can die in real world!!!"
"A columnist for Slate asks why there aren't any civilians in today's military shooting games."
Well, DUH! Because everyone could be a terrorist and therefore it's ok to torture and kill them. It's what USA has been teaching the world for the past 10 years now. The hard way.
Think about it a minute.
You have civilians in game, there are a few options how its handled.
1. No consequences. The anti violence lobby goes nuts, the game is OK, but every time someone opens fire there are screams and civilians running. Probably quite entertaining hunting them down and shooting them but would distract from the main story and the novelty would soon wear off.
2. Instant consequences. You hit a civilian the mission is failed. This is annoying, failing missions from accidentally winging your computerised team mates is frustrating enough, this would be 10x more likely and as a consequence far more annoying.
3. Delayed consequences. You hit a civilian the game goes on, then in the end of mission debrief there are consequences. Either a mission failed redo it (immensely frustrating after spending half an hour working your way through a mission) or some negative impact on your score (but if you put a "number of civilians killed" score in there some people are going to try to max it out. This could actually be quite good if well thought out and there was some method of the computer distinguishing "accidental" civilian shootings from deliberate ones. Differing paths and mission briefings etc. But it means a lot more work from a game design perspective.
The other thing:
What are these civilians doing in my war-zone?
OK in some sort of terrorist event civilians aren't that unlikely. But once the shooting starts you will only find them cowering under tables behind locked doors. In a battlefield/war-zone scenario, the civilians would have had plenty of time to evacuate or lock themselves in the basement etc. So civilians just "wondering around" is highly unlikely.
Fuck that... I mow down civilians if they get in my way in any game. It's just a game and has nothing to do with real life behaviour. If I want to drive down the sidewalk and plow through people so be it. If a game wants me to mow down an airport full of people with a LMG, I will enjoy doing so.
Too bad I won't be buying Battlefield 3 to care about this one way or the other... I have never been overly pleased with any other games in that franchise.
for fragging them... give them a virtual court martial or war crimes trial complete with spending time in prison or being executed (virtually) with the loss of the gamer's character...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
Ah come on, remember the good old days of running down pixelatd old ladies with zimmer frames in carmageddon?
I miss that!
like, 20 years on and I still havent even tried to score a pile driver bonus on a real one!
Sure would be nice to be able to take out frustrations about real life in a game again!
Oh and while they're at it, how about some school buses with children that come out the windows when you overturn it? I mean really..
I'd buy it
no dead civilians here nope... just dead hookers. they don't count anyways. they are probably soulless gingers.
I fail to see the problem with civilian casualties in video games. They make things more fun and provide a nice outlet to go rage stomping. Mechwarrior had civilians in it for a short time and you could run around in the mech and stomp on them and hear them scream. World of Warcraft up until recently had most of their civilians in towns killable by players. Minecraft is coming out with civilians for their towns and supposedly they will be killable. Think of all the delicious death traps you could set for them in Minecraft once they put civilians in there.
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
From TFA they're talking about mainstream games; well there is your problem right there.
ARMA2 has as many civilians as you want to your heart's content, not to mention that it's generally a far superior game in terms of military simulation.
There are tons of movies about torturing and killing innocent people and the idea that they think doing the same in video games is worse or that we have to be protected just shows the industry's real mentality. They love bragging about how mature and old gamers are now but they still treat everyone like children because that is who they still primarily target because kids are still a huge part of their market and as long as business care more about selling violence to kids and therefore putting certain limits on the violence to make it more acceptable then we'll never progress.
... which is what I would do. Aggression in Video Game != Aggression in Real Life, IMHO.
Released just before the 2004 election.
No ulterior motive there, right?
Each and every time I've tried to go the 'dark side' in games, be it Fallout, Vampire the Masquerade, Mass Effect, Dragon Age etc, I've ALWAYS been compelled to do the 'right' thing. This guy's just a chicken shit.
There are no consequences for a lone actor, not in real life. Why would there be in a fictional game scenario? You live then you die.
OTOH, if the fate of others - family, friends, peers, community, is affected - then you have consequences. You live you do things that impact others, you die and everyone around you has to deal with the consequences. Logically bind individual actions to the team of players and peer pressure will kick in to not do stupid things. Alternatively the player will lose the benefit of the team if they disown him.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
All you'd want is a mechanic in the game that noticed what people were doing and if you didn't want them doing it... punishing them.
For example, if you're doing a modern war simulator then killing civilians will probably get you arrested or shot by your own forces. Stop and imagine what someone would do if a soldier just randomly started shooting women and children... not in the heat of combat or some other situation where perhaps the fog of war could obscure things. But I mean on an otherwise peaceful street in the middle of a patrol or something.
They'd tackle him and possibly just shoot him on the spot. No one is going to put up with some guy in an unstable part of the world, with a machine gun, who has completely cracked.
So I say add the feature but also put in a realistic response to it.
Rather then turning the civilians into some sick trophy that a player could pick off for giggles... instead turn them into obstacles and hazards just as they are in real life. In real war there are things you can shoot/destroy and things you must avoid.
You can also add in places where maybe a soldier cries because he threw a grenade into a room and later found out that it was a family hiding in there... dead women and children... and this guy just drops to his knees and cries. It could make the game more powerful and humanize it a bit.
Immersive gameplay is a good thing.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
short cutscene of the player in a cell in Fort Leavenworth
If it were realistic, the cut scene would last at least until the game's sequel is released.
When I play video games, I can't choose the bad guy. I even have trouble being the Russians in Bad Company 2 (no offense to Russians, but they are the bad guys in the campaign, and I grew up in the USA during the late cold war). Even in total fantasyland, Star Wars games, I can't do the dark side, which made The Force Unleashed particularly troubling for me (fortunately, I had a suspicion about how the game would end). So Bach's conclusion is an imperfect generalization, when given the choice, I wouldn't kill civilians in game, and I'd hope that there are more like me than not. I think having killable civilians in game could be a good realism feature in the urban warfare environment. For gameplay, it would have to be hard to confuse a combatant for a civilian, and of course, the penalty for killing a civilian should be steep. I'm looking forward to Battlefield 3.
http://cryptojoe.blogspot.com
Has anybody been harmed by the mass murder I engaged when playing that driving game from Microsoft 10 years ago ? That, was the DeathWagen bug ! Note that as a player, I engaged in that for some minutes at the very beginning, out of novelty, and long after the game had lost attraction, because I had nothing better to do. Boredom made me stop eventually and stop playing altogether, that maybe added 1h of mild fun to the game.Seriously, I don't see the point. Nobody gets harm, so who cares. It's not like normal people will turn into murderers because they rolled over people in videogames when they got bored. Those on which videogames might have impact are already seriously fucked up in their heads.
In mercenaries: playground of destruction you kill or subdue a civillian or reporter it counted against you in the game. It did not matter if it was on purpose or accidental , the game attitude was collateral damage is bad for business , which is true in the real world. In the real world it bad politically & morally (sp?)
For some strange reason, people tend to think it's just the conservatives who want to ban things and violate rights. The reality is that each side loves to do it, has its own preferred demons, and sometimes they overlap.
People forget the left participation in wars against smoking, guns, music and games, and their desire to control what you eat. They've even joined in on the War on Drugs, although some factions are softening a bit. Prohibition was across the board, considered a progressive cause by many, and an issue of morals by the religious conservatives. Don't forget Al Gore was the spearhead of the effort to mandate government backdoors in our encryption.
Our memory is so short we forget the Republican party was founded on an anti-slavery platform, and it was the Democrats who wanted to keep blacks segregated as recently as the 1960s. Andrew Jackson, a Democrat, was famous for supporting slavery and the forced relocation of Indians. It was the Democrats who rounded up the Japanese in WWII. Democrats were in charge in WWII when we executed six German unlawful combatants a month after a secret military tribunal, but the public thinks the concept of an unlawful combatant is a conservative Bush/Cheney concept.
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WWW.ChiCha.in
It is true by definition, but these days It implies some kind of subversive effort. America's Army is fully acknowledged to be a recruiting tool that portrays a positive image of the Army.
What you might not know is that it was also designed to get some people to NOT join. Basic training washouts still cost the government a lot of money, and they were hoping a more realistic experience would discourage some of those who weren't cut out for the Army.
It's also designed to train existing soldiers. Yes, people being paid to have a LAN party. But it's less expensive and safer for squad tactics training than real guns and bullets out in the field.
Don't worry. 90%+ of games with an obvious or even semi-obvious agenda are poorly produced, not fun to play, and feel inherently un-cool to gamers of all ages.
The most they do
By removing civilians from the picture, developers like Bach are trying to reap the benefits of a real-life setting without grappling with the reality of collateral damage.
So... we're calling the video game industry out (and specifically BF3) because its doing EXACTLY what video games are designed to do... allow players to exist in a fantasy without consequences of reality.
While we're at it, let's go ahead and call the author out for doing exactly what he was hired to do too... create pointless conflict for the sake of online ad sales...
Can we post articles with some actual substance please? Thanks. Bye.
This test is designed to help you learn self control.
Welcome to the Experiment.
You must continue. BZZT
America, the Great Experiment.
You must continue. BZZT
Let's see if the serfs ACTUALLY want to stand alone against the kings as they all claim.
You must continue. BZZT
well? What are you waiting for?
You must continue. BZZT
Is there anyone still out there!? oh god please no...
You must continue. BZZT
I thought you said this was about self control!
You must continue. BZZT
Hello!? Please? I DON'T UNDERSTAND
You must continue. BZZT
I HAVE A HEART GET ME OUT OF HERE
You must contiX X X
Where are the independent variables?
Is this experiment still under control?
Who is in charge of this experiment?
If we started murdering people, would there be anyone left?
I had lethal enforcers for Sega Genesis way back in the 90's and it had civilians popping up left and right, and you could shoot them but there was a penalty for doing so.
-Xoltri
"If you put a person in front of a choice where they can do good things or bad things, they will do bad things, go [to the] dark side because people think it's cool to be naughty, they won't be caught," he said.
Fixed that for you.
(Is it really that hard to make an AI that, if one of the computer's soldiers sees you commit a wartime atrocity, they tell others and try to bring you in, dead or alive?)
I see. How does the abundance of seamen make you feel?
How many novels, movies or plays about military activities deal with civilians? From the material I've read, not many. Why? Unless they are important to the development of the storyline, they are unnecessary.
Why should video games be any different?
I've been playing Carmageddon recently. Great fun. You don't have to kill pedestrians but you stand very little chance of finishing any of the races if you don't! I read somewhere that in Germany the pedestrians were changed to zombies. My version has the red blooded humans. Cunning Stunt Bonus!
http://www.acetonestudio.com
How a game where you play as a civilian in a war setting, trying to keep you, your family, and friends alive without becoming combatants? It could be "Sims War".
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
I don't think I can count the number of times I killed Barney or a professor
in Half-Life.
If you choose to play in "Grownup"mode you can kill civilians, but from time to time you will suffer a flashback replay of you killing the civilian. During that time, your avatar becomes a stationary target. Kill more civilians get more frequent flashbacks. Eventually you become trapped in continuous flashbacks,
grand theft auto has civilians
In related news, Monopoly board game designers commented that they removed the "eviction" feature from the game so players would not be tempted to boot low-income families from tenement housing. "Given the choice, players would become slumlords, because they think it's cool to get rich without consequences," said a source close to the designers.
And who else remembers those immortal words ... stairs going down...
"The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes" - Winston Churchill
With the right scoring system killing civ could move the heart and minds the other way and make winning harder kill too many and they become hostile. You can also make missions where you have to extract civilian, protect their neighbourhood, feed them, protect their hospital, fix the sewers/ electrical grid/ water pump. It might even teach a generation that bombing the shit out of peoples does not turn them into ally!
What wrong with adding killable civilians, but when they're killed your "bad press" score goes up, which then affects the... the.. erm I can't quite put my finger on what that affects. Oh, elections, right.
Nevermind, carry on.
If you want to kill civilians, you can play something like Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
Or improve your driving skills with GTA.
I suppose this guy thinks military games are for boys who like to pose in fancy combat outfits. And shoot at each other.
--
Almost everything is a lot less serious than you think.
There's an easy fix for this. Definitely put civilians in the video games and then cause the players to suffer substantial point losses for killing them. This puts the player in a much more realistic situation where if they kill civilians, they might just lose the game.
Much more likely to vastly inflate deaths reported to make us look bad.