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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.
Just imagine the "ammo" this would give anti-game violence arguments. They shot civilians in game to practice shooting civilians in real life!
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.
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.
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.
Kind of sad commentary on the fucktards who think killing innocent people is fun. Even if it is in a video game, it reflects your values.
On another note, they could introduce killing civilians in video games in an "ethical" manner. Just set the rules that if you kill a civilian it will either immediately or eventually negatively impact your game. e.g. some time later in the game when you are found out, your player is executed for murder. But then, the AI would have to figure out whether it was accidental (usually forgivable in the fog of war) or intentional. Fallout 3 rewarded your karma level by sending hit squads (regulators) after you if you did enough "bad" things, and mercs after you if you were too good.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
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?
Kind of sad commentary on the fucktards who think killing innocent people is fun. Even if it is in a video game, it reflects your values.
So being an actor in a play as "the bad dude", or enjoying a novel about an assassin is bad, or watching a movie about a terrorist is bad, or killing a character you don't like in Sims3 by putting furniture around the pool is bad, or playing Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards (late 80s game, I think) to seduce as many women as possible in an evening is bad? your viewpoint is ridiculous, it reflects your absurd values. Plenty of normal people like escapist entertainment where they get to play or imagine themselves the crazy or bad or naughty or slutty person.
I don't think you got the politics of that correct.
No, he got it right. Both major parities have censorial tendencies. Occasionally they overlap.
For example:
McCain (just the first major GOP politician I thought to google)
"I can take you to a video game being sold to our children where the object of the game is to kill police. I understand the importance of weapons, but to define that as being the major cause [of youth violence], there’s a whole lot of causes."
Following the Littleton school shootings, McCain was one of four lawmakers who wrote Clinton after the shootings to call for a close look at “the entertainment media and the violent images and message with which they are bombarding our children.”
Saying parents need clear, consistent information about entertainment products, McCain [proposed] a uniform labeling system on all movies, video games, and music products. The “21st Century Media Responsibility Act” amends the Cigarette Labeling Act to apply its warning label requirements to violent media products.
"...when we’re wiring every school and library with the Internet, each should have filtering software to filter out that stuff. We need to know why we’re robbing our children of the most precious treasure, and that’s their innocence."
Perhaps such games could be used to draw attention on how the ROE are callous with regards to civilian lives.
Look at the following stats:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_Body_Count_project#March_2003_to_March_2005_report
37%. US-led forces killed 37% of civilian victims.
9%. Anti-occupation forces/insurgents killed 9% of civilian victims.
36%. Post-invasion criminal violence accounted for 36% of all deaths.
11%. Unknown agents (11%).
The USA until 2005 were those who killed the most civilians, way ahead of their enemies.
Now, most people typically believe that the USA killed about 10% of civilians while the insurgents killed 40% or more by using callous tactics such as placing IEDs and attacking US forces in the middle of crowded streets. (I was actually surprised by those numbers myself).
Also, in comparison, the USA lost only about 5000 troops while civilian casualties for the whole war are around 100,000 (possibly up to twice as many). Assuming the stats above did not change much since 2005, this means the USA killed 37,000 civilians while losing only 5,000 of their own troops...
I understand troops do a hard job, they want to get back home alive... BUT:
- The USA started the war, those civilians didn't ask for it
- Who's doing the fighting? The soldiers should be doing it, not the civilians.
Troops should be taking more risks than civilians. When I see so many civilians are dying, and I see the USA killed so many of them, I start to question the tactics used by the US military. I mean what, are they bombing entire buildings full of civilians just because an insurgent with a pistol is hiding inside and they don't want to risk sending troops to get him? What is going on? It's suspicious and I wouldn't trust the US military to tell me the truth... They've been caught repeatedly hiding facts that cast a bad light on them or the war, so they aren't credible. Now, if they were not afraid to come forward and admit their ROE sometimes endanger civilians, I'd have more faith in them.
Anyway, my point is, games that show the real ROE could be a good thing. I don't expect any war to be perfect, I know civilians will always suffer. My question is, how much do they really need to suffer? When are civilian casualties too many casualties? How many of these casualties could have been avoided? How easy were they to avoid, how reckless are the ROE exactly? Video games could help us have an opinion. Of course no game could be 100% unbiased, but it could still help us get closer to the truth.
There's a war going on for hell's sake! Innocent people are dying by the thousands and we're all busy trying to pretend it isn't happening because that would be bad for public relations. Let's have a sense of responsibility for a moment and admit to what is really going on. Let's discuss the issue, all of us, not just those suits in Washington! Let's all decide whether or not the US military are doing things properly or if they're needlessly endangering innocents. Let's show the American public what war really is, maybe next time they'll think twice before paying taxes so their government can start a war on some innocent people. Because that's what it's really about: we don't want Americans to know how murderous war is for civilians. We want the American public to think the USA are kicking terrorist ass while saving innocent civilians. We want to think US soldiers will gladly catch a bullet for an Iraqi child. Well in reality things are not like that at all and the American public should know.
Also, a game that presents US troops as the bad guys could be interesting too. It could show the perspective of the civilians and the insurgents, and people would realize it's not all black and white but very grey. Yes, even insurgents have good reasons to fight, sorry to break it to those of you who didn't realize that. Kicking the asses of people who came in your country with
Well, they taught me that internet armchair generals recognise no such thing as innocence in their willingness to defend any crime committed by their chosen side.
Wow, I didn't know this. That unpublished level with the "twist" really does sound interesting. But I don't think the problem is that there is something outrageous about civilians being mortal, especially if killing one instantly gets the "game over" screen. No, I think it's that there is a lesson that war-glorification games don't want the players to learn: civilians are actually the vast majority of modern war casualties. The perfectly ordinary waging of war, even when care is taken, will still probably result in killing more civilians than bad guys. If they were made mortal and the fighting scenes resemble real modern wars, then players would be finding bleeding, crying, crawling children with massive burns, every twentieth time they fired a rocket launcher inside a populated area. Poorly-built houses would collapse on the families inside. That's how war games would have to look. Clearly nobody wants that in a game. But the reason isn't the fact that players would deliberately kill the civilians. That could be easily prevented by a "game over". Maybe too many civilian deaths would lock you out of certain urban environment missions. No, war games need to make players think that they're doing something awesome. There is a segment of the population who pictures war as awesome, and these people will be appeased by games that glorify it instead of revealing its sickening reality. Then again, maybe there is a small subset of these people who would still find this war stuff is awesome even if there were burned, crawling children and weeping parents, and it's true, nobody wants to see someone enjoying that as a part of a "game". But remember that we still live in the amazing times when the mention of undisputed facts about civilian deaths is done only by protesters and other marginalized people. Some undisputed facts are just too inconvenient when we want to live with our delusions, so they become unmentionable. And game publishers certainly have no incentive to mention these. Quite to the contrary, they would rather show the people back home an unrealistic and glorified picture of war so that ignoring the reality becomes even easier. (Wow, I didn't think the post would end here when I started, but I think I'm on to something.)
Funny, what they taught me was that if Joe Farmer gets shot or or bombed or captured by Westerners while tending his garden or defending his family, the US government will announce that he was a terrorist and Al Qaeda will announce that he was a martyr, or if he gets shot by the Taliban then the US will announce that he was a friendly civilian and the Taliban will announce that he was an infidel traitor.
And if Joe Farmer is carrying a rifle, if he's in Texas the US right wing will say he's protected by the Second Amendment, but if he's in Afghanistan, they'll say he's a terrorist, whereas realistically, if he's a goat herder then of course he'll be carrying an AK47, because otherwise the Taliban or the government's army or the local warlord or some other guy with an AK47 will steal his goats.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
See and that is where it is not realistic, because IRL the military would just define them as 'insurgents' and destroy the evidence.
So instead of 'soldiers raid house and slaughter family' it becomes 'brave soldiers wipe out terrorist stronghold'.
Already the use of the term 'collateral damage' in the article is in itself a joke.
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.
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CINC, 4th Penguin Legion