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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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Should I be worried that you put a qualifier on where you don't kill people?
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.
I'd bring a gun to work.
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?
Yeah, they're minus 100 points.
Because in some cases, it doesn't make sense for the streets to be vacant. If you are just walking around a city, you will expect people to be about doing their own thing. If battle erupts, they will be running all over the place for cover, or holed up in some corner somewhere. Two armies don't face off in a sterile environment. There needs to be external life around. Adding such things opens up the possibility for more in depth gameplay. Killing civilians gets you a reprimand, or a failed mission, or perhaps results in civilians reacting to you differently, closing off some options and opening others. Preventing civilian deaths earns you things, like better weapons. Perhaps enemy combatants are hiding among the civilians.
If your reasoning for not adding additional NPCs is due to triangle count, then you need to broaden your horizons, and realize that games can be about more than just high quality graphics.
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".
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.
Hmm....a "certain type of person?" Are you judging yourself or others by how you play a video game?
Take the Red Pill.
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.
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.
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
"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. "
Kind of sad commentary on the fucktards who are so mentally inept they can't separate reality from fantasy.
If think actions in a video game have any relation to real life values then it's really going to hurt your brain to know that whilst I think killing civilians in the original Syndicate was part of what made it quite funny sometimes, I've been staunchly for avoiding civilian deaths in real life, and in fact you're free to look at my comment history from yesterday if you wish to see evidence of this.
Honestly, if you can't see that computer games are a way to explore a world that is not real and that whatever you do in a game has absolutely no relation to what you would do or think should be done in reality, then you need help.
Your argument is equivalent to saying storywriters and actors for films or TV have bad values for writing in the deaths of civilians or the actors playing a part responsible for the death of civilians.
Sorry but that's fucking stupid.
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
insurgencies who hide within the local population to avoid retaliation, not implying that there were no innocents.
You realise this is a propaganda line right? In reality they are the local population defending their patch of fields. Not all of the civilians join the fight but those that do can not be said to be "hiding" among their friends and family. Where else could they go? Did the US military offer to buy them all fancy uniforms before the war kicked off, and build them nice military barracks with the national flag flying on the roof?
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.