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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...?
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.
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 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.
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.
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."
Here's Fox "News", just last week, talking about how educational games such as Sim City are produced by a left wing conspiracy with the goal of frightening young children into protecting the environment: link.
Funny, because when I played Sim City I made it my #1 goal to cause a nuclear meltdown without using the disaster menu.
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.
Of course, a more popular game would be Modern Warfare. I haven't played one of those titles in MW2, but I distinctly recall a scene in which torture is used to get important intel from a bad guy, after abducting said bad guy from the streets of a sovereign nation (Brazil, I think). Which message would you rather expose your children to: "Torture is okay as long as the government says so!" or "Cities that bulldoze all their greenspace and get all their electricity from unregulated coal power plants end up with smog."?
Actually, if you watch Fox News, I'm guessing I won't like the answer....
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.
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
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