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.")

Comments

Duh.

[Anonymous Coward]

If I wanted to grapple with reality, I wouldn't be playing a video game.

Re:Duh.

[Moryath]

I don't know if it goes that far. Certainly, some videogames are more realistic than others (within reason of course... for instance, the original Deus Ex would have enemies simply collapse if rendered unconscious, but actually bleed a pool of blood if killed).

At the same time, the ability to have a "realistic environment" is always a strange goal. I will admit to laughing during Fallout 3 the first time a wasteland wanderer ran up to me to thank me for my work on the Wasteland Survival Guide, handed me a gift... and promptly ran off into the wilderness to be tackled and torn to shreds by the nearest Yao Guai. Not that I was laughing at the circumstance, more the combination of AI limitations and random spawn points that caused it to happen. (Don't worry. I killed the Yao Guai, then looted both corpses. Can't have a maneater running around willing to attack other humans after all.)

But as for the rest... Again, Deus Ex had civilians. Killable ones. So did the first two Fallout games (hell, if you weren't in Britain, there were killable KIDS). And you should expect that people will do stupid things. Sometimes it's going to the dark side in the game for a while. Sometimes it's wasting an entire clip of ammo on that freaking annoying Claptrap. Sometimes it's piling six dozen grenades under a Warthog to see how high it will flip.

Gamers push boundaries. They test things. Give them a sandbox and they (at least some of them) will diligently work to tunnel their way out.

Video Games = School Shootings

[redJag]

Just imagine the "ammo" this would give anti-game violence arguments. They shot civilians in game to practice shooting civilians in real life!

Simple.

[Nemyst]

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.

Players do bad things because:

[Dracos]

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.

Re:Players do bad things because:

[gman003]

Well, there's no civilians in America's Army (the US Army's propaganda game), but, during the training missions, shooting a superior officer (surprisingly hard to do, since the game enforces basic range safety) leads to a short cutscene of the player in a cell in Fort Leavenworth, awaiting court-martial.

Civilians that may die in games?

[vgerclover]

I loved to play the Rainbow Six series, and those fucking civilians would always get between my gun and the head of the last remaining terrorist. I also remember killing scientists in Half-Life just because they wouldn't move anymore after some map point.
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...?

That's incredibly unrealistic.

[mosb1000]

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.

Here's a hint - it's not the developers

[gman003]

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.

Re:Here's a hint - it's not the developers

[Dr. Spork]

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.)

Re:I don't

[ChromeAeonium]

Yeah, they're minus 100 points.

Re:Because then...

[rubycodez]

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.

Re:Al Gore wanted to restrict access to games

[artor3]

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....

Re:This can be handled

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Because then...

[billstewart]

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.