| FIGHT
How much video game violence is too much? 'Cause,
I wanna make one that's right at the bleeding edge, there.
This isn't exactly unique to me, but I'm a
big fan of the "Grand Theft Auto" game series. In fact, I'm proud to say
that I was a fan from the very beginning, back when various South American
nations were in-process of banning it because of their real-world difficulties
with carjackings. That was GTA one, which was sprite-based, and featured
characters the size of ants. M-rated. Major controversy.
GTA 2 was also sprite-based, but unlike part
one, it was rated T for Teen. I don't know if that rating stuck through the
various re-releases, but I think it was appropriate. You could still run
over and gun down innocent pedestrians, but it was very, very hard to take
seriously, particularly in that hitting a pedestrian at high speed resulted
in a sound-effect entirely akin to putting one's foot down in a pile of cow
flop.
I've never had a problem with game violence,
even graphic. Not that I advocate it, but I think you could hand a ten-year-old
a copy of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, let him play it to his heart's content,
and you'd have no ill effects, whatsoever, except that junior might've learned
a few new, colorful words therefrom.
One of the chief reasons I feel this way, even
when dealing with characters sawing one another's heads off, is that even
the most-sophisticated games, to this point, have been little more than high-tech
marionette shows. Kids have played with dolls -- or action figures, if you're
particular -- since society began, and male kids have always incorporated
heavy levels of violence into their play. We just do. It's fun.
Like you've never decapitated a Barbie doll
before. Come on.
Anyways, I don't know if you've seen the trailer
for Grand Theft Auto 4, yet -- it's gorgeous, by the way -- but it HAS got
me thinkin'.
Games ARE getting more realistic, and while
I don't think this new generation of games is anything to worry about,
particularly, there IS going to eventually come a day when having an arm
torn off in a video game will look (or, at the least, will be capable of
looking) like having an arm torn off in real life. And that's going to call
for a general re-evaluation of the industry, at the very least from a PR
stance...
Don't get me wrong, I don't think that any
normal, healthy kid is going to turn homicidal when he encounters ultra-realistic
game violence (as a matter of fact, if it's realistic ENOUGH, that'll probably
get him off the gamin' habit entirely -- people's insides are yucky). But
the differences between this generation and the next few are going to be
palpable. Game characters will move, think, emote much more strongly than
in the past, and there are going to be serious philosophical issues to consider
when designing games. It is, after all, one thing to point a shotgun at a
person, pull the trigger, and have them blasted twenty feet into the air,
yelling "Yahooey!" and quite another to shoot someone in the gut and have
them writhing on the floor for five minutes, gasping and crying in pain and
misery. Kinda harshes the buzz, there.
It's my guess that action games will likely
make violence more stylized and cartoony as the graphics and motion technology
get closer to life, and you'll probably see the more-realistic stuff restricted
to the higher end of the mature-games scale, crime thrillers and such...
At any rate, it's imperative that games be
established as a valid media for adults in the public view long before any
of this comes to pass, or we're looking at a PR nightmare, and we've already
had plenty of those.
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