Games don't kill people -- do they?

There is a lot of violence in computer gaming. Some of it is very ugly. The two most popular categories in computer games at present are the first-person shooter (Quake, Unreal, Half-Life) and the real-time strategy game ( StarCraft, Myth, Total Annihilation). Both categories are "games of violence," if you will.

The computer gaming industry is a monoculture: It consists almost entirely of white, suburban males in their 20s. We're talking the demographic that reads Maxim magazine. They're heavily into computer games, almost completely ignorant of games from other media and almost equally ignorant of computer games published longer than five years ago. Visiting a game development firm is like walking into a strangely 1950s version of 1990s America; if any women are on the premises, they're artists or marketing people. You may see some Asians, you might see a programmer from India, but certainly nobody darker.

Developers play the same games, they see the same movies, they fraternize with people like themselves and they develop some pretty weird mind-sets. Violence is perceived as cool -- no, not real violence, but violence in games.

Consider Postal, published two years ago. It's a shooter in which you play a deranged, psychotic loser. You wander around shooting completely innocent people at random.

It's hard to imagine why anyone thought this was a good idea. For one thing, innocent people do not make good obstacles: They're unlikely to shoot back. They're not particularly threatening. Never mind the moral considerations; this makes for a dull game.

And the moral considerations should certainly have made Postal's developers (a company called Running With Scissors) think twice. No doubt, they assumed that the "edgy" nature of the project would get them a lot of press and boost its sales. They did get a lot of press, almost all of it negative, and no doubt that did spur some sales to the kind of people who actually think "Beavis & Butthead" is funny.

But you know what? Postal failed. It didn't achieve anywhere near expected sales. The reviews were almost uniformly negative. It failed because it was a bad game.

Consider the "bathtub of blood" ad (for the game Blood, developed by Monolith for GT Interactive). It ran in computer gaming magazines in 1997 (for example, the front gatefold of Computer Gaming World, May 97). The dominant image of the advertisement was, literally, a bathtub filled with blood.

It's hard to imagine why anyone thought this was effective advertising. What it said was: Our game is violent. Our sense of humor is crass. It didn't actually do what an advertisement must do -- explain why the product will be fun or useful, establish a compelling value proposition for the consumer.

Only computer game developers could ever have thought this was a good idea.

In March, another advertisement, for an online games retailer, appeared in the computer gaming press (for instance, Computer Gaming World, March 99, page 89). Its dominant image is that of the naked torso of a woman, lying on an operating table, the rest of her body outside the frame. In the foreground are surgically-gloved hands, holding a scalpel. In the woman's bare flesh are incised the lines of a tic-tac-toe game.

I buy a lot of computer games. I generally buy them online. But the image of someone cutting a woman's flesh in order to play the most patently brain-dead game imaginable did not make me want to patronize this company's services. God only knows why they thought it would motivate anyone else.

Certainly, it is an arresting image. Arresting enough to make the gorge rise. Only the computer gaming culture could possibly view any of this as effective, appropriate or funny.

So perhaps the critics are correct, at least to this degree: The coolness of violence, as portrayed in computer games, has persuaded computer game developers, if no one else, that nauseating depictions of violence, whether or not effective, are cool.

In the gaming field, the response to post-Littleton attacks has been self-righteously defensive. It's just a game. It doesn't hurt you any more than TV (never mind the damage television has done to our political system, our propensity to read, and our sense of social solidarity). Games Are Cool.

That's understandable. Computer gaming people have virtually no defense other than self-righteousness. They're guilty of many of the sins ascribed to them.

But consider this: The excesses fail. Postal failed. Those ads do not deliver. Violence alone doesn't do the trick. Violence is, and should be, part of a designer's toolkit; but it is neither necessary nor sufficient.

Next Page: Advice to game designers: Put your heart into your violence!

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