Friday, Jul 25, 2008
Every year, Brian Moriarty gives a speech at the Game Developers Conference, one of the industry's main trade shows. Every year, it is the best-received speech at the conference. Moriarty is a brilliant speaker, but more than that, he is one of the industry's eminences grises -- one of the original Infocom crew, creator of Loom and Beyond Zork, now in charge of development at MPlayer (one of the biggest of the online-game communities).
Last year, Moriarty's speech was on the subject of violence in games. As he spoke, two short clips appeared on a screen behind him, repeating hypnotically. One was a clip from "The Great Train Robbery," a silent film historians call the first real movie hit, showing a mustachioed Westerner shooting a gun directly toward the camera; the other, a short sequence from Quake, showed a guard being shot.
Compelling images both -- and compelling in that both show that violence has been a important part of two very different media, virtually from their inceptions.
The speech itself was a meditation on two issues: first, the nature of violence in gaming; and second, the idea of "rhythm of play." Moriarty says that, if you observe people playing a game -- observe them, not the game itself -- you find that they engage in repeated cycles of activity. And this repetition, the rhythm created, is one of the strongest draws for people to interactive entertainment. It's hypnotic. It's involving.
Violence, he says, creates dissonance. It breaks the rhythm. Dissonance is not bad in itself; dissonance, consciously and creatively used, can be an extremely effective technique, in gaming as in music.
"If you want to include violence in your games," says Moriarty, "do it, and put your heart and soul into it, do it with awareness -- not because violence is easy, or because it shocks, but because you need dissonance, and you know how and why it strengthens your game."
To paraphrase: Violence used artistically is effective; violence used crudely is vile.
It's a lesson most computer-game developers have yet to learn -- and if one of the upshots of Littleton is that they begin to think more clearly about the issue, that will be to the good.
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First-person shooters are violent games. Yet they are not depictions of endless, orgasmic mayhem; in their solo-play mode, they are mainly about exploration and puzzle-solving, with opposition provided in the form of monsters you shoot. Though violence, and the edge-of-the-seat tension it builds, is a key part of the game's aesthetic, impressive 3D technology and art and clever "level design" (where exploration and puzzle-solving come in) are at least as important.
The "violence" is against monsters, defined as such, who are clearly attempting to kill you; the back story, such as it is, presents them as some kind of horrible, Lovecraftian intrusion into the real world. Hence they are, in a sense, totally depersonalized opponents. But the notion that this kind of thing therefore "desensitizes" people to violence and makes them more willing to commit it seems dubious. Shooters are really about the "booga-booga" fright instinct: A scary monster appears out of nowhere and roars at you; you have to turn quickly and blow it away.
And of course, you die frequently yourself. The feeling engendered is not "I'm an immortal Rambo, I'm so cool I can kill anything" -- rather, it's more like, "God, that was a hard level, those spider things with the cannon launchers are really tough, I'm glad I finally got through it."
Interestingly, the multiplayer online version is very different. You shoot not monsters but other players, who are running around trying to kill you. And they aren't depersonalized; they look just like you, you can chat with them (but rarely do because the game is too fast-paced), and so forth. This has been portrayed as something new and frightening -- but frankly, it's no different from paintball and not much different from tag.
The press has reported Lt. Col. David Grossman's claim that games like Quake are good training for murder, because they teach you to "clear a room" by moving quickly from target to target and aiming for the head. They teach you to avoid the novice hunter or soldier's mistake of shooting repeatedly at the same target until the target drops, and instead to use only a single shot.
On the basis of this, I have to doubt that Grossman has ever actually played Quake. No monster in Quake can be killed with a single shot; at least two hits are required. It is impossible to make a "head-shot"; Quake makes no distinction between shots that strike at different locations on a target's body. And if you stay still long enough to pick your targets and get off head-shots, you're dead. You must keep moving to evade enemy fire. You snap off shots when you can.
In short, Quake doesn't teach the lessons that the critics claim it teaches.
The development of shooting games over time has not been toward more and more megaviolence; rather, it's been toward prettier and more-impressive 3D rendering (Unreal) and toward more compelling story-lines, interwoven more effectively with the game (Half-Life).
Yes, these are violent games -- but as is usually the case when the media latches onto something, they have been caricatured. Violence is only a part of their appeal.
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