“10 people will fight, 8 people will die.
You get to watch.”
- tagline for the film ‘The Condemned’
Picture the scene: you get home from work & switch the TV on. It’s the news.
A notorious, yet elusive, illegal immigrant with known gang connections and a chequered history of crime & prison time back in his own country stole a car earlier today. He ran over 12 pedestrians, caused 3 serious road accidents involving other vehicles and finally rammed the (now almost completely undriveable) stolen vehicle into the side a house. Bloody, bruised and shaken up he emerged from the wreckage and made a break for it. He was chased on foot by police officers, a police helicopter joined the pursuit, along with a news helicopter from the local news station.
Despite being relatively lightly armed with a handgun, he and fired several shots at his pursuers, killing two officers and 3 innocent bystanders before being taken down by a SWAT team lying in wait a couple of streets away.
What I just described is pretty much Grand Theft Auto IV; the basic game formula is ‘steal this, go there, shoot that’.
These kinds of highly criminal and destructive acts are, in real life, the pursuit of a tiny minority of society’s bastards. If someone in real life strung together all those things in the above paragraph it would no doubt be called a ‘REIGN OF TERROR’, ‘A RAMPAGE OF DEATH’ or some other similarly formulaic tabloid headline. It would make news around the world (and quite rightly so).
In the non-reality of gaming however (and GTA IV in particular), doing these things is not only possible, but encouraged and rewarded. If you can do all these things then escape the scene, lower your ‘wanted’ level, lay low and eventually let the heat die down you can go about Liberty City as if nothing ever happened the next (in-game) day.
If I escaped and did this or was actually caught & shot by the police after the events described above I certainly wouldn’t wake up stood outside a hospital a few hours later, all my wounds having been miraculously healed and free to go about my business as if nothing had happened. GTA IV is deliberately not life-like (well, not for most of us), it’s not trying to tell you what is right or wrong. It deliberately allows you to indulge in being a ‘bad guy’.
Most importantly though, it’s just a game. It’s just ‘silly violent nonsense’.
This game (and Modern Warfare 2) has caused outrage.
But why? They’re both just ‘silly violent nonsense’.
Go watch the films Gone In 60 Seconds, Scarface, Menace II Society and any one of the Saw films. You’ll see aspects of Grand Theft Auto in parts of those films. What you’ll also see are depictions of violence far more vivid, ‘real-life’ looking and sadistic than anything you’ll see in the GTA video game. Indeed GTA: Vice City was pretty much a complete lifting of the Scarface film verbatim then slightly tinkered with to create an entertaining, time-consuming (and critically, a Scarface copyright-infringement avoiding) game. As advanced as any current video game may be, they’re simply not photo-realistic enough to look anywhere near as ‘real’ as actual events, actual people or an actual movie.
So could a person who looks at GTA or Modern Warfare (or any game where the primary function is violence or crime) be the same person who, without the video game would mimic events from films, TV or even comic books?
How about if all it takes is watching a movie or playing a game to trigger such a psychotic episode? Then surely that person cannot distinguish between fantasy and reality or right from wrong.. This person must then be, in all likelihood, an undiagnosed sociopath.
If it’s not a video game, a movie, a voice, a vision, a dream or a song that is the ‘claimed’ reason for going nuts it will have to be pinned on something. That person, the people around them or the media will have to place the blame on SOMETHING. No-one can just accept that things can just happen with very little conceivable reason.
When someone suffers depression some people may ask: “Well, what are you depressed about?” then proceed to reel off a list of reasons why they shouldn’t be depressed.
Well, it’s not that they’re necessarily depressed about something, they just are. It can be entirely independent of reason or ‘things’. It’s not simply a matter of the person feeling better by confronting the reason, eating some chocolate or going out & forgetting about it. Depression doesn’t have to be about something, it just is.
This whole misunderstanding has an effect and is the reason why musicians, games and movies get the blame for entirely unrelated incidents when people claim to have been violently ‘inspired’ by Marilyn Manson. This will be leapt upon by the media so they can lay the blame somewhere. The truth however is very different. Far more people have enjoyed the music of Marilyn Manson and been entertained by his music both on record and at the live venue. Still more will have been positively influenced to go off and start their own band, write lyrics and poetry or paint like Mr Manson does.
The much vilified (but ultimately utterly harmless in the great scheme of things) 2004 game ‘Manhunt‘ is another good example of media hyperbole and tabloid witch hunting for an easy scapegoat to peg societal problems on (a common implication which police always later reject after investigation)…
Most of ‘Manhunt’ is spent stealthily executing people in elaborate & ultraviolent ways with whatever bits of improvised weaponry are to hand. The people you must kill to advance in the game are also trying to kill you by the way. The person in charge of the whole thing is a producer and he’s filming the whole thing & broadcasting it to a TV audience. In fact, the whole game is basically ‘The Running Man’ put into game format (and again altered just enough to avoid any copyright unpleasantries). I’ve seen no evidence of this game resulting in a dramatic rise in the numbers of people being suffocated with plastic bags, faces being smashed off with baseball bats or stabbings in both eyes with huge shards of glass.
It’s incredibly violent yes, and wantonly so, but absolutely no more violent than a lot of gore-based horror films. And it’s not being acted out by real people and with a host of special effects to make everything look absolutely as ‘real’ as possible.
Ever seen ‘The Condemned’ starring ‘Stone Cold’ Steve Austin? It’s full of shocking violence and a rape scene (and is very similar in concept to The Running Man, even down to the rape scene, now I think about it). I certainly didn’t like the rape scene and thought it absolutely did not need to be in the film. But when it comes to a question of whether or not I enjoyed the film as a whole (rape scene notwithstanding), as Stone Cold himself would say; ”Hell Yeah!”
Enjoying this, or any other violent film does not make me (or you) a bad person though.
Go here and read about the film and the characters. It’s shockingly violent. Enjoyable, yet violent. Media outlets are conspicuous in their silence when it comes to the violence and rape in this movie. Newspapers aren’t going foaming dog crazy about “moral standards” with this film.
The Condemned was largely written off as ‘silly violent nonsense’ by most of the film critics and this is absolutely the best way to treat it and (similarly violent) games; silly violent nonsense.
In fact, the game Manhunt could almost be what the producers of The Condemned looked at as their inspiration. There are many similarities. One similarity the game does NOT share with the movie though is that rape scene. Even without this the game still makes headlines as being ultraviolent and disgusting. But, the film does have a rape scene, yet that doesn’t get anywhere near the coverage.
The scene itself is completely unneccessary and could’ve been left out altogether without affecting the storyline. The bad guy who actually does it is plenty bad enough already and the viewer hates him enough without adding ‘rapist’ to his portfolio of bastardry. He even rapes this woman in front of her injured husband who is powerless and unable to do anything about it. It’s really that bad.
Transpose just the violence of this film to a video game and that on its own is enough to spark an outrage. Imagine if there was a rape scene in the game too? Just imagine the outrage. The game would be banned without a second thought.
So why is it acceptable to have rape acted out in a film (and portrayed as real) but within a game (by definition not real and not close to actually looking real) that has an 18 certificate and is absolutely not marketed to kids yet it’s not acceptable?
The more you look at this example the darker the conclusion. Is the movie acceptable because people are so used to seeing rape in movies that it just passes under the radar?
I think that is the reason and that scares me. That’s an indication of a sick society.
Incidentally, the sequel to Manhunt (the imaginatively titled ‘Manhunt 2′) does (or did) have a rape scene in it. It was immediately banned. Although it was eventually okayed and released it was only after a lot of violent content was toned down, removed or reinterpreted. I’m not sure if the rape scene remained. I hope it didn’t.
I feel like somewhat of a hypocrite to say on the one hand that I believe rape in video games to be going too far when on the other I completely advocate violent video games and describe them as silly violent nonsense. I’m not sure where the line is drawn in my own head, never mind trying to write it down and describe it. Maybe it’s just a matter of what I’m desensitized to and what offends me personally.
And that’s why it’s so hard to have the discussion; it’s all entirely subjective. I may get offended at a rape scene in a video game, someone else won’t. I won’t get offended by a game where carjacking, robbery and violence is the main thrust of the gameplay, someone else will.
Neither I, nor you, have any more or less right to say what’s right or wrong than the next person. Even of the next person is a moron.
So, back to the game I’m specifically dealing with in this whole series of writings (and the game which I’ve hardly talked about so far…); Modern Warfare 2…
