Is It All Fun and Games?

This returns us to the hypocrisy that Stephen Bush’s final worry points towards: we’re fine with shooting anyone as long as they don’t resemble us. But Bush makes this into an issue about individual guilt. I am or we are fine with it. But by excusing the individual there is the risk of letting the cultural logic that informs the individual’s rationale off the hook.

Games like Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto don’t just reflect our culture, though, they also shape it. In his book Ludopolitics, Liam Mitchell, an Associate Professor of Cultural Studies at Trent University, notes how the popular strategy game Civilization is political because it “institute[s] a way of thinking and acting in [its] design.” In Civilization, the player rules over a civilization, beginning with a single settler and expanding it into an empire. Civilization exemplifies the 4X genre – games where the overriding objective is to explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate. Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto insert the player into a framework of rules that automatically dehumanises everyone in sight. A human is not a human but a target. The difference between this and films that glorify violence is that here the player is actively acting out the logic of certain power relations. The game may present an environment, but the player fulfills that environment’s logic. While not necessarily evil if one can dissociate between the two, the problem is the ways that these games inevitably and mindlessly play out the cruel power dynamics that usually occur elsewhere.

School shootings do not run according to the program though. Like other acts of violence, they are traumatic and disrupt the way that society is supposed to function. Unlike the other acts of violence, the market has not produced a way to package and repurpose the horror. Companies have commercialized the violence of gangs and battlefields by relying on the impersonal logic of a game. When faced with the personal, random violence of a school shooting, our logic can’t cope. It shatters the illusion that society can keep this violence under control.

I reached out to Liam Mitchell, asking him if a game could convincingly critique the distinction between “permissible” and “impermissible” violence in video games. Perhaps, he conceded, but it was more important to consider the sorts of violence a game is best capable of identifying. While a game can draw attention to many kinds of violence — Civilization is very colonial — games are best suited to depicting systemic violence. They show how a system works by showing how that system works.

For example, there’s Papers, Please, a critically acclaimed game released in 2013 in which you play an immigration inspector at the border of a recently conquered town. The mechanics of the game consist entirely of checking passports and deciding who can go through. This simplistic set up allows the game to deal with the violence of the border.