I love video games. Lots of us do. Yet our love is not always shared, and many have asked about the potential social impacts of games: do they cause violence? Do they cause deviant, disruptive, or otherwise antisocial behavior? Since the tragic Columbine shootings, whose perpetrators were players of the revolutionary first-person-shooter Doom, video games have been called into question for their supposed negative effects on society. While this began, naturally, with investigation of the presence of violence in games, the backlash against video games has also entered the realm of sexual content, profanity, counter-productivity, and other social taboos.
It is impossible to perfectly stratify discussion about video games in society into neat categories. With that in mind, one must contemplate the following facts when considering the place of video games in society, as I will in this paper. Video games are the product of the brilliance of technology, and conceptually they are the single medium that will come ever closer to the fullest representation of reality and pseudo-realities. However, there exists a conservative element of society that imagines that video games are empty, brain-draining activities upon which children and adults spend wasteful hours, leading them to violent or lewd behavior and to the breakdown of society.
Part of this element comes from inexperience with and ignorance of video games; another part comes from an arbitrary view of society and morality; and another part, fundamentally, comes from a subconscious hatred of the good for being good. Video games are not just mindless, substance-free, sugary candies for the brain. They, like all other media, have the ability to be beautiful, emotional, intelligent, poetic, reflective, or any other adjective one can find to describe a piece of art, yet they can do it in an exceptionally new way. They put the consumer in the driver’s seat, saying, “make this experience your own,” whether it is in custom character creation, open-ended problem-solving, or pervasive ethical quandaries. A full understanding of the educational and entertaining possibilities to be offered by the medium of video games, as well as the nature of its enemies, can lead to the full realization of its potential benefits.
Video games as simulations of an alternate reality
A false assumption to make about video games, especially in the modern day, is that they are ergodic- predictable, repetitive, or otherwise banal. Quite contrarily, the nature of logic and modern technology’s ability to manifest that logic on the computer screen has demonstrated repeatedly that video games (and their scientific counterparts, computer models) have lead to new kinds of situations, interactions, and understandings of things never observed before. Even in terms of game design, games have been played and optimized beyond ways that game developers would have ever expected. Though older game design may have been more directly and linearly construction with fewer possibilities, newer games have capitalized on the presence of new technologies- as well as the experiences learned from past greats- to create dynamic gaming experiences.
The more characteristics and variables programmed into more individual objects and entities, the greater and greater exponentially the possibilities become. The gradual evolution of video games is not toward “realism” per se, but toward immersion: natural consistency and dynamics. It is nonsensical to ask for realism in a game about Dungeons & Dragons, a universe jam-packed with magic, but that does not mean that anything goes: the magic must act as believably as it can, as though the game were saying “if magic actually existed, this is how it would behave.”
It is thus a misconception that video games provide the same singular, preprogrammed experience that movies or television provide. Though, of course, individuals have subjective responses to the same content in movies and television, games provide subjectivity of two orders: the first of the player, and the second of the content that is experienced itself. Beyond the simple spontaneity implemented into the games (randomized behavior of enemies, item appearances, etc.), the actual subjective presence of the player- whether it is in his ability to operate his character or his choices of action- affects the outcome of what actually occurs on-screen. The greater in complexity a game becomes, the more and more this becomes true.
This facet of video games- their non-ergodicity- is by far their most important characteristic. It is, as we have seen, what makes them unlike any media ever before. Generally speaking, the power of computers has given us the ability to imagine different objects of totally diverse natures, program them into a system of laws of interaction, and then sit back and watch the show. Biologists can now see things that are very logically real, but do not have to be directly observed or deduced by hand anymore; one researcher speaks of DNA shuffling for forecasting genetic behaviors: “we used thermodynamics and reaction engineering to evaluate and model this complex reaction network so we can now predict where the DNA from different parent genes will recombine.”[1] Economists can imagine economic actors of certain preferences, assume they are utility maximizing, plug in the amount of resources available, and learn about what kinds of things people will produce. In the same regard, the video gamer can ask, “let’s say we have a mountain lion fighting a huge wasp; who will win, and will the fight be awesome or lame?” The process is about imagining independent things and making assumptions about their characteristics, and then throwing them into a figurative box, shaking it, and then pouring it out to find out what is there.
Gaming as Art and Narrative
Some have argued that video games offer no valid mode of expression. In April 2002, U.S. District Judge Stephen N. Limbaugh, Sr. ruled that video games are not subject to first amendment protections under the constitution: “[There is] no conveyance of ideas, expression, or anything else that could possibly amount to speech. The court finds that video games have more in common with board games and sports than they do with motion pictures.”[2] Nothing could be farther from the truth, even besides the point that board games and even athletics can, too, be artistic in the creativity that goes into their rules and aesthetics. The games contemplated and cited in the court opinion, “Fear Effect,” “Doom,” “Mortal Kombat” and “Resident Evil,” were not only six to nine years old at the date of the court opinion, but had titles falsely cited as “Mortal Combat” and “Resident of Evil Creek.”[3] This is testament to the fact that inexperience with video games has a strong positive productive relationship with total, ape-like ignorance about them.
Though to some degree this paper is guilty of it, the primary problem with much formal academic research into video games is its insistence on “boxing” characteristics of games into neat little propositional packages. Usually, it is the result of an infrequent video game player conducting a study, or a frequent gamer attempting to appeal to a broader audience with his writing. The problem with this approach lies in attempting to convey the facets of such a complex kind of thing to someone who has never experienced it. Simply to say, “imagine something like a movie, where the player holds a controller that moves a character around on screen and makes him do things” clearly fails to capture all the qualitative essence of video games, especially in the present-day context. It is the equivalent of trying to explain to an 11th-century Catholic Bishop the concept of a car as “imagine something like a carriage, but one that moves by itself.” He, too, would condemn it, probably as the product of witchcraft, because he would not understand how it worked. The attempt, then, to “sound-bite” video game research certainly creates skewed perceptions of their supposed social implications.
Video games are free speech
Thankfully, the 7th District Court (which affected a much broader jurisdiction than the Limbaugh ruling) had previously upheld video games as free speech. The bottom line is that inanimate visual art, audio, and films are protected under freedom of expression, no matter whether their substance is contributory to public discourse or not. The same should go for video games, and relying on prejudice against the “new guy” will not suffice. Many games require just as much, if not plenty more effort than a single painting or a book. Development teams often number between thirty and two thousand people, frequently allocating many members simply to developing the plot and characters and making them believable. Besides all the technological input that must go into the game in order to make it playable on the user’s computer, the art for the “look” of the game must be drafted and implemented into three dimensional graphics, while voice-overs and sound effects must be created and integrated into the entire process seamlessly. A good game must be one with entertaining gameplay, an interesting plot, and appealing graphics and sound, meanwhile operating on a budget and somehow turning a profit.
Interactivity and character
The desire for interactivity in entertainment is, in some regards, a product of social evolution. Instead of watching television, children often play in imaginary worlds. Many adventurous persons have a passion for exploring the wilderness or traveling to different cities, to enjoy the alternative aesthetics and atmosphere. It is this same spirit that leads to the appreciation of quality video games. Movies and books do not afford the reader the kind of flexibility and freedom that video games do; the actions of the characters always happen no matter what the reader says or does, and all he can do is try to imagine otherwise. The video game provides the interface by which the audience can instead be the protagonist, for a change.
Many games, especially role-playing games, offer character customization schemes that both affect the aesthetic role of the character on screen (clothes, hair and skin color, body shape, facial features, etc.) as well as his substantive role (attributes, skills, and abilities). Throughout the game, characters can collect items or earn experience that gives them more abilities, often at the player’s choice. The result is character development, which leads to close identification with the character at play and even sentimental value (try deleting someone’s character in World of Warcraft and receiving an indifferent response).