The Questions Games Make Us Ask

(or, How Impaling a Man Leads to Higher Wisdom)

          So my current obsession is MadWorld, the recently released bloodbath for the Wii. In this monochrome piece of wonderfulness, you play Jack, a a burly contestant in a game show where the rules are simple: kill as many people as you can. Actually, the term “kill” is an understatement. What you are ACTUALLY doing is ENDING people in horrifically brutal fashions that lead me to believe there should have been twelve, possibly thirteen commandments in the old testament just to cover the shit you can do in the first level.

          Now, I have a rather strange custom when it comes to new newly purchased games, in that I will play through them twice before moving on. The first time is for the fun of it, just to experience the game, and to be entertained. The second time is where I put on my “pretentious hat” and try to actually analyze what I'm looking at, like a coffee house beatnik at an Andy Warhol exhibit. Yes, I tried to analyze, and find intellectual merit, in Madworld. Crazy, I know. Crazier thing? I succeeded.

          The academics of the world, no doubt because they are incredibly bored, have a major habit of analyzing pieces of popular culture to find “meaning” behind it, regardless of whether or not the author intended it. You know what I'm talking about, you've seen the critics, standing there all smug in their cardigan sweaters, proclaiming that The Great Gatsby is the shining example of lost love during the early twentieth century, or how the fact that because Zhang Ziyi wore red in Memoirs of a Geisha, that it symbolized the oppression of the working class in Tibet or some shit like that. The quality of any creative work (as judged by pretentious academics) is the level of meaning that the viewer can derive from it. Said pretentious academics (we'll just call them “Smart Dicks” from now on) are particularly fond of things that force the viewer to ask “the hard questions”...whatever the fuck THAT means.

          It would be naïve of me to say that games have always been deserving of worthwhile academic study. I don't really see how one can try to relate Pac-Man to Plato, but recent years have seen a sort of maturity come to the games industry.  Stories are more involved, realism has gone up, and even some Smart Dicks who previously scoffed at video games have been involved with making them, such as Stephen Spielberg and Harlan Ellison (who has the dubious honor being both a Dick and an asshole....ok, I'll stop now.) But still, there hasn't been much of anything that asks “the hard questions” until very recently.

          Let's return to Madworld for a moment. On the surface, it seems to be nothing more than a game where you kill everyone you see by jamming as much metal into their bodies as you can before vivisecting them with a very Bruce Campbell-esque chainsaw, and while there is certainly nothing wrong with chainsaw-related murder (Mr. Campbell HAS made a career out of it, after all), the reality is that the game is actually quite a bit deeper than that. The game is, whether the creators intended it or not, a kind of study with the human fascination with violence, blood and death. This is no more apparent than at the end when Jack asks the villain (who shall remain nameless to avoid spoilers) why said villain has taken over a city and forced the inhabitants to reenact Gladiator on a massive scale. The villain's reply is that it was because he was fascinated by all the killing. It's at this point that I began to subconsciously wonder to myself why it is that humans have such a need to see pain inflicted on other human beings. Madworld is the Fight Club of video games: a casebook study of human nature that's been well disguised by being painted in buckets of blood.

          Well played, Sega. Well played.

          I already hear anti-game naysayers crying out that this is just coincidence, but this has actually been going on for quite a while now, only its been very piecemeal at first, but the meaning is there if you know where to look. It could be said that the System Shock duology is a study of the dangers of playing God. The Hacker gives SHODAN free will, so she tries to kill him, then in the sequel, she creates a lifeform of her own that tries to kill her, thus repeating a vicious circle. Or, if you're more of a technofear fetishist, it could be said that SHODAN represents the fear that eventually the mechanical creations of man will one day enslave us. Either way, it still made me give a few weird looks any time I read an article about scientists trying to create A.I. And these are games that came out in 1992/99 respectively!

          Or what about Bioforge, the story of a mind wiped cyborg waking up in a laboratory, not knowing who he is, how he got there? At the game's start, he doesn't want to hurt anyone. He'll beg and plead for the soldiers to stop attacking him and expresses regret after he's killed them. All he wants is to know “What the FUCK, dude?!” But as his pleas for peace continue to fall on deaf ears, his pacifism is replaced with rage, and by the end, he's a remorseless killer, who couldn't give a damn about his real identity. Its a pedestrian example, I know, but I think Mary Shelley would have been happy seeing the themes of her opus echoed in interactive form. Its games like these, that make a STATEMENT that resonate so much with players.

          Recently, I was perusing my usual gaming news periodicals when I saw something that caused my brain to explode out of the back of my skull. Konami has announced plans to create a game based not only on the Iraq War, but on the totally true REAL LIFE battle in Fallujah. It's called Six Days in Fallujah, and its not even in beta, and its already causing a controversy. After retrieving my freshly blown brain, I sat to think of the consequences of this, and the implications are staggering. If this game is made how they say its going to be, then we have a game that, for the first time in industry history, is going to dare to make a bold, political statement. And people are not happy about this.

          Now, before I continue, I want to say that I am not in any way belittling the war, or the brave and men and women who serve in it, nor am I degrading the families who have lost loved ones to the war. I'm not trying to push politics, nor make any point beyond my thoughts on the game industry.

          There are countless books and films that have made political statements. Heck, within the past year we've seen films like Rendition, Stop-Loss, W, and Home of the Brave that have spoken on the politics in, around and behind the Iraq War. Some have supported these works because they agree with whatever point its trying to make, and others have hated them because of it. And yet, Smart Dicks LOVE this kind of shit, BECAUSE of the controversy it stirs up. If it can get people talking and discussing their beliefs, then they're all for it. So why is it that movies and books are allowed to make political statements and games aren't? Isn't this exactly what “games are toys” naysayers have said needed to happen before they'd take gaming seriously?

          If the best works are the ones that ask the “hard questions” then Six Days in Fallujah, if done the right way, could be one of the most noteworthy games in history. It takes a set of stones to make a creative work that makes a political statement, and if Fallujah can pull it off, then think of what this could mean for the future. Think of an era where the game DEVELOPERS took the message of their games as seriously as the gamers do!

          I personally look forward to the days when I'll be able to have a serious discussion with someone about the merits and meaning in video games. I would love one day to walk into a bookstore and see a book of philosophy according to Final Fantasy. And it would make my day if I were to learn one day, college classes on ethics, philosophy and psychology were being taught with games as teaching aides. But none of this will be possible if games don't continue to grow in their depth and in their meaning. And it most certainly won't come to pass if we don't continue to look beyond the blood, and beyond the pixels to find the hidden meanings in our treasured medium.