Against the Stream

Video Games and Morality: My "Different Drummers" Interview

Greater Chicago Broadcast Ministry has a show called "Different Drummers" that they post on their Youtube Channel. A few weeks ago they invited me in for an interview. Here it is:

 

It was a fun and interesting experience, though I admit it was a bit disconcerting to talk about these issues while the young man being interviewed with me was blowing away bad guys on the screen right behind me!

Felicia Day Is Cool

Taking a break from theo-blogging to dip into nerd blogging. Hope you don't mind.

The Hunger Games and the Rejection of Violence

At CNN's BeliefBlog, Danielle Elizabeth Tumminio suggests that the central message of The Hunger Games is "Don't watch this": 

As I watched Katniss Everdeen fight to the death, I became aware that I could just as well have been a citizen of Panem, watching the Hunger Games on a giant screen, rooting for favorites, desensitized from the film’s artfully-orchestrated-so-as-to-maintain-a-PG-13-rating-but-still-incredibly-disturbing violence.

She goes on to connect the themes of the novel, and to a lesser extent the movie, to some of the overarching themes of Christianity:

As in Christianity, violence in "The Hunger Games" also serves a purpose: It is not gratuitous. It is not voyeuristic. But there’s a difference as well: We the viewers are not witnessing a past event. We feel like we are seeing the Games in real time, that we are part of Panem and, by virtue of sitting in the audience, part of its dysfunction.

That powerful revelation encourages us to contemplate the ways that we are complicit in violence in our own world and the ways in which we do not object.

So perhaps the great irony revealed by the film is that we are not meant to see it. We’re not intended to watch its violence, because this story, as Gale says, is meant to be protested. Which means that, ironically, "The Hunger Games’ " greatest triumph would be an empty theater and streets full of people demanding the kinds of changes needed in Katniss’ world and in our own.

I'm still working my way through the first novel, and I'm unlikely to get to the movie any time soon, but this does cause me to reflect a bit on my own media violence consumption: From The Walking Dead to Game of Thrones to Mass Effect, I consume and (via video and role-playing games) participate in a lot of simulated violence. It's never really bothered me on a moral level because I do recognize a distinction between real and simulated violence. And I always go back to the Aristotelian concept of catharsis when all else fails.

But underneath all of that is the very real question: Not "is simulated violence anesthetizing me to real violence," for which the answer is clearly no. But "is reveling in fantastic worlds and narratives anesthetizing me to the real needs and problems of the world I'm living in. And all too often I fear the answer to that is yes.

Moral Combat

My cover article is in the current issue of the Christian century. Here is a link to the site for those of you who are interested in checking it out.

Grand Theft Auto IV

I like playing video games, but I'm by no means hard core, and I've never had a desire to play one of the Grand Theft Auto games. However, I was interested in this observation from Salon.com:

As much as it is a driving and shooting game, then, "GTA" is also a puzzle game. The puzzle concerns social relationships: You're working with and for several characters at once, and what you do for some of them affects how you get along with others. In a game known mainly for carjacking, it's surprising how much time you're asked to spend building and maintaining friendships and romantic liaisons -- going on dates to bowling alleys and comedy clubs, hanging out with your pals at bars and pool halls, keeping up with a surfeit of text messages and e-mail (even deleting Nigerian spam).

It may be too much to say that "GTA" has a message, but it certainly has a vision: It's the dystopian near-future, something like the world of "The Children of Men" (there are no kids here, either).

The vision is pushed by the media your character encounters -- the radio stations, the TV networks, the astonishingly deep in-game Web (with parodies of Craigslist, Fox News, Match.com and other sites, which you access at Internet cafes called TW@).

As you pass through the city, you learn about the end of reading as a pastime, or the new market in selling babies over the Internet, or the extremely elevated terrorist threat -- "Liberty City is now officially on Charcoal 8 Alert, more serious than the Red High 7 Risk Alert, but not as serious as the recently created Black Severe 9 Alert," the game's Fox News analogue, Weasel News, warns.

I can't imagine enjoying a game like GTAIV, but I might enjoy reading a book or seeing a movie set in its world? The difference? I suppose it's one of moral agency. I can watch characters on a movie screen do dispicable things without identifying with their depravity. I can read about them in books without becoming responsible for their actions. But you take agency over video game characters, and their actions are, vicariously, your actions, and the limits (or lack of limits) of your moral universe define the characters' morality as well. Thus, by playing this story in a video game, I would come to see myself as complicit in that which my character did, in ways that I would not want to be complicit.

By analogy, I've played several Star Wars themed video games, and one consistent theme is the ability of your character to choose the light side or the dark side of the Force through the choices you make in-game. I've never been comfortable playing dark side characters. When I played Neverwinter Nights 2, which allows alignment shift based on your behavior, by the end of the game my character was strongly "Lawful Good" (and here I had always thought of myself in real life as Neutral Good, oh well).

So, GTA, though I'm sure a very intriguing game for any number of reasons, would leave me morally troubled in a way that watching "No Country for Old Men" did not. So, I'll be happy to read the reviews, and consider the distopian vision of the game, but I can't imagine I'd ever be intrigued enough to actually play it.

The D&D Website: Soooooo Bad!

Michael Sigler at Dragon Avenue has a vlog about all that is wrong with WOTC's D&D website:

Why the D&D website sucks from Michael Sigler on Vimeo.

I'll admit, I gave up checking out Wizards' website a few years ago when they stopped offering really good "Web Enhancements" for D&D products (which were, by the way, excellent through the entire run of D&D 3.0). My declining interest seemed to correspond almost exactly to the decision to revise the game to D&D 3.5. Now that 4.0 is almost upon us, the site holds no interest for me whatsoever.

It's a shame though. I loved Dungeon and Dragon magazines, which no exist only in spectral form on the WOTC website. But I'll be damned if I'm going to navigate their ugly ass website just to find one or two interesting articles. And I'll be doubly damned if I'm going to pay for it.

Fortunately, no matter how far Wizards of the Coast falls, they can't take away my D&D books, so I can keep playing to my heart's content as long as I can find other players.

How Do You Kill That Which Has No Life?

Via Matt Yglesias:

From the I can't believe it's not a joke file: "the U.S. intelligence community is working to develop software that will detect violent extremists infiltrating World of Warcraft and other massive multiplayer games, according to a data-mining report from the Director of National Intelligence."

Which is really just an excuse for me to post  this:

Colbert Pays His Respects

"May your prismatic spray always bypass your target's reflex saving throw."

Words to live by, Stephen. Words to live by.

Gary Gygax, R.I.P.

The nerdfather is dead!

GenCon Video

I've never been to GenCon, but I've always wanted to go. I can't decide whether this video makes me more or less eager to go: