Thirith on 10/11/2008 at 10:00

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The idea for this thread comes from (http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2008/11/09/thats-entertainment/) this RPG article. In short, there's a discussion about the intro of Call of Duty 5, which shows footage of actual executions during WW2.

I'm curious: what's your opinion of this, and what's your take in general on ethics and taste in video games? I'm asking because I think it's a shame that most of the discussion on the topic is starkly binary: either "violence in games is evil, you're evil!" or "Games aren't real so anything goes, nyah nyah!"

Does the fictionality of games mean that there is no ethical dimension to what games show and what situations they put the player in? Are such scenes at worst tasteless? Can games even make valid points about ethics, especially in connection with violence?

I thought that Call of Duty 4 was surprisingly subversive in its representation of violence and war. It's surprisingly low on obvious, simplistic heroics; for one thing, the first actual combat engagement has you shoot sleeping men in their bunks, for another, the player characters don't get to kill the main baddies in heroic combat. (You only get to kill one of them yourself, and even then it's not some GI Joe battle royale.) Then there's the "war is a video game" level "Death from above" which IMO can only be seen as subversive.

I'm also thinking of games such as Shadow of the Colossus, which makes you question the wholesale slaughter of the Colossi that you commit for largely selfish reasons.

What are your thoughts and opinions?

june gloom on 10/11/2008 at 13:13

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Something else just occurred to me: there are dozens of WW2 games but the only game I know of that even refers to the Holocaust in any way is whatshername from Bioshock. Video games seem reluctant to touch on the topic, even in the bad light it deserves; for that matter, very few movies like talking about it too- Schindler's List and one of the later episodes of Band of Brothers (which made me cry like a stupid kid- actually all of BoB's episodes did) come to mind first, but aside from Jakob the Liar I have a hard time thinking of anything else, at least here in the U.S.

For that matter, why are the Nazis typically portrayed as merely an opposing side in the war? I'm aware that not every German was a Nazi and that most of the German army were just conscripts, but the topic doesn't even get touched on. Nazi mysticism, which provided a religious basis for Nazi racial ideology (read (http://www.amazon.com/Occult-Roots-Nazism-Influence-Ideology/dp/0814730604) The Occult Roots of Nazism by Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, fascinating book) is barely mentioned, and it's reduced to the borderline-silly, Indiana Jones-style cartoon that we see in Return to Castle Wolfenstein.

I think video games also have a tendency to dehumanize the war- which disappoints me, because shit like Brothers in Arms makes a seriously good attempt at putting a human face on things.

demagogue on 10/11/2008 at 17:39

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Metal of Honor: AA's last mission was raiding a concentration camp in a gas mask, shooting up the gas tanks to kill off the guards, and freeing the prisoners. It handled the whole thing rather obliquely though, since you never directly saw the prisoners and it didn't look like a camp ... It wasn't actually until my 2nd play that I caught on that it was execution gas. It's also a bit cynical to treat the issue as a game "finale", since the player is going to be cheering at the end, and it's a little disingenuous to coat-tail on the holocaust to get the player feeling good about shooting Nazis. But you could also interpret it as feeling good about doing something more than just killing faceless Nazis, since they play up the 'freeing prisoners' event, although still a bit blunt. But considering the target audience, maybe not so bad.

Re: ethics, I actually have a lot of opinions about gaming. Since I have utilitarian (functionalist) roots, of course I don't think there's anything wrong killing computer AI, especially knowing how rudimentary most AI code is, lol ... And the users' intentions should only be tangentially invoked (i.e., have a direct nexus to real wrongs, like if they are using a game to plan a real murder). I'm wary of the "unconscious motivator" line of moral theory. If there's an ethical hook left, it's in how "edifying" games are in being part of a life-well-lived, which is a much different moral issue ... But standing along-side most popular culture it's hard to say they're specially bad.

OTOH, I think there is a lot positive potential for humanist reflection in games because they're vehicles for reflection (just like any other media), but games are unique in having a special capacity to engage the behavioral-machinery in users' brains. But a culture hasn't gelled around thinking about games like that, and right now there frankly isn't enough imagination or critical thinking in most games for them to have real ethical weight, positively or negatively. But you could say the same about most books published anymore, and it doesn't take away from the ethical gravitas of the great Western and Eastern classics out there. What's really missing is a school of designers committed to making games like that. I've long written off the markets' capacity to generate them (cf Adorno, The Culture Industry, etc.)

june gloom on 10/11/2008 at 19:24

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As far as I know, Germany bans the use of swastikas in any non-educational context- I presume that includes movies as well. Even if the Nazis are portrayed as bad guys.

Any Germans want to clarify/correct/confirm/deny?

june gloom on 10/11/2008 at 19:30

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I think I speak for most of us here when I say:

That's stupid.