Culture Clash

(April 2004)

Let there be Lightsourcing

The two faces of acceptable violence

"I pursued mine enemies and destroyed them. I shattered them, so that they were not able to rise. I destroyed those who hated me. They cried for help, but there was none. I beat them fine as the dust before the wind."
- 2 Samuel 22:38-43

The Bible's a pretty gory book, with its looted cities and brimstone thunderstorms, its reasonably detailed accounts of Roman torture methods, its armed clashes and the often gruesome deaths of its martyrs. The Old and New Testaments encourage a philosophy of peace improbably juxtaposed with a narrative full of eyes for eyes and teeth for teeth, often laid out in spectacularly bloody prose. The Koran, a misunderstood text if ever there was, urges similarly ghastly violence at times, though again its overall theme is one of peaceful coexistence. But these books, despite the bloodiness of certain passages and their occasional flat-out advocacy of violence against others, are considered acceptable consumption for young people while Hitman is not. For those who choose not to accept the teachings of various religious texts, or those who choose to accept them within a more moderate framework of interpretation, this duplicity is seen as confusing and hypocritical.

This issue is big right now, with Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ devouring box office records. Various evangelists are calling on parents to take children as young as seven to a picture so relentlessly savage that no video game experience comes close to mimicking its bloodthirsty intensity. Consider, for example, the Roman soldiers literally slobbering in their eagerness to dole out a beating so horrific that even a sadist would cringe. The film's portrayal of the delight these men took in administering the scourging draws an alarming parallel to some claims that video games desensitize young people to violence. Apparently to certain pundits violence is only bad when it exists within a medium they find morally dubious. In fairness, most reviews - even from sources with a vested interest in the film's success - are insisting that it's not for kids. But it begs the question: do people oppose game violence because they oppose violence, or because they oppose games?

The history of opposition to games is a long one, and religion is often used to justify that opposition, though naysayers tend to ignore the fact that religion itself is a major source of violent acts. Frankly, the arguments for and against violence in games, as in any entertainment media, must be assessed in context or not at all: the violence in the Bible and various other religious texts is "okay" because it exists in the context of a larger teaching. The violence in Postal 2 is "not okay" because it presents itself as its own objective and agenda. Similarly, it's okay to kill enemies during wartime but it's not okay to kill the same nationalities when at peace. Context.

The perspective of the violence and those who execute it make or break the acceptability argument. The violence in XIII or Armed & Dangerous is not harmful because violence is appropriate within the context of the game. You rarely hear complaints about violence in Max Payne or Thief or Unreal Tournament (where you're theoretically killing "real" people), because the violent acts in them are presented within the context of the narrative arc or evolution of character. It's much harder to attack something developed that way. And while I'm not comparing the Bible to a video game, it's worth noting that those games which don't get much attention from pro-censors fit their violence into the overall milieu of the game, just as the Bible fits violence into its context.

There are lots of good discussions about the apparent sanctimony of religion sounding off against game violence (two such recent discussions on the IGDA forums are here and here), and it's a topic that's neither new nor likely to go away. Those who cite religion as a basis for opposition to violence in games don't see the hypocrisy of their arguments; those who do may not realize that the best solution to the problem is to accept the opposing viewpoint while insisting on creative freedom. The truth of the matter is that it's easier to produce a slightly different game than it is to make some of these people see reason.

Most developers are already doing that: witness the aforementioned presence of a context for the violence in narrative games. And plenty of highly religious individuals have no problem at all with violence or off-color religious imagery in video games, recognizing the medium for what it is. David Kushner's Masters of Doom recounts a hilarious exchange between John Romero and (strict Mormon) Sandy Petersen, in which Petersen says, "I have no problem with the demons in this game. They're just cartoons. And anyway, they're the bad guys." DOOM itself was only targeted because outsiders saw it as excessively gory - with no reason to look at video games until DOOM's huge sales, many nongamers probably still thought video games looked like Asteroids , so the "realistic" blood and gore shocked them more than it should have - and because it contained blatantly Satanic imagery, and of course because of Columbine. The violence in DOOM , like the violence in most other games, is contextual and therefore rather inoffensive.

There's a burgeoning Christian development community that sees opportunity in creating mainstream video games that speak to their beliefs and values, realizing that the consumer base is available and that gaming would be an effective tool to build interest among young people. Though no religious games have yet been wildly popular by studio standards - N'Lightning's Catechumen coming closest - there's no particular reason why they couldn't be. One issue with the current trend of Christian/religious game development, of course, is an extension of the very duplicity some gamers and developers detest: that these games are largely sanitized of the violence so ubiquitous in the texts that inspire them.