Thought o’ the Day: Violence Encapsulation
Walking along today, I was tuning in and out of the NPR news headlines (with my ears, not my radio receiver). At one point, there was some sort of murderer or ethnic violence or… god knows what. Anywasy, I caught the announcer say “…three more people were killed today in…”, and at that point, I actually tuned out again. I didn’t really care to hear the rest, mostly because I wasn’t terribly interested. However, I caught myself at that point and thought “now wait a tick… isn’t people being killed a really… well… urgent, loud event?!?” Now, something in the general “X number of people were killed today” area can be heard pretty much every day on the news, so we could chalk this up to being desensitized. I define “being desensitized”, though, as a condition where exposure to a stimulus (even a horrible or poignant one) causes a reduced reaction over repeated instances. So if, say, you’re a professional assassin (to be dramatic about it), the first time you kill somebody is likely emotional, but the 100th time you kill is quite routine (just an example… not being of the KGB sort, I can’t vouch for the absolute veracity of this, but you get the idea).
Hearing the words “X more people were killed”, though…. you can’t be desensitized to that because it’s not a shocking stimulus, at least in our culture. It’s only a series of words delivered by a person specifically chosen for the pleasing quality of his/her voice. It’s still a representation of a terrible event, but it’s… well… presented at a very removed level. As a computer geek, I’d say that the violence is “encapsulated”, to pervert a technical term. When you use a computer, there’s a bajillion and a half layers between the user interaction and the physical bits going to and fro. When a programmer is making a program, if they’re working at a high level, you invoke methods or functions in a single line of code that may move millions, billions, or more bits from one place to another! So my mental parallel (hey it works for me, but that’s just because of my background) is that “X more people were killed” on the radio is the violence-realm equivalent of a high level function (like, say, format(“C:”), to be silly) that masks the true complexity and consequence of reality.
Anywho, I thought about it some more, and I feel that that’s where the true danger of some types of games may lie. I’m actually a game developer who feels that violent games can have an effect on players via prolonged exposure (we seem to be in the minority… most people seem to prefer shouting “Oh it’s just a game! Everybody knows it’s not real!”). However, I don’t feel that it’s the blood and guts that we try ever so hard to render faithfully that is at issue here; if that’s a problem, it’s one that movies and other visual media share. Instead, I feel that games, as a medium, are highly effective at delivering “encapsulated violence”. Halo’s “killing sprees”, strategy games’ battle stats, or heck… even your Pokemon’s HP… they’re meant to be a playful (literally) representation of violence and damage. Nobody mistakes your health bar for what true pain is like; but when we are interactively manipulating game statistics (ie: playing the game) to cause digital harm, and we have no strong, physical experiences to use as reference for cruelty towards others, perhaps we at least partly associate cruelty with “You hit your opponent for 10 HP” and remove some remembrance of it as actual physical agony.
Essentially, I guess I’m making the “you’ll join the Army because America’s Army was a sweet online shooter” argument. Curses… stupid reality reminding me that my arguments are unoriginal.
One game I know of actually makes unnerving, explicity use of violence encapsulation. DEFCON, if you’ve not heard of it, is a strategic game where you play the role of a commander operating forces in full-out nuclear war. I wouldn’t recommend judging the game from the main site’s trailer; it seems more to be advertising the typical “dominate your opponents!” feeling that most online strategy games go for. Try this gameplay video instead. The presentation takes the form of a glowing, situation-room-ish video screen with monochromatic icons for your forces, and there’s a haunting ambient soundtrack in the background. The game presents nothing short of a fictional apocalypse to the player, yet uses minimal stimuli to indicate massive physical events. ICBM’s streaking around the globe are pretty little curves, warships are indistinct geometric shapes, and total destruction of major cities appear only as a city name with the number of millions killed. Now that’s understatement, but it’s very intentional. I’ve only played the demo, so I can’t vouch for or deny the lasting appeal of the gameplay, but the ideological expression that they packed into the game certainly is something I’ll remember. It’s one of those games that tries to make you ask some hard questions (didn’t they call that art last time I checked?). For example: “Where have we have a species reached when we can represent the deaths of millions as a bit of text on a screen (indeed, we must for reasons of military efficiency and survival of the remaining “good guys”)?”
Sure, it’s just a game, and it’s loved by players more for its online competitive matches than for any political statement that it tries to make, but I’m happy to see DEFCON turn the usual violence encapsulation on its head and make it explicit for players to see.
