Gun Wake

In the wake of the Stanford shooting, guns are being blamed for contributing to violence in America. As a result of this, Vice President Joe Biden has asked the video game industry to improve it’s image. Go back and read that again.

The gun violence/video game correlation is brought up every time there’s a shooting in America. With the advent of Facebook, the curious public can go through every perpetrator’s profile and see what they’ve liked. If there’s a game in there, it will be blamed. It doesn’t help that Breivik, the world’s worst mass shooter, claims to have trained himself using Call of Duty.

Do violent video games really contribute to violence? Who knows. Numerous studies say yes there is a correlation, and numerous studies say no, don’t be stupid.

I can’t answer that question myself. My question is: Can violence be taken out of games? Look at the multi-billion dollar gaming industry, and how many of the top AAA titles, each selling record-breaking millions of copies contain guns and violence. Call of Duty has been the undisputed king of video games for years now, and it’s essentially gun porn. Players will play endless matches where they’re tasked with shooting men with guns in order to get new guns as a reward. Not that’s there’s only guns in the game, but I know as a fact from playing that using any weapon other than a gun is considered cheap and cheating. If you lob grenades, you’re considered cheap. If you use a mine or claymore, you’re considered cheap. If you use a knife, you’re considered cheap. Even using a sniper rifle is considered cheap. The only kind of kill people respect is taking a gun and getting close enough to see the whites of the eyes. Bear in mind, the most popular match types in Call of Duty are Team, and Free-For-All, the least strategic and least co-operative. All you do is point, click, boom over-and-over. So is it violent? Yes. It’s violent. It encourages players to act violently by rewarding violence with greater violence. The greatest thrill in the game is Multi-kills. Killing enough enemies in a row without dying unlocks weapons drops, up to and including nukes. The more kills, the higher your score, which isn’t even really what war is about, when you think about it. In war, you’re not expected to kill the greatest number of the enemy. Your goal is to gain the most objectives. That doesn’t even necessarily mean killing. You can drop in on an enemy base and take them all prisoner before raising your flag. That’s not something you can do in Call of Duty. There’s no button for mercy.

And it sells. It sells well. The top titles on the 360 almost all include guns. The only games that fall into a different category are sports and racing. There’s even bows and arrows in Minecraft, a game that’s essentially a Lego simulator. There’s very few popular games that you can point at and say don’t have some form of violence in them. Racing games have car-crashes. Sports games have tackling, fights, and injuries. Super Mario is about stomping animals to death. Even Guitar Hero had a drummer explode after a Spinal Tap song, and audiences throw bottles at you. Angry Birds has pig murder.

So can you take violence out of games? Sure, you can make games that aren’t violent, but don’t expect them to sell.