Let’s get one thing straight right off the bat: I love video games.
I am a parent, a professional, a real-live-grown-up-man.
And I love video games.
I needed to get that out there. I want you to know that I love video games, because otherwise you might see what I’m about to say as a negative view of games, gaming, or even gamers. None of these things are true. Sure, I have a negative view of certain games and certain gamers—but only if they’ve come by it honestly and earned my negativity.
I like all sorts of video games. One of the biggest reasons I love gaming is that I get to truly enter an experience and become the hero. I love reading books, too. Books are great because they take you into a world that is at least a little different from your own, and you get to ride along an adventure unlike your real life. But video games, man; with games you not only ride along with the story, you shape the story, you become it.
As a grown up (debatable, I suppose, don’t ask my wife if I’m grown up), I can really appreciate immersion into an adventure I know I’ll never be able to live. For instance, I love the Mass Effect series. I love being Shephard and saving the galaxy. And I love that I’ll never have to do it “IRL,” as the kids say. I love the fact that I’ll likely never be in a situation where I have to take a life—any life—to save my own or my loved ones’. Heck, if all goes according to plan, I’ll never have to even hurt someone to protect myself.
This is where there’s a difference between video games and real life. In video games, I’m usually okay with following the mantra of the legendary Jayne Cobb: “Hell, I’ll kill a man in a fair fight, or if I think he’s gonna start a fair fight, or if he bothers me, or if there’s a woman, or if I’m gettin’ paid; mostly only when I’m gettin’ paid.” But in real life I know things are different.
I get a little scared that our society doesn’t realize there’s a difference. And I don’t mean “gamer society” or “kids these days.” I mean society, our primarily western, but perhaps global, society. We’ve accepted this idea that it’s okay to kill people or hurt people, or carpet bomb people, or torture people, or do any number of inhumane things to people and it can somehow make the world a better place. We forget that when we talk about all of this, we are talking about people. People who are probably more like us than different.
This is the myth of redemptive violence: the misconception that we can somehow make the world a better place through violence. Author Walter Wink, in his article, Facing the Myth of Redemptive Violence, writes about how our TV shows repeat the pattern endlessly (although he didn’t talk about it, it is certain that this holds true for video games), and how we come to believe the myth.
We have already seen how the myth off redemptive violence is played out in the structure of children’s cartoon shows (and is found as well in comics, video and computer games, and movies). But we also encounter it in the media, in sports, in nationalism, in militarism, in foreign policy, in televangelism, in the religious right, and in self-styled militia groups. What appears so innocuous in cartoons is, in fact, the mythic underpinnings of our violent society.
Walter Wink, Facing the Myth of Redemptive Violence.
Too many people either don’t see the difference, or choose to ignore the difference between video games and real life when it comes to redemptive violence. To accept redemptive violence as a reality, we must first inflate our ego to the point where we are sure that we are good and right and could never be mistaken about whatever our violence is meant to cure. Then we have to inflate our ego even further to the point where we determine that is our right—no, our duty—to be the agent of destruction for the force we have called evil.
Hey folks: in real life, it’s just not that simple. And video games, which sometimes enforce the myth of redemptive violence by telling us that we must prevail through war-like means to save the day/world/universe, also give us a lesson on why it’s really a myth.
Let’s go back to Mass Effect for a second. In the first Mass Effect, we use redemptive violence to defeat Saren, who has become a pawn for the Reapers. We do. We save the galaxy.
Except we don’t. In Mass Effect 2, we realize that the violence has only given rise to more violence, and we need to destroy the Collectors and the Reapers. Then, once you’ve done that, things get even worse and you have to try to save the world violently again in ME3. It just goes on.
But it’s simple in games. You know who is good or evil, or which side you’re on. In some really well-written games, it’s harder; maybe you know that it’s not black-and-white, and you know there is no perfect outcome awaiting. Even in those games, though, you use violence to try to make the world a better place.
Let’s circle this back to the beginning before concluding:
I love video games. Even violent games where I have to save the day/world/universe by blowing up all of my enemies. It can be fun, it can be liberating.
Let us remember, though, that video games aren’t real. Life is so much more complicated. Lot’s of things that work in video games just don’t work in real life. But the biggest thing in video games that doesn’t work in real life: making the world better through violence. In real life, violence gives rise to more, greater violence.
Game On; Live On.
- ShuaLaw
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