OMG! A Completely Fictional Character Uses a Totally Unreal Alien as a Shield!

I saw this article on Yahoo! this afternoon discussing Gears of War 2 and its violent content:

Whereas Gears 1 included an up-close attack that used a chainsaw blade on the lead character’s main weapon to dismember a foe, Gears 2 adds a reverse attack that actually slices an enemy in half — from the groin upwards. Elsewhere in the demo, presenter Cliff Bleszinski, the celebrated lead designer behind the Gears and Unreal series, showed off a new ability that let him use the corpse of a fallen enemy as a “meat shield”, soaking up bullets while he returned fire around its head. (para 3)

Interestingly enough, the details of this “complaint” aren’t exactly new.  The chainsaw kill move was present in the first game, and using enemy NPCs as shields is a comparatively old mechanic for videogames.  Why this now?  For one thing, GTA IV has opened up the door to this discussion (…again…).  Playing through the game, I do think Rockstar North is essentially giving a big middle finger to many of their social critics over the last five or six years.  Many little details take at least some of the objections stemming from Hot Coffee and poke at the audience with them, particularly the strip club sequences. 

And, it’s not shocking that this issue comes up right before the United States’ general election is about to kick into full gear.  With GoW 2, GTA IV, and some others releasing this year, I’m sure this discussion will come up at some point this fall.  (I’ll freely admit that the gaming industry welcomes this kind of hype, too.  The more transgressive and ribald a game is, the more interest it can generate.  This discussion essentially ends up as free marketing for game developers and their publishers.)

Aesthetically though, as much as I do like games like Call of Duty 4 and GRAW 2, they do create some problematic issues for videogames as a means of expression.  One limitation games have is derived from one of their grandest assets: “interactivity”, whatever that term actually means.  That a game demands the gamer to do something means that developers have to build active abilities into the gameplay (a word that is simultaneously noun and verb).  And the abilities most often employed in games usually involve shooting at something else.  Thus, the gaming industry has built its own most limiting stereotype, that games must be violent, or combative. 

Some games take a different approach, caricaturing that violence so that it is flatly ridiculous (Ratchet & Clank) or actually cartoonish (Sly Cooper).  Others offer up puzzle games, Tetris being the most obvious, while Echochrome has garnered much critical praise all across the mainstream gaming press. 

But, to return to the aesthetic problem I alluded to above, a quick survey of recent titles starts to indicate that expressive ability is tied into games with the most violent tendancies.  My predisposition toward Metal Gear Solid is reasonably well documented on this blog (it is one of the only series that I can play for hours on end).  Grand Theft Auto’s storylines have been lauded as engaging and socially relevant, particularly over the last two installments, San Andreas and the most recent release.  I have not played either Bioshock or Mass Effect (I haven’t shelled out for a 360), but both games are described as both violent and ambitious in their narrative hopes. 

The simple model we teach to undergraduate literature students, even in general education courses, is Freytag’s Model:  Exposition, Conflict, Rising Action, Climax, Falling Action, Resolution, Denoument.  Every story needs some kind of conflict, and as of yet, games have not figured out a great way of communicating internal conflicts except only as they can be expressed in external ways.  Gaming as an activity does not always let people inside the minds of characters.  Games have relied on guages that quantify various elements of a character’s psychological makeup.  MGS 4 reportedly uses a “Psyche” and “Stress” guage to inform the gamer of Snake’s emotional state.  Obviously, this kind of mechanistic feature doesn’t do much to really immerse a gamer into a character’s head.  In fact, it’s quite counterproductive with respect to immersion because people don’t understand their emotional wellbeing in terms of percentages.  Using guages and visual representations don’t allow a gamer inside the head of their avatar, so to speak, and reduces these matters to simple mechanisms that can be controlled with the proper tools and actions in the right contexts. 

This belies another inherent tension — how much a playable character already maintains and uses a preestablished personality versus how much of that character is defined through the choices and actions of the gamer.