…and in the game! ho ho! Ahem. Not very long ago a small discussion broke out on twitter between me and our old contributor-turned-journalistic-superstar Jaz McDougall. It surfaced when someone pointed out a fan-made page for a proposed tenth TF2 class – The Guard Dog. Jaz reeled at the idea; he didn’t like the prospect of killing a dog, even if it was armed to the teeth. In fact, he continued, he doesn’t like killing any animals at all in games. This seemed absurd to me – “But you kill people!” I said “Why won’t you kill animals? What if they are attacking you? And if it’s ethics what about the elderly, kids, civilians in GTA?”. With this bombardment of questions being difficult to address in 140 characters or less, Jaz instead opted to draft out a proper answer…
I guess, you could ask: “Why does it matter if you shoot something in a game? It’s not real!” I understand this question, but I think it doesn’t account for all the things you can show in a game that would be universally frowned upon. Imagine a game where you could rape people? I might play the game, I might even, as a journalist reporting on the game, trigger the rape scene, but I definitely wouldn’t make a habit of it.
Games are supposed to affect us. I just read something on Gamasutra about the Scribblenauts-Sambo controversy, where Ian Bogost warned against dismissing the issue because it’s “just a game” – games should come under fire for the situations they make possible (although not necessarily be condemned for them). In the end, I played Oblivion with hunger mods, I killed wolves, I hunted deer for their meat to survive. I’ve hurt animals in games when I’ve been forced to.
It’s that which I resent; being forced to, when in real life, I’ve never been forced to hurt an animal. Resident Evil 5 was slated for featuring black people – I don’t think anyone really felt that Capcom were using the game as a delivery system for malicious racist imagery, but as N’Gai Croal rightly pointed out, “this imagery has a history”. Resident Evil 5 was about an indiscriminate virus hitting an area with a genetic predominance, but what if the T-Virus in that game only affected black people? What if you’d be talking and trading with white people, but the moment you saw a black person, they’d look up at you and grunt and run at you, L4D style? Wouldn’t that be horrible? Wouldn’t that disturb the hell out of you? Wouldn’t that pop into your head on a street full of white people when a black person looks up at you from their food, teeth bared?
It’s about imagery. Seeing a dog lying on its back with blood across its mouth conjures memories of dead pets, pets I loved because they were my friends. It doesn’t help that I’m ferociously pro-animal ethics, passionately fair and respectful in my treatment of animals. I spent nearly ten grand shipping my cats here (one of my cats has a disorder that, while perfectly painless and uninhibiting, often panics ignorant owners to the point where they needlessly put their cats down.) to the UK so I could look after them. I still get misty eyed when I remember Hampton, my beautiful hamster that passed away last year.
When I kill a rat in Oblivion and it reminds me of that bleak morning I woke up to find a beloved, innocent friend lying stiff and open on the ground, I just don’t feel like killing rats anymore.
Kids are a no-no for much the same reason as animals are – a child is an innocent, and I’ve never been forced into killing one by a game, so I never have. Bioshock did give me the option, though, in probably one of the least sophisticated moral dilemmas I’ve yet encountered (brilliantly parodied by Anna Anthropy in this glorious train wreck). I gather that Bioshock doesn’t actually let you toss aside a little child-corpse.
This is where my virtuous aura vanishes. I kill innocents in GTAIV. I kill innocents in Hitman, and in Fallout 3, and in just about everything. Not all the time, of course – my play habits are very role-play oriented, and I like to get inside my characters. Niko isn’t a bad guy, but he’s been scarred by war. He needs a car, so he looks around for the fuzz, whips out his pistol, and puts one into the driver-side window.
I don’t have a problem with this because, essentially, the people in GTAIV aren’t people, they’re puppets. They’re toy soldiers to be knocked over and called dead. You’ll run into multiple copies of the same one just driving around. This applies to the animals and the children too, but, being fundamentally innocent creatures with a lot less observable complexity in the real world, their virtual counterparts bridge the gap of representation a lot better. A pigeon in a game hops around pecking, and so do the pigeons hopping around in real life. The real pigeon has (as I see no reason to doubt) thoughts and feelings, hopes and dreams, while the fake one is a simulation, but they’re identical in appearance and behaviour. It’s this predictability, this apparent simplicity, that too often trivialises animals in our minds. We humans, with our bold endeavours, our fashions and our moods and our unpredictability, look upon these self-absorbed industrialists with a sort of aloof disgust.
So, in a game where nothing is real and no lasting wrongs can be committed, I’ll spare a pigeon because it looks just a little too real. I’ll run over the businessman so he’ll say something candidly-cynical about his health insurance, so people will run screaming and call the cops, to get at the delicious social commentary and acerbic humour that runs in a fat vein through GTAIV. Take Team Fortress 2; two teams of identical people wearing different colours, fighting over a series of mirrored landscapes. It’s commentary. That’s what war can seem like, sometimes; pointless, opportunistic, and cruelly willing to expend a few soldiers for the prospect of some gold or oil.
It doesn’t bother me that I’m seeing something that looks very like a dead businessman, because it looks identical to a dead rapist or a dead sith or a dead soldier. A dead person in a game, even a dead child, is a symbol, and it can represent something; revolution, heartbreak, corruption, hubris. A dead animal can too, but it’ll be something contrived like “nature”. Show me a game that compels me to feel something when I kill that absurdly snarling wolf in Oblivion, that pack of rotting attack dogs in S.T.A.L.K.E.R., raging to the point of hyperbole – show me a game that makes that more than a throwaway enemy, and you’ll have shown me a developer who understands the creatures they’re representing in their game.
I understand Jazs reasoning and somewhat admire the fact that someone feels like this, yet I still can’t agree. Yes, virtual animals are a closer representation to their real selves than what people are, but I can’t help but feel it’s irrelevant. For me, a virtual representation is always just that – a virtual representation. I have no qualms in killing anything in a game unless (and this happens a lot) the narrative has given me an attachment to it. Random people/animals are fodder – there for me to fulfil my god-complex urges and hold their life in my hands. I wont kill the vast majority of them for obvious reasons, but I know that I could, I might, and that it wont affect me if I do. I’ll probably just kill the odd one just to let the others know that I can.
Do I have a soul? Probably not. I’m fully aware I can be callous at the best of times; and in games which allow me, I pretty much turn into a socio-path. Should I feel guilty over this though? I don’t think so. It’s virtual after all, and it’s not like I do it in real life (damn ‘laws’). Where do you stand, dear reader? Will you happily kill anything that moves, or do you draw the line somewhere? What differentiates killable and not killable? Give us your hearty opinions below, but if anyone says “and in the game” they are banned from the internet.
Related posts:
- Killing Floor has leveled Up
- Killing Floor, the zombie co-op shooter that we covered before has been updated with a...
- Modern Warfare 2 – Killing Civilians
- Once again, the world has been confronted with difficult questions about the nature of...
- Natascha, my love.
- My ex doesn’t like my newest conquest. Apparently she’s too “gruff and noisy”. Whatever, I...
Yeah, with you on this one. That being said, I have no soul, and in the game.
Jazz, just so I can clarify: do you avoid killing animals in games because of the feelings it provokes when you see a dead animal? Or is it because of what it represents?
The role-playing point strikes me as quite inconsistent, because it seems that you are using that as justification for killing innocent adult humans and not children/animals. What if you were to play a game where you play a protagonist who has no qualms about killing animals or he is crazy and spontaneously violent? Surely, for the purposes of role-playing and ‘getting inside the character’ you would kill an innocent animal, even if you were not forced to? I’m sure Niko wouldn’t think twice about breaking the neck of a guard dog if he thought it might, at some point during a mission, get in his way? And yet, I’m also sure you would make every effort to avoid doing this when playing through such a mission, which would involve you suspending your attempt to ‘role play’ for the purposes of avoiding imagery you find disturbing.
You do make the convincing argument that the ‘predictability’ of children and animals is more easily transferred to the virtual medium, because they are not as observably ‘complex’, which I understand. But what if, say, in 30 years time, technology will have advanced sufficiently enough (which I imagine it will have done) for games to convincingly simulate the complexity of adult humans. According to your premise given above, surely you would no doubt feel equally disturbed by killing anyone because they are also ‘just too real’? Be they Nazis, businessmen, evil mutants or whatever? By that point you would be fairly limited by what your morals would allow you to play.
1. I wouldn’t choose to role-play as a character who delights in killing animals. The game may define the parameters of my in-game personality, but it doesn’t utterly control it. If my Niko wears different clothes and makes different mission choices than yours, then I can decide that my Niko doesn’t shoot pigeons for points, too.
2. If I came across a character real enough, I’d have to apply my real world ethics to killing them. I probably wouldn’t kill an old man feeding pigeons if he resembled a genuine, believable old man feeding pigeons. The hole in this hypothesis is that actors are still struggling to approach this level of believability; it’s not an issue of technology (although being able to quickly render tiny emotions is certainly an obstacle, but it’s not about the graphics, it’s the projected feel).
Go watch the Soloist; if I saw that in a game, I’d save and quit and have a think about my life. If it’s one of the pitiless hobos from Spawn, fuck ‘em. I know I’m not committing some symbolic wrong by running over an inane parody of a complex issue.
Thanks for the interesting questions, Laurence!
I see your point.
The other issue here is the definition of ‘innocence’ and whether animals are actually more innocent than humans. They certainly kill other animals, but you could argue that there is no maliciousness or evil intent involved in this, thereby distinguishing them from humans. It’s an evolutionary matter of survival more than anything. But if you draw that line, then really you are ignoring the fact that humans, being animals as well, are also an intrinsic part of that evolutionary process, and that our supposed ‘maliciousness’ is another result of the very natural evolution of our brains into complex organs that have the capacity for this kind of ‘evil’ or ‘abuse’. I’m not saying that just because our brains are a part of the evolutionary process that it justifies cruelty, it just makes you question the idea of innocence, which at the moment, your entire argument hinges on.
I’m playing devil’s advocate a bit here because I love this kind of debate; it’s the best way to explore these kind of ideas in my opinion. I also would try to avoid killing animals in games, but I don’t think it’s for the same reasons as you.
You’re assuming that humans don’t kill animals for food there, for some reason. You obviously know that’s not true. I have no trouble hunting deer in Oblivion, as I’ve said, and nor would I force my vegetarianism on an Inuit hunter whose only food source is reindeer or seal.
If I found my cat torturing a mouse, I’d put a stop to it – cruelty isn’t human-only, and nobody may be excused of it. Our brains are complex, yeah, but it’s all software – a cat that could grip a pencil, that could form words, that could live ten times as long, could be taught to write “can haz cheezburger?” at the very least. When we are born, we are innocent, animalistic creatures that would probably kill smaller animals and eat them if hungry and alone.
The long induction into our society is an inexact and profoundly buggered science – parents that criticize and micro-manage their kids can fuck them up for life. Parents that over or under-indulge their kids can fuck them up too. Parenting is actually really difficult, and not because it’s intrinsically hard, but because the booming rabble of society has decided that it knows how to raise a kid, and it is wrong, and it will still tell you how to do it. We’ve very quickly learned to talk and read and write, and made the mistake of assuming it means we’re intelligent. It’s like being given a megaphone and assuming that you’re now in charge.
Getting back on topic, in GTAIV you can kill a person and the whole city reacts. You can kill a pigeon and nobody gives a shit. That’s not realistic. Creating a system where you can commit a crime and nobody gives a shit, nobody even mutters hushed complaints, is misleading and dangerous. It’s like letting you hire a 10 year old prostitute in broad daylight and never mentioning it again. The only argument that hinges on the definition of innocence is the whole PETA thing – that’s for a different thread. My argument is that games shouldn’t misrepresent animals. Sure, let me blow a dogs head off. But don’t turn the dog into an angry monster so that I’m forced to, and don’t lets pretend that society just looks the other way when I do it.
And in the game.
One of the main reasons I tend to avoid killing animals in games is because it feels too final. I attribute this to a limited number of character models – if I kill that prostitute in GTA, then as soon as I’ve turned a corner I’ll see the EXACT SAME PERSON soliciting away without a care in the world. But if I kill a dog, or pigeon, or deer, etc, I know that I’m killing them forever – they won’t respawn, and any dog/pigeon/deer I see after that will simply be a different animal.
Playing San Andreas, I kept seeing a chubby hooker in a red top and black miniskirt. Every time I saw her plying her trade, I wondered why she kept coming back to Grove Street, since I stabbed her every time? I just KNEW it was the same person. But playing Oblivion, or Far Cry 2, I just KNEW that if an animal died then I would never see it again, although I may see many other animals that look exactly the same.
I suppose this is just because it’s easier to differentiate between humans than it is between animals. I’d say I know at least twenty people who are white-skinned, have 4 limbs, 2 eyes, 1 nose, etc, but I can tell them apart instantaneously. If a game presents us with a character we know as ‘Crack Whore 3′ or ‘Gangbanger 2′ then we recognise them, with their unique appearance, as the crack whore/gangbanger we just killed, rather than as an identically-dressed person. Animals are not the same – I’d find it next to impossible to identify which one of twenty sparrows (for example) I was looking at.
Perhaps when games reach a point where no character model is repeated, EVER, and some effort is made to make each unique (eg. huge database of character voices, with some randomised level of sonic distortion/alteration, so no voice is heard twice), then a game which actually asks you to kill someone/something will be a game many people will have real qualms with.
For me it’s not so much killing animals, but killing innocents. In Far Cry 2 I would always stop for zebras crossing the street. Once I accidentally hit one, and I felt really bad afterwards. But I have no problem killing tigers in Tomb Raider, because they attacked me first. In Oblivion I would just not attack animals that weren’t in my way and didn’t attack me. But if a wolf would come too close I had no problem killing it.
I have a much larger problem with humans. I specifically remember when I killed an enemy in Far Cry 2 who hadn’t noticed me yet. I felt really guilty as I clicked the mouse. This guy was just standing in his hut, probably enjoying his afternoon. But he was standing in a hut I needed to pass by, so he would have attacked me. Still I was just killing some random guy who hadn’t done anything wrong yet, so I felt guilty.
Because of that I often don’t like sniping in games. I can only enjoy it when sniping people who are clearly coming for you.
That is also one of the reasons, why I haven’t really played one of the recent GTAs. They handle killing innocents way too casually. I felt like I was playing some kind of psychopath, and the game didn’t even acknowledge that properly. It still worked in GTA 2, because that was so abstract. But I haven’t really played any game in the series afterwards.
@Sagan: Really interesting comments. I agree with your stance on self-defence. Of course, if I was on the savannah and a lion ran for me, and I had a gun, I’d definitely shoot the lion. But if I was in the woods and a badger ran at me, along with two other badgers and a deer, and started jumping and biting at my face, I’d probably stop taking so many drugs.
I think we differ when it comes to humans. Gillen once said something about scoring games: he said that mainstream games start at 9/10 and lose points from there, and that indie games start at 5/10 and tend to gain points. For me, animals are the former, humans the latter. Working in retail for so many years has utterly broken my faith in the human race, and the only people I actively spend time with are those who I’m sure are good people. To contrast, I universally love all animals until they bite me or try to steal my shit. Even then, I’d never retaliate with violence – making a song and dance of being fearsome is just as effective.
@Jazmeister: I’m in the same boat. My rationale for not killing animals is that they have no knowledge of right or wrong, moral or immoral. They can’t be held to these judgments because they aren’t capable of that level of thought. Just like they are programmed in a game, they are taught in real life. So even when I kill those attack dogs in CoD4, or those angry wolves in Oblivion, I honestly feel bad about it. I assume the dogs were conditioned by their owners to attack intruders, or that the wolves learned over their lives that a person coming too close is trying to kill you. A child is the same in my eyes as an animal, but by adulthood, most people have a good idea of what is considered morally acceptable, and they can identify the right and wrong choices. When they make those wrong choices, they are aware of it, and aware that they are now responsible for any retribution they may receive for it.
Innocents I happen to run over in GTA I honestly can’t morally reconcile, the thought never really crosses my mind. Maybe its like Andy N explained, and its easier to differentiate the carbon copy people from the carbon copy animals.