It's Okay If The Blood Is Green
November 30th 2007 11:14
I have just completed 69% of a Guitar Hero 2 song on Expert mode. (Radium Eyes, for the curious.) Since that's about 68% more than I had done before, it's quite an achievement, and plainly means I should talk more about video games. Well, it's plain to me, anyway.
I'll start with responses to the previous post.
ANanoMoose (hi again, Nano) pointed out that, since interactive violence horrifies the censors, in many cases games don't avoid threats, but avoid opportunities. The sheer horror that a game can deliver is... not so sheer. As Nano says, not all games should feature on-screen child murder, but to automatically never include on-screen child murder is to take out a weapon from your arsenal. And - also as Nano says, I should be thankful to have so much of my post prewritten for me - "That...kind of neuters any impact it could have had." Either way, a child gets murdered... it's just that if it's treated gruesomely, you care.
I'm reminded of a scene in Metal Gear Solid 2 - this paragraph might well contain spoilers, so be careful - and the director talking about it. A character has just died in Otacon's arms, and after the long (very long - this is a Metal Gear game, after all) cutscene, Our Heroes turn towards camera and do their Power Walk, and then you get the chance to play the game again. For about five minutes. Until the next cutscene.
Kojima saw this scene originally, so the story goes, and said "Where's the blood?" The character had died in Otacon's arms - why wasn't his long, very white labcoat spattered with blood? The animators defended their bloodless decision with all the power and passion they could manage, saying that if Otacon was bloodsoaked, it'd detract from the beauty of the scene. But Kojima was adamant. What beauty? Character's just died. Character's gonna stay dead. Bloody Otacon's coat.
So when Otacon leads the Power Walk towards camera, he's guilt-red. And that was the right decision.
Okay, that's it for the spoilers.
My point, and Nano's point - tying back into the previous posts - is that violence elicits an emotional reaction. Omit the consequences of violence, and you might well bring up just the desensitisation the critics are terrified of.
That can go too far, though. If the gore becomes the point of the scene, and there's a chance we should be ignoring the character in peril in favour of look-how-much-blood-can-shoot -out-of-her-eyeballs... well, that's something else altogether. And in many cases - Chiller, some views of Manhunt, every splatter film ever*, and most cases of what happens when you give a teenager Flash - that's what you get. If the intended emotional reaction to horrible violence is "Wow, cool!", we got a problem.
(Or do we? Still, that's something to argue later.)
Harry pointed out another reason this is suddenly a problem now, best illustrated thusly:
A pitched battle scene in 1988...
...and today.
Small wonder moral guardians would be more concerned about a game with graphics like the latter. If you have to squint and look out of the corner of your eye to make sure that the victim's entrails are being pinned to a wall, it's perhaps not a very big deal. With photorealistic graphics and surround sound, there's a little more concern. "As these programs become more photo realistic," Harry says, "even computer game standards like shooting someone will be called into question." And I think we're getting a little of that even now - with the Soldier of Fortune series, if nothing else. Enhanced graphics and interactivity are both of them gifts, but... there's always a downside to anything, isn't there? Or if not a downside, then pitfalls to avoid. Every silver ingot has a cloudy lining. ...Or something like that.
It's easy to paint the censors as a legion of Thomas Bowdler clones, not only out of touch but with no desire to be in touch, and that's easy because... frankly a lot of the time it looks pretty much true. But censorship is important. For the same reason we don't let Mrs. Ostermeyer's Year 4 class sit in on a matinee showing of Extreme Teen 24, we should think twice before letting Pious Preteen Billy take home a copy of "Disemboweler IV: the game where condemned criminals dig at each other with rusty hooks"**. And given that I recently saw a party of preteens playing one of the M15 rated Call of Duty or Medal of Honour or Seriously Dudes It's World War II Again You Like That Stuff Right? games in a Domayne store, in full view of the clerk, I suspect we're taking video games a lot less seriously in that regard than we take film and literature... and much like the comic book industry, I suspect that's why we're getting screwed in a decidedly X-rated manner.
Still, I didn't make this blog to talk about censorship all the time. Next up: But I Don't Wanna Go To The Louvre Today, or, Art Is Okay, But So Is Button-Mashing.
* Hyperbole. I accept that splatter films can easily be art. But I think it's rare that they're taken to their full potential.
** The Simpsons, Season 6 episode Homer Badman.
I'll start with responses to the previous post.
ANanoMoose (hi again, Nano) pointed out that, since interactive violence horrifies the censors, in many cases games don't avoid threats, but avoid opportunities. The sheer horror that a game can deliver is... not so sheer. As Nano says, not all games should feature on-screen child murder, but to automatically never include on-screen child murder is to take out a weapon from your arsenal. And - also as Nano says, I should be thankful to have so much of my post prewritten for me - "That...kind of neuters any impact it could have had." Either way, a child gets murdered... it's just that if it's treated gruesomely, you care.
I'm reminded of a scene in Metal Gear Solid 2 - this paragraph might well contain spoilers, so be careful - and the director talking about it. A character has just died in Otacon's arms, and after the long (very long - this is a Metal Gear game, after all) cutscene, Our Heroes turn towards camera and do their Power Walk, and then you get the chance to play the game again. For about five minutes. Until the next cutscene.
Kojima saw this scene originally, so the story goes, and said "Where's the blood?" The character had died in Otacon's arms - why wasn't his long, very white labcoat spattered with blood? The animators defended their bloodless decision with all the power and passion they could manage, saying that if Otacon was bloodsoaked, it'd detract from the beauty of the scene. But Kojima was adamant. What beauty? Character's just died. Character's gonna stay dead. Bloody Otacon's coat.
So when Otacon leads the Power Walk towards camera, he's guilt-red. And that was the right decision.
Okay, that's it for the spoilers.
My point, and Nano's point - tying back into the previous posts - is that violence elicits an emotional reaction. Omit the consequences of violence, and you might well bring up just the desensitisation the critics are terrified of.
That can go too far, though. If the gore becomes the point of the scene, and there's a chance we should be ignoring the character in peril in favour of look-how-much-blood-can-shoot -out-of-her-eyeballs... well, that's something else altogether. And in many cases - Chiller, some views of Manhunt, every splatter film ever*, and most cases of what happens when you give a teenager Flash - that's what you get. If the intended emotional reaction to horrible violence is "Wow, cool!", we got a problem.
(Or do we? Still, that's something to argue later.)
Harry pointed out another reason this is suddenly a problem now, best illustrated thusly:
A pitched battle scene in 1988...
...and today.
Small wonder moral guardians would be more concerned about a game with graphics like the latter. If you have to squint and look out of the corner of your eye to make sure that the victim's entrails are being pinned to a wall, it's perhaps not a very big deal. With photorealistic graphics and surround sound, there's a little more concern. "As these programs become more photo realistic," Harry says, "even computer game standards like shooting someone will be called into question." And I think we're getting a little of that even now - with the Soldier of Fortune series, if nothing else. Enhanced graphics and interactivity are both of them gifts, but... there's always a downside to anything, isn't there? Or if not a downside, then pitfalls to avoid. Every silver ingot has a cloudy lining. ...Or something like that.
It's easy to paint the censors as a legion of Thomas Bowdler clones, not only out of touch but with no desire to be in touch, and that's easy because... frankly a lot of the time it looks pretty much true. But censorship is important. For the same reason we don't let Mrs. Ostermeyer's Year 4 class sit in on a matinee showing of Extreme Teen 24, we should think twice before letting Pious Preteen Billy take home a copy of "Disemboweler IV: the game where condemned criminals dig at each other with rusty hooks"**. And given that I recently saw a party of preteens playing one of the M15 rated Call of Duty or Medal of Honour or Seriously Dudes It's World War II Again You Like That Stuff Right? games in a Domayne store, in full view of the clerk, I suspect we're taking video games a lot less seriously in that regard than we take film and literature... and much like the comic book industry, I suspect that's why we're getting screwed in a decidedly X-rated manner.
Still, I didn't make this blog to talk about censorship all the time. Next up: But I Don't Wanna Go To The Louvre Today, or, Art Is Okay, But So Is Button-Mashing.
* Hyperbole. I accept that splatter films can easily be art. But I think it's rare that they're taken to their full potential.
** The Simpsons, Season 6 episode Homer Badman.
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