Motion Controls & Violent Games - Problem or No Biggie?

By jakob187 June 23, 2010 20 Comments

*** During E3 2010, I began thinking about some of the things that are entering our medium of gaming to change the way we view, interact, and participate with video games.  In a series of blogs outside of my regular ongoing Uninteresting $#!% blog, I want to take a look at some of these ideas from a philosophical, psychological, and theological perspective.  Please feel free to participate in discussion.  *** 
 
I write this with the standpoint of being someone who has written the pages for extreme violence as well as Splatterhouse on this site.  I hold no one position on this, so merely consider this a way to open healthy discussion about the topic. 
 
Whether we want to face the facts or not, motion controls are finally coming around full circle in the gaming industry.  With the showing of PlayStation Move and Microsoft's Kinect hardware at E3 2010 and even before then, we'll soon find that companies are going to be finding ways of implementing this hardware into their games to create a deeper and more immersive experience.  However, this poses a problem that I'm sure some have considered but many may not have thought to a deep level of thought. 
 

In real life, when we want to be good at something, we practice it.  Repetition makes things much easier for us to not only remember, but also to perform.  A pitcher repeatedly pitches in the bullpen to not only warm-up, but also to improve his aim when he gets on the mound.  A seasoned actor will still do small improvisational work in order to keep his skills honed.  While there are plenty of examples in how practice and repetition of movement and/or brain function can allow someone to be better at something, there are still those examples that lie on the darker side.  As an example, a serial killer murders his victims in a pattern not just to have his own MO, but also to hone his skills at the practice. 
 
Jack Thompson, who many have named public enemy #1 in the world of gaming for his extreme views on violent games, made a point many years ago when the Nintendo Wii was coming out:  eventually, our society will move towards mimicking the terrible actions that violence begets rather than just pressing buttons on a controller.  With the idea of 1:1 movement recognition or even full body interaction, it would seem that the capabilities of a developer or publisher to offer this in their games...is not too far off. 
 
Would a developer like Rockstar actually make a game like Manhunt with Kinect capabilities where you literally mimic the motions needed to kill someone?  Would games that cater to gameplay mechanics involving shooting people or running someone over actually go further to desensitizing people, making violent acts seem less impossible to go through with?  While that idea can get into an incredibly theological conversation regarding the ideas of moral standing and the difference between right and wrong, we have to look at video games as a medium in order to understand the potential of these possibilities. 
 
Video games are not like movies or music, which is a passive form of entertainment that allow a user to make up their own minds on many themes and ideas presented within a given piece of work.  Instead, we deal with an interactive medium, where we make the decisions that will further us through a game.  One of the up-and-coming pillars that has surged through video games is the ability to choose moral differences with our own avatars and characters.  A game like Infamous might give some form of negative response to acting like a bad guy, but in the end, someone who is insensitive of human life is ultimately rewarded.  In Giant Bomb's own look at the game, they stated that playing as the bad guy seemed to offer the big arsenal of firepower in comparison to playing as the good guy.  This brings about the idea of "it's tougher to be a good guy than it is to be a bad guy". 
 

So let's ask ourselves this question as well:  does the ability to define our moral decisions in a game that would feature motion controls further desensitize us to potentially being bad, or does it help us to understand those actions more so we can try to be good?  It's an interesting juxtaposition - the idea that something like interaction with a video game can teach us lessons about our moral standpoint, but what is morally right and wrong?  Don't do bad things, only do good things?  Don't kill or steal?  Don't covet thy neighbor's wife?  What utter consequences behold those ideals, and moreover, what do those consequences actually mean to us as people, as humans? 
 
With the display of family-friendly types of games for Kinect at E3 2010 this year, I kept thinking back to Milo and the discussions that started up about how Milo would potentially be used as a child abuse simulator.  Would there be a safeguard against these types of things in games?  If there were, to what extent do they go?  Obviously, video games have to offer some form of limitations in order to adhere to the mechanics that a game uses for its progression. 
 
My concern in this "essay", if you will, is that while motion controls still can't simulate the weight of an action in terms of physicality, it can definitely simulate a weight mentally that could be ultimately troublesome.  Will publishers or even the ESRB allow violent video games to offer motion control capabilities?  Manhunt 2, while a broken game in its own right, was still an offering on the Nintendo Wii.  It wasn't 1:1, and it created quite a fuss on its own right, but should that excuse the idea that SIMULATING a horrid act is okay?  What happened to the idea of "practice makes perfect"? 
 
I've never been one to give in to the ideas that violent video games cause people to be violent.  I've always seen them as being a form of escapism and entertainment, a way to vent your frustrations in a safe place that won't harm another actual human being.  However, if someone were to offer the ability to replicate that into a game and offer full body control, would it create a violent human being? 
 
I open the floor to you, Giant Bomb community and anyone else reading.  What does the future of violent video games potentially offering motion control mean to you?  Is it a cause for concern and worry, or is it something that you feel is no big deal?    

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