Video games are an ideal gift – especially the violent ones
Not long ago, Salman Rushdie took to Twitter to say, ‘Passed this billboard: “From the Makers of Doom… Rage!” What does it say about us that these are the names of games?’ The author of Fury had a point. Video games are now bigger business than movies, and the biggest business in video games is war: exploding aliens, terrorists being shot in the spine, guns, guns, guns. To those who don’t know their FPSs from their STDs, it looks like a bewildering miasma of regressive male adolescent nonsense.
Which, of course, it is. Most of these games have crude narratives and cruder voice-acting; if you look for the qualities in them that you’d seek in a film (emotional engagement, subtlety of character, women) you’ll be sair disappointed. But they are, on their own terms, things to marvel at. The best are triumphs of information architecture, game design, simulated physics and sound; with gameplay carefully balanced: miraculously well-designed and often beautiful imaginary spaces.
Almost all sports and games, at root, are simulations or sublimations of warfare. These ones, you could say, are just more simulated, and less sublimated. But the co-ordination and timing involved in playing them well are formidable (I know: I once played heads-up with a world-champion gamer and didn’t land a bullet on him). That’s to say nothing of the tactics involved when playing online in teams. The root appeal of these games is not the simulated blood. It matters not a whit whether you’re shooting an alien, a Nazi or a robot in a game or a moving paper target in a shooting contest: what matters is making the shot.
And contrary to what amateur behavioural psychologists such as Keith Vaz MP will tell you, it no more stands to reason that playing violent video games will make you violent than it stands to reason that eating carrots will turn you orange. As far as copycat violence goes, Tom and Jerry poses the higher risk. Most teenagers — to their admitted regret — have easier access to mallets, bowling balls and hot irons than to 50-Cal Gargleblasters with night sights, attached grenade launchers and chainsaw bayonets.
Anyway, this year has been a cracker for wargames. Buy them for your children and play them yourself. They’re super fun, they increase hand-eye co-ordination, they stave off Alzheimer’s, and they make you taller and better in bed. Fact.
The biggest deal this year is Modern Warfare 3, third in a FPS series (First-Person Shooter: where you see through the eyes of your homicidal maniac) that piques itself on its realism, and sells itself on its willingness to transgress the bounds of good taste in the hopes of publicity. The previous instalment had you participating in a massacre of civilians at an airport; this one has a brief scene where you see through the eyes of a tourist making a holiday video of his cute daughter in London… just as the explosives-laden truck detonates beside her. (You can find nastier things in the average episode of Spooks, actually, but Spooks doesn’t get a rise out of Keith Vaz.)
Like proper war it’s noisy and confusing and there’s a fairly good chance of being blown up at random. Unlike proper war if you die you get another go. There are lots of people shouting things like ‘Contact!’ and ‘Tangoes up ahead!’ and ‘Light them up!’ Its realism also extends to the fact that you spend time blowing up lightly armed and disorganised third-world fighters from aerial drones, or cutting down enemies fleeing on foot, from the safety of your tank, with a heavy machine gun. It’s grippingly paced and very jolly indeed if you like your games macho and humourless.
Battlefield 3 — this is the year of the trilogy — is a more or less slick MW3-a-like, with urban landscapes, middle eastern terrorists, and those evergreen classics ‘Contact!’, ‘Tangoes up ahead’ and ‘Light them up’. Your arms, alarmingly, don’t always appear at an angle that suggests they belong to the same person. If you ignore the flashing grenade warning, mind you, they won’t. BF3’s cute selling point is destructible scenery: that parapet you’re hiding behind splinters to rubble under HMG fire. The solo game isn’t much to write home about but it excels in the online multiplayer department.
There’s no real danger of realism in Gears of War 3. This is a third-person shooter peopled by cuboid space-marines with arms the size of most people’s thighs, testicles the size of most people’s heads, and heads the size of most people’s testicles. They wear bandanas to keep their brains in. Their enemies are extra-terrestrials hopped up on some sort of alien Ready Brek that makes them extremely bad-tempered, and causes them to glow in the dark. They explode when you shoot them in the tummy.
At critical moments, something horrible will come plunging through the roof and you’ll be instructed to ‘Defend against the tentacle!’, which almost never happens in MW3. The great selling point of the Gears of War series is its cover mechanism — which is to say, your spud-headed marines are to be congratulated on knowing that it’s a good idea to hide behind something if people (or glowing aliens) are shooting at you.
Then there’s Rage, the game which caught Salman’s eye. This is, essentially, Mad Max the video game. An asteroid has hit the earth, making it an altogether far less pleasant place. You wake up from cryogenic sleep to find yourself surrounded by violent mutants with horrendous fashion sense, and so you zoom about shooting as many of them in the face as possible. When not shooting them, you challenge them to car races or run errands for them. And when not doing either of those things, you sneak into their bases and loot small change from their post-apocalyptic vending machines, which seems petty but there you are. No wonder it’s called Rage.
If neither shooting Russians, nor shooting aliens, nor shooting mutants toots the horn of your post-apocalyptic dune-buggy, to be honest I despair of you. But before I abandon you to light opera or whatever else it is you waste your time on, one last try: there’s always Batman: Arkham City.
Here is a game in which you don’t shoot anybody at all. Instead, as Batman (and occasionally Catwoman, who can fight 20 grown men without breaking sweat but seems to have a problem zipping her jumpsuit all the way up to the neck), you swoop around a gloriously well realised cityscape thwarting the Joker and the Riddler and the Mad Hatter and Mr Freeze and their like. And when you meet their henchmen — because you are Batman and you have a Code Of Honour — all you do is pounce from the shadows and pound them acrobatically into unconsciousness.
Unconscious, right? Just snoozing. No more than an ickle bump on the head — even for the really evil ones. Even Keith Vaz can’t argue with that.