Week 12: NST = Briggs & Burke flashbacks
Unfortunately, my freshman year I lived on a hall will all dudes, though the rest of the dorm was co-ed. Fortunately, we had video games (this explains so much). By the second week, just about everyone on the hall had Counter-Strike and playing became a nightly ritual. And I assure you the only thing more satisfying than killing my hall mates was hearing their cursing shouts and yelps echoing down the hall. We spent almost as much time talking about our death matches afterwards as we did playing, usually over some cheap Chinese food (though I did not order any, for I do not eat, especially after 11pm. Think Gremlins.) Collective violence brought us together, and I stayed good friends with most of my fellow Counter-Strikers for the next four years. However, after that first year, most of us never played Counter-Strike again. And since then, I have not played video games regularly. Tear.
Jenkins, citing Talmadge Wright, refers to this social aspect of gaming as meta-gaming wherein two games take place simultaneously: "one, the explicit conflict and combat on the screen, the other, the implicit cooperation and comradeship between the players. Two players may be fighting to death on-screen and growing closer as friends off-screen" (214). This certainly applies to my freshman experience, and it reinforces Jenkins' point that how violence is perceived depends upon what the gaming audience and individual gamers brings to the game. In a social setting among friends, a violent game can be a bounding experience.
But what about the lone gamers, either social outcasts or those who seek isolation? How does game violence affect them? Here, I am thinking of how Grossman's brutalization, classical conditioning, operant conditioning, and role modeling might apply more to the lone gamer than a group of gamers. For example, one guy on my freshman hall rarely came out of his room, and yet he always joined our Counter-Strike games the moment we started playing. Because I lived next to him, I could hear him playing well into the night. Whenever someone did catch a glimpse inside his room, it was always gloomily lit. My friends and I often joked that he was plotting our demise.
Liestol, Turkle, and even Jenkins, albeit a bit reluctantly, admits that games require the gamers complete attention. Liestol writes, "Duke, however is merely a potential he-man, as it is the player who empowers him an gives the role life….If we are successful in realizing Duke's potential then perhaps we will have attained the same caliber on the same par—at least in the game’s fictional world" (330, 332). Turkle writes that with video games "reflection has given way to domination" (500). And later, "Video games are something you do, something you do to your head, a world that you enter, and, to a certain extent, they are something you 'become'" (501). I would assume that the effects of this intense attention, the becoming of the he-man are more salient for the isolated gamer than for a MMORPG. Turkle only interviews gamers who played alone (technical limitations?). Even though gamers enter fully in the worlds of MMORPGs, they still have that social component that allows meta-gaming.
It seems that if we really want to get gamers to reflect upon video games and violence, we should bring violent games into the classroom. My fourth grade class played “Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego”, great for geography, but what if we had played Mortal Kombat (I’m not sure the timeline matches up here, but you get the idea)? Jenkins suggests using specifically educational games in the classroom. This seems to defeat the purpose because as Zach pointed out and I would concur, we would just go home and play violent games, most unreflectively. In this case, what has using video games added to pedagogy and the questioning of violence?
Liestol could have been an interviewee of Turkle. Turkle discusses how gamers learn how to learn: "Working out your game strategy involves a process of deciphering the logic of the game, of understanding the intent of the game’s designer, of achieving a ‘meeting of the minds’ with the program" (502). By recording her thoughts on playing Duke Nukem, Liestol makes explicit how she learns to play by the game's rules. In passage redolent of Hayles and Lupton, Turkle suggests that all video game action occurs in a "space where the physical machine and physical player do not exist" (502). This seems to be especially true for today's games. NST note how Pac-Man had to be limited to a pie wedge. Mario had to wear a hat because hair was too difficult to program. These were technical limitations. But with today's processors, games, like Gears of War, are becoming incredibly detailed and nuanced and with game physics that match real-world physics. Does such a game create an even more abstract space in which gamers lose themselves? Liestol notes that even though she dies, she knows she has another chance. Are games going to reach the point of such immersion that when a character dies, a gamer might just die, too?
I think, then, that the problem with Grand Theft Auto's violence is not that it is more violent than any other game, but that the violence seems arbitrary and unjustified. Fairy tales are also violent and told to little children, but that violence is justified. Cinderella’s stepsisters have their eyes poked out, and we smile with satisfaction because they got what we they deserved. All is right in that world. Jenkins and NST both point out Grand Theft Auto has an open-architecture allowing the player unprecedented use of objects in the game world (NST, 90). The uncertainty of an openly violent city does not provide justification for violence and reflects a world much too much like our own.
Given our discussion in 702, does Jenkins too easily separate effects from meaning? If style is substance, then effects are meaning.