About a month ago, I found myself doing something I never thought I would do. I picked up a PS4 controller and started playing a violent video game. And then, to make things even weirder, I found myself not hating it. I kind of enjoyed it.
To give you some background to this, I wasn’t allowed to play video games as a child. And to be honest, they never really appealed to me, even though my best friend played them all the time. She was so into the Link and Zelda series that it became the basis of our favorite let’s-pretend games. We would spend hours as Link and Zelda; we even made her little sister (who was 4 years old at the time) be the bad guy. Then, after we tired ourselves out and stuffed ourselves with her mother’s delicious fried sardines and sesame rice, I’d sneak in a little time playing Animal Crossing, the only video game I remember enjoying in my childhood. Let’s just say Tom Nook had nothing on me and my apple trees.
So, I’ve always had a complicated relationship with video games, and it only got more complicated when violent video games started to become overwhelmingly popular. They never appealed to me in the slightest, and, to be honest, I was kind of horrified by them. For a while, I thought that children who played violent video games had to be predisposed toward violence and aggression as problem-solvers, as solutions. So when my friends asked me to join them in a game of Super Smash Bros., I would decline because I’m absolutely useless at it (much to their amusement), and when they asked me if I wanted to play Call of Duty, I would tense up and say a near-disdainful “NO” — because I would never support violence like that, especially commercial violence.
Everything changed when I started dating a gamer.
(If you caught the Last Airbender reference, good. I like you.)
Gaming is one of his favorite hobbies, and I wanted to explore something that was so important to him. So he’s giving me a gaming education, and I decided to take the opportunity to challenge what I felt about violent video games, to see if there was any truth in it.
For some unfathomable (to him, now) reason, he decided to introduce me to video games by having me play Bloodborne. I can hear the serious gamers out there wincing. For those of you not in the know, Bloodborne is set in dystopian, Gothic and Victorian-era Yharnam (which looks a lot like London, funnily enough), a city torn apart by a nameless blood-borne disease. This disease is essentially lycanthropy (werewolf syndrome), and those infected with it gradually become more and more bestial. So, of course, they try to kill you on sight. You play the Hunter, a person imbued with special abilities (thanks to a nifty little not-diseased-blood transfusion) that make you a crazy-good fighter. The objective of the game, as far as I can understand it, is to gradually unravel Yharnam’s mysterious past while you hunt down the nasty beasties, including bosses that essentially allow you to “level up.” (Note: the animals that got the diseased blood turn real huge and real scary and real mean. We’re talking crows the size of an industrial stove.)
I think a major part of what makes the violence in this game more digestible is its design. The beasties are triggered into action by your presence or your movement; if you stand there long enough, they’ll come for you, and they don’t hesitate. Case in point: the opening of the game. You wake up in a creaky house, and there’s a dog the size of a small truck munching on a rotting corpse in the next room, and you have to get past him to get on with the game. You don’t have any weapons. Even though you might want to, you’re not supposed to fight the thing. You’re supposed to die so you can enter the Hunter’s Dream (a kind of a “safe zone” separate from reality) for the first time and see how it all works and actually get said weapons, but that doesn’t make the moment when the dog turns on you any less terrifying. Now, my boyfriend didn’t tell me that I was supposed to die until the dog was lunging for me and I was throwing the controller into my boyfriend’s lap and diving behind him into the couch cushions. Safely said, this game is more easily played when you’ve got an experienced and willing-to-help-and-not-just-quietly-giggle-at-you gamer sitting with you.
But I digress. This game, like many other (if not every) violent video games, plays on your defensive reflexes. Once you get past the initial shock, if you even have one, and realize that you kind of never die, you will do whatever you can to put down whatever it is that’s coming at you, whether it has a human face or not. These games are also great at playing on redirected anger. What I mean is that they’re an outlet for stress — although whether they’re the best outlet available is debatable, given that they often just create more, different stress for you to cope with. Case in point: If you’re pissed that you got a C on that stupid Chem test, odds are you won’t be able to focus on the game as well as you normally do because you’re so caught up in your own frustration — which means that you won’t do as well in the game, or you’ll die a lot more frequently, which will only piss you off more until you smash all the buttons and do something like rage-quit. But, in being around my gamer friends, I’ve heard something close to this line at least a dozen times: “Nah, work/school/my day was pretty crappy. Wanna go play some Call of Duty/Destiny/insert-other-first-person-shooter-here?” I’ve noticed that when things aren’t going so great for my gamer pals, they’re more likely to turn to the violent games instead of the calmer, let’s-build type games, like Minecraft or Journey or Limbo or Flower, because it’s an easy way to vent and to have something to vent about.
I’ve probably clocked around 5 hours playing this game (this was up until about a month ago when finals started to kick in), and I barely made it to the first boss on my own — and that was with help. Although, of course, remember that I’m in no way an experienced gamer, and it took me a long time just to figure out the different button combinations to extend my weapon, charge it up, use a side-to-side attack instead of an up-down attack, etc. I even had to take notes on what each button would do, even though I would just end up smashing buttons most of the time.
But, from moment one, I found myself really enjoying the game, even though the major focus of the game is killing things. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that Bloodborne isn’t as first-person as a lot of other games; you see your character from behind, so you see the whole body, and not just the hands and the weapon. Maybe this means that you’re not as in the game as you might be in other games, or as attached to your actions. Whether that’s a good or a bad thing, I don’t know.
After I started playing Bloodborne, I would refer to playing it like so: “Hey, I wanna kill some stuff later.” Typing that out, I realize how awful that must sound! I would say it so benignly, so nonchalantly, and my boyfriend would just smile and say, “All right, cool.” I think a lot of my relaxed attitude came from the fact that the enemies in the game don’t look all that human, and they attack you with hardly any provocation. And, they don’t even bleed red blood. It becomes less of a game about killing things and more of a game about defending yourself. Plus, you technically have infinite lives. Video games wouldn’t be in business if the game just stopped each time your character died. Sure, they often institute penalties for dying (for example, when you die in Bloodborne, you lose all your money, and the only way to get it back is to go back and kill whatever killed you; but, if you die again before you can do that, then all your money’s gone forever) — but the game never just stops and makes you start over again because you let some lycanthropic crow get the better of you. So, dying in a video game isn’t like actually dying, which means you take more risks and have more opportunities. Plus, if the violence done toward you isn’t permanent, then neither is the violence you commit to others, which makes me wonder if it even counts as true violence at that point. Doesn’t most of the force of violence come from its lasting impact, be it physical or psychological?
Ah, it’s getting to the point where I need to shut up. So, I’ll get to the important stuff.
Do I feel different after playing and enjoying a violent video game? Kind of. I feel like my reflexes might have actually improved. I’m not sure if it made my temperament more violent since I’ve always been pretty grouchy, but that’s something I plan to keep tabs on as I continue to explore video games. I feel like I definitely understand where the enjoyment comes from because the violence is used as a reward system. That might sound arbitrary or over-simplified, but I think it explains the majority of the enjoyment or enthusiasm people have for these games. (Don’t even get me started on the heroification of the individual because there’s definitely some of that, too.)
Do I think video games make people more suited toward violence? I’m going to be honest here: I don’t know. I really don’t, especially at this point. I think turning to violence as a problem-solver has a lot more to do with inherited values and with how parents teach their children to cope than it does media. But, I do think that there are too many violent video games out there, just as I think that the media focuses on negative news far too much. There has to be a balance, and I see more of a balance between violent and non-violent than I do in, say, the front page of the paper, or the headlines on my email website.
I end this piece very much in the middle ground because I’m neither here nor there on violent video games. Do I hate them? No. Do I love them? Eh. I like the one I played. Does that mean I would enjoy Mortal Kombat? Probably not, simply because I can’t stand gore and excessive violence, even when it’s animated.
One of the more important things I’ve taken away from my experience so far is that, more than anything, people should be aware of what they’re doing, and maybe they should pause during their round of Call of Duty to think about it for a moment, imagine the game as a reality, and realize that all actions, even animated ones, have weight and intention. At least, I think they do.
And remember, we are born of the blood. *winky-face*