I’ve always played video games. From the seven year old kid messing with an Atari 2600, to the uber geeky jock that loved playing R-Type on the Commodore64 as much as a good pickup game of basketball, to the highschool student that literally lived through the Kings / Space / Hero’s Quest games, and the Playstation addicted med student that routinely told his friends that Hideo Kojima was a god – I’ve always loved games.
And yet, as any gamer will tell you, gaming culture is not about distracting one from life, it is really a series of shared interactive experiences that, in my humble opinion, makes life all the more richer. Life happens regardless. You survive med school and residency, you meet the woman of your dreams, you start a family, you live, laugh, love and cry, all with the additional joy of knowing what it is to slay dragons, take your team to the Superbowl, explore distant ring-shaped worlds and push back the Locust horde.
In this thing called Life, one of my other hats involves being an acute care physician, meaning that I also get to care for patients, usually at a time of need. One doesn’t need to be a physician to embrace and nurture the concept of empathy. Ask anyone that has volunteered at a soup-kitchen, participated in a charity event, reached out to a friend in trouble. And I suppose that it is this same part of my brain that twinges when I play games that involve running and gunning down other humans. It’s really weird, and perhaps a bit petty – I mean the aliens in Halo speak English for crying out loud, but I have no problem mowing down wave after wave of them. Locust horde? Hand me that Lancer, sir! But if they run around acting all, y’know, human and all, screaming in pain when injured, dropping to a knee, crawling away – uuhh, that’s when things have just of late started to become uncomfortable for me. Can’t seem to switch off that empathy muscle and it is severely impeding my gamer cred.
I guess this was why I looked at the release of Modern Warfare2 with a combination of excitement and trepidation. For some reason, shooting at humans has gotten just that much harder. I know it’s just a game. But the emotional intensity that comes with the act of onscreen killing, particularly stealth kills has become overly upsetting of late. While watching a preview for MW2, there was a stealth kill moment that involved a knife to the heart of an unsuspecting soldier, and the camera focused for agonizing seconds on the eyes of the victim, to me paralleling the horror I felt during the slow knife kill Spielberg highlighted near the end of Saving Private Ryan. Speaking of Ryans, Ryan O’Donnell with the gaming show COOP describes this perfectly, detailing an evolutionary progression in gaming where designers tap into ‘experiences’ in a digital realm that don’t necessarily tied to violence against other human beings. He was riffing off of the terrible irony that is presented to our hero Nathan Drake by the antagonist at the end of Uncharted2. And no, I won’t tell you what it is because the same twinge that comes up with on-screen violence is also mindful of the concept of the SPOILER. If you don’t watch COOP, shame on you. Perhaps the most intelligent and thoughtful gaming show on the interwebs today. Here’s the episode that I referred to.