Gaming turned me into a mass murder accomplice. But I’m fine with that.
The following is based on true events.
I’m sitting on my stain covered couch, watching the The Last of Us end credits. As the last meaningless name is swallowed by the blackness, I place the controller on my junk-food infested coffee table. Wiping sweaty palms on smelly jeans, I get up with wobbly legs and grope my way towards the bathroom. I flick the light switch on and approach the electric shower dial. I turn it to maximum temperature and jump inside the shower, my clothes long gone. I sit in a corner, crying like a domestic abuse victim in an indie movie. The burning water does nothing to wash away the guilt, blood or intestinal fluids (slight exaggeration for dramatic effect).
I have accompanied and enabled a ruthless mass murderer in his year-long voyage through the sunny, if apocalyptic, United States. It wasn’t survival. It was a massacre. And I couldn’t stop Joel, the rugged protagonist of The Last of Us. Worse, I didn’t want to. I crossed moral ambiguity and came out on the Nazi end.
And it wasn’t the first time. I remember walking through the nightmarish streets of Silent Hill with my mate, James Sunderland, and feeling a sort of sick, guilty compulsion to explore his psychosis (even at the expense of his remaining sanity). I helped bomb the shit out of the remnants of a broken Dubai, in Spec Ops: The Line, and then left Captain Martin Walker to shoulder the blame. I journeyed with Nier on a species wide genocide, mentally high-fiving him among the dying screams of an entire race. I vanquished 16 colossi that were simply minding their own business in Shadow of the Colossus. I did it all for love, duty and honour, and never felt dirtier. But I had fallen too deep inside the rabbit hole to stop.
You don’t have to feel like a murder accomplice: The many emotions of gaming
All the games described above remind us that we can have our cake and eat it. We can have violence and cruelty without trivialising them or numbing their effect. Intense, addictive and fun gameplay can be more than guilty pleasure or sick sadism, because games can be so much more than simple escapism. Their own nature demands such an active participation from the player that it should be impossible to simply “shutdown your brain”. Once your mind is off so is the game, seeing as you’re an integral part of the final work – a silent, unpaid and unacknowledged accomplice.
We, the players, are demonic cheerleaders who encourage our traumatised protagonists to commit unspeakable acts.
Mind you, the actual game never truly belongs to us, the players. It’s an independent work and we have no true control over it. Those create-your-own-adventure type of games only offer the illusion of choice and usually lead to oversimplified narratives, in a lame attempt to please everyone. We can never really become the hero of these games (that would be a mild form of schizophrenia), and that’s why the archetypal silent protagonist just comes off as a dumb mute nowadays, guided from plot point to plot point by condescending allies and patronising enemies.
No, we, the players, are closer to demonic cheerleaders, encouraging our traumatised protagonists to commit unspeakable act after unspeakable act. We’re little ghost-like devils, hovering over the main characters and nudging them along until their post-traumatic stress is our post-traumatic stress. Not merely through identification, which is the most all other mediums can strive for, but through sheer closeness. And the closer we get, the stronger the impact.
That’s the thing, you see. The tiny controller dangling at our feet is a hassle-free entryway into other worlds. It’s a quick connection into the mind of a creator. Something that allows us to bypass the spectator phase and become an actual part of the finished product, in all its glory and PTSD. That’s the holy grail of all art forms – a guaranteed and tangible relationship between art and audience, only accomplished by this so-called immature medium. So suck on that, you pretentious art hipsters. None of your artsy-fartsy pieces will ever come close to the relationship between gamer and game. Just be careful you don’t end up scarred for life.
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Featured Image: Naughty Dog
Insets: JBLivin and FAN THE FIRE Magazine via Flickr
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