Culture

In May this year, gaming giant Electronic Arts announced it would no longer be using officially licensed firearms in its video games. The move was a backpedal in reaction to an extremely poorly thought-out charity campaign launched as part of the stupidly-named Medal of Honor: Warfighter. The campaign, in a partnership with actual arms manufacturers, directed players to buy real weapons. The profits were to be given to a veterans’ charity, demonstrating a staggering corporate imperviousness to irony.

The game itself was another one of those camo-brown shlock-fests with an audience composed primarily of trigger-happy teens calling each other “faggots” on Xbox live. If that line just made you call me a faggot, come at me brah. I’m sure you can headshot me from 200 feet no problems. I’ll still be trying to figure out how to aim properly with a stick. Give me a mouse any day.

Let me be clear, I fucking love video games. I’m an indoors kinda guy, and I will freely admit to spending hundreds of hours hunched over a PC in virtual worlds. But seriously, fuck those endlessly bland Call of Duty-esque titles. Endlessly re-living world wars is strange enough when it’s on the History Channel, and it’s even more odd in video games.

With Fran as president, OUSA has been making bold moves to support the New Zealand E-Sports scene, including running a tournament for Activision’s Call of Duty: Black Ops 2. So it’s a good time to take a look at links between the arms industry and the games we invite into our living rooms. Is buying these war-fetishising camo-laden-jizz-fests a moral choice akin to our slave-sneakers and Foxconn iPhones?

Broadly, yes. As games became more realistic, the weapons manufacturers started to take note of their copyrighted designs being used in games, and triple-A publishers like EA and Activision signed agreements licencing particular firearms for virtual use. When sued by a helicopter manufacturer over Battlefield 3, EA claimed fair use, arguing for their right to tell a story just like a writer mentioning a particular weapon in a novel.

To a certain extent, good on them, but it makes you wonder why games need to be so damn realistic. Doom had a “pistol” and a “shotgun” and I don’t think it suffered for it – although check out “Wiki of the Week” to hear from people who disagree.

While there is no proven link between video game violence and the real deal, the way the news media has cried wolf on this particular issue papers over the deeper, and painfully obvious, problem of interdependence between the video game and arms industries. Nearly all video game characters shoot things, and we don’t stop to question exactly why this has to be the case. Even innovation comes with a hand cannon of some variety: both Portal and indie smash hit Antichamber use the first-person shooter mechanic as a springboard for their innovations.

My love for the games industry is matched in equal parts by my exasperation with its often-lackluster artistic output. Yes, there are stunning, innovative games that emotionally impact the player, but they are still often eclipsed by broad, clichéd storylines with guaranteed appeal. Take Far Cry 3. I love that game – I shot a bear with a rocket launcher – but I’d prefer not to be patronised afterwards by one of the lead writers claiming that the crowd-pleasing violence is somehow “ironic.”

I’ll take the welcome abstraction of sci-fi weapons for now, both for my piece of mind and so that I can spend another 200 hours playing the Mass Effect trilogy.