This second and final part of The Dark Side of Videogames will focus on a personal experience on how videogames condition our psyches towards violence.
Back in 2005 (or maybe 2006), when F.E.A.R came out, it quickly became one of my go-to videogame experiences, I was hooked from the onset----the gritty, realistic graphics (by the standards of it’s time), the visceral gameplay that seamlessly blended both surreal first person shooting mechanics and close combat martial arts thrills perfectly, and on top of all that, it’s horror infused story that had you trying to bring down a threat that you have absolutely no idea how to. Needless to say, it was one of the most promising videogame experiences and totally lived up to it’s premises and more. And even to this day, in the ‘lists’ of most memorable FPS’ of the past decades, you’ll most likely find F.E.A.R popping up in them.
Anyway, there was a certain level in the game which gave you a pretty unique kind of weapon—instead of bullets, it fired razor sharp spikes that, upon contact with the A.I. enemies, lethally impales their bodies or any part of the bodies. Coupled with the ultra realistic depiction of gore (it even had slow-mo which highlighted the 'spectacles' of extreme violence) that was present in the game, any gunfight where you used that weapon was boundlessly brutal, with clouds of blood vaporing out from the enemies, full body dismemberment and all the rest of the ‘gory’ details (sorry, bad pun). Needless to say, the whole experience was unsettling and even borderline offensive.
But here’s the more interesting part----In several levels of the game, the game placed you in situations where that gun was your only available weapon, and this is where the background mental conditioning towards violence began. It was fine if there was any choice involved in your part, but the game simply forced you in places to use that gun as your only weapon. You had no other option but to rely on it to clear out the in-game enemies for quite a while.
So what happened is that the game actually ‘wanted’ you to experience all the brutal violence that erupt every time you fire that weapon at your enemies, over and over again. This is mental conditioning, pure and simple, where the player’s mind is being subjected and exposed to acts of brutality repeatedly and so eventually, there will be a response of ‘passive acceptance’ toward all that onscreen blood and gore when the mind has finally gotten ‘used to’ experiencing it for a period of time.
Although the duration of this was fairly limited in the game, and you do get other weapons that feature considerably less brutality, but for a fixed length, the game indeed made you go through the most extreme degree of violence that it could offer, deliberately.
There are also other games that do this, extensively, even on a much bigger scale than what F.E.A.R. did. And as we’ve learned from part 3 of the Anatomy of Videogames series of articles (The Ties that Bind), it’s all intentional and purposeful, the games simply ‘want’ it’s players to have these gory experiences.
Videogames, even with all of their interconnected mechanics and technological layers, ultimately translates to a psychological ride of experiences where the player is taken on a rollercoaster of mental-emotional consequences. And those consequences are completely dependent on the design of the games themselves or in other words, they are unpredictable and can be even harmful for the human psyche. This element alone, which is an inseparable part of the design philosophy behind the games, makes these psychological experiences potentially dangerous.
This reveals an aspect of the nature of videogames that is as ‘new’ as it’s disturbing. They plug themselves in our minds and exposes it to experiences that can have very negative connotations. They attract us through their premises, engage our psyches and takes them to places where we may or may not like at all.
Games such as F.E.A.R clearly demonstrates that videogames can and in many cases, indeed do tap into and even nurture the base, animalistic tendencies in the psyches of it’s players. This makes them more of a tool for socially engineering the masses rather than what they should be, what videogames were originally meant to be.
Videogames are awesome, but videogames with psychological agendas are not. Any medium with the capability to directly connect with the human mind (just as films, music, books or TV) should always operate under some clearly defined moral codes, otherwise they can become representatives of cunning, invasive mental manipulative dynamics rather than what they were originally conceived to be. Videogames, no matter how much detailed or dense they get, fail their own purpose when they stop standing for what they were meant to be. And all that they were meant to be are immersive experiences that are engaging and rewarding, but never manipulating.
And that’s the shady, darker side of videogames which is a farcry from what we knew (or think we knew) them to be all this time. So with that, this article comes to it’s end, and I sincerely hope you’ve at least found it interesting to read through. Let me know in the comments section.
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