Split-Screen :: The Game-Geek’s Daily Read

by Nike Okami

Will Wright (co-founder of Maxis, which is now a part of Electronic Arts) has been feeling the pain lately, but it’s not over the recent Chinese earthquake or the World Food Crisis. The sultan of Sim has lived through the ultimate Grand Theft Auto experience — that of butchering an innocent in cold blood? And finds himself, like so many gamers before him, bewildered. What is this new developing sensation of guilt and remorse?

Killing people here was no different from killing them in multi-player maps of Halo, so why does it feel so shameful here? Are the graphics, the audio, the small nuances so tightly knit, so intricately woven as to produce this gut-wrenching feeling of humbling remorse?

My GTA experience started with Liberty Stories on the PS2, and on switching over to the meaner, bling-o-rific San Andreas, it only got more…vague. Why, I asked myself, did bystanders in Liberty City stories die when I ran them over once, but in San Andreas, it usually took two or three direct collisions to bring down even the leanest of substance-abusing shrimps? Perhaps gameplay balance motivated one to peruse their murderous extravagance with precaution? That you had to actually think when killing. That you had to make conscious, rational efforts to end the life of your opposition.

Rationality and ethics in real life can play havoc with one’s mind? “An idle mind is a devil’s playground” becomes “An active mind is the reverence of one’s life” Those who do what they want, achieve their goals according to their moral standards, who never compromise their moral stature for the sake of those littler and more belittling than them rely on rationality, whether subconsciously or consciously.

It’s often been cited in several murder cases. The murderer can’t begin to understand what provoked him to end another man’s life. All the rage has been sobered down and he’s been reduced to the level of a socially innocent child with his hand in the cookie jar, his cognizance failing to register that his unconscious actions define his life, and that murder was an unconscious action, hence it ceases to hold any mortgage on his life.

Did the boys from Columbine blank-out when they were planning their murders? No. That was a fully-planned, meticulously constructed scenario meant to destroy and desecrate, if nothing else. However, social conditioning theories sought to take that away, seeking video games as the gore guiders of today’s youth.

What did all the Jack Thompsons of the world use to justify their case? The absence of the mind and the “monkey-see, monkey-do” theory of learning. But for every action, there is a thinking mind balancing the rationality and the moral significance that any reward would provide for one’s actions; when one can only destroy things around him in an unconscious state using the only means humanly possible to him… the means of unconsciousness.

Will Wright, however, isn’t your ordinary man. He’s one of the established game designers, a revolutionary visionary, one who pursues each and every aspect of game planning with an objective sense of reality. Every one of his games was created with the one constructional choice of a designer — right or wrong? For whom, you ask? The gamer. Which gamer? The gamers of this world, the ones who play games because it’s what they want. The real gamers? The ones who want to have fun. Some have more of this within them and some less, predominately the fanboys.

However, find a game of either Will Wright or Sid Meier being denounced by a fanboy, and you’ll find that whether people believe it or not, whether some mystic feeling is telling them these kinds of games are beyond petty squabbles and dime-a-word hackneyed critiques, little to no arguments exist on the amount of fun derived from them.

Fun within one’s hands. Fun obtained through one’s own thinking. Fun created and rewarded through history being changed for the better. Fun achieved through productivity and application. Fun, by the only way possible to man: In using his brain and being good at it.

Which brings us back to the violence of Grand Theft Auto. Ever endeared yourself to a mafia movie that you knew was so wrong in its preaching, and which, typically, ended with the main characters incarcerated or killed?

On this single count, I applaud Rockstar North for encapsulating a feeling that lasts for two hours at best in a cinema hall into a 100+ hour game. You’re not killing people through cut-scenes but with your own two hands, which applies to every single other illegal action in every other Grand Theft Auto game.

Grand Theft Auto IV, more than any other such game however, caters to the gamer who wishes to use his rational mind but to achieve actions of shame. A gamer who wants to see a young woman fall limp and the blood pooling into a small crimson puddle at his feet.

He wants to commit the actions with his own rational convictions, not by blank-out or adrenaline rushes, but with spontaneous material thinking, in search of a reward fitting to the moral standards practiced in the game. This is why, even though Grand Theft Auto IV promotes using your head, that fanboys are complaining whether the game’s worth or not, whether it was really ‘fun’ or not. It’s not despite the graphics or audio or story or lifelike qualities of the game world that we come to regret any amoral actions committed.

Destruction is the polar opposite of productivity. There is no morally grand reward awaiting gamers who finish GTA IV. This a game world built on destroying one’s ethics using the source of his ethics — his mind. Rather than setting the body against the mind as in a real murder, video games have that unique talent of setting one tool of the mind against the other.

That is why Will Wright felt remorse, even if for a split-second. That is why GTA IV is a feat. This being an action game, it’s your thoughts translated into actions that have the most impact. It doesn’t try to take you away from an objective reality.

It puts you knee-deep into the museum of it, watching and waiting for you to decide whether to observe and appreciate it or desecrate and destroy it, then swooping down in the form of a bloodied corpse of an innocent civilian to remind you that your actions were real, even if the reality and the results are fictitious.