CGI Violence vs. the violencia - Why Gamers and Politicians play the same game.

I have been thinking for the last couple days about what i called the wolfenstien fantasy.

Put briefly the wolfenstein fantasy is any use of the media that seeks to make complex human issue straightforward and morally simple by invoking the uncanny, the demonic and the odd. Thus the namesake game (about an American soldier escaping from a Nazi prison) makes the violence easier to stomach by making Nazi's occultist's plumbing the depths of an un-dead evil in hopes of finding a weapon that will defeat the allies. The fantasy has its draw because it dehumanizes humans that commit disturbing acts. And as agents of the undead, demonic I can kill them with impunity. I am only doing my duty, after all, because left to their own they would eat my heart and draw pentagrams with my blood.

My fear isn't that computer games are adversely affecting young people. My fear is that the general discussion in the political arena has become a market of competing wolfenstein fantasies.

In America, the right have their fantasy of "terrorists" people entirely dedicated to the downfall of all that "we" hold dear. And their fantasy of the left, who would betray us and turn America over to Shiite rule if given a chance. The left have their fantasy of "oppression" of the faceless nameless power mongers set on destroying the environment and draining your retirement fund, and their fantasy of the right, who love war, drink oil from barrels like vampires and secretly plan the fate of the world while on corporate junkets. It a fun game to play, you create a fictitious media character hell-bent on your destruction and then you destroy it. It's why every shoot-em-up computer game is fun, everyone shoots at you first, Every shot fired is self defense, none of the dead are innocent.

It's a great way to design video games and draft movie scripts starring Californian republicans, it is a terrible way to run an informed public debate.

Perhaps the reason that you hear politicians complaining about computer games is that in them, we find a perfect working model of politics as it stands. Every computer game designer is a lobbyist, -sketching the enemy as demons, wholly committed to your cause, and your inevitable victory. Video games are almost entirely propaganda, mixed with a little user skill. As is politics. The same slight of hand that morphs "avoiding any actual constructive debate" into "staying on message" morphs a violent CGI killing spree into a quest of honor.

The media doesn't always dehumanize. It can, and does, deconstruct the various wolfenstien fantasies that we find. In movies like American History X, Schindlers List, the Shawshank Redemption in fact, in every great work of narrative fiction, every film making triumph. (The latest was Harry Potter, it took the entire series to baptize Severus Snape as a great noble and brave character, but it would take only a campaign ad to destroy him if he ran for president.)

We need to understand that the power of the "violencia", on both sides of the isle, resides in its ability to take a huge, epic, (seven book) issue and paint it in a 30 second black and white campaign ad. The first violence is directed toward the issue itself. Truth is always the first casualty.

Every computer game starts with a 30 second "ad" a small clip that explains, in the most concise terms possible why you need to destroy every moving graphic you see. And more importantly, why there you are able to do so without ethical scruples.

Politics aren't a computer game.
I'm keeping my scruples.

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