I took an introductory art history class at Oberlin. In one of the first lectures, the professor suggested a thought experiment: imagine that you’re holding a picture of someone you love, someone you are very close to. The person looks happy; it is a photograph of good times. You have other spare copies of the photograph; the photograph itself is not precious to you, just its content. Now, suppose someone offered you $50 to swear at that photograph, scream at it, spit on it, throw in on the ground and stamp on it, maybe burn it. You have no other demands on your time. It’s just a photograph. $50 is a nice dinner for two. Would you do it?

I knew I wouldn’t do it. I think almost everyone felt the same way. I think I would wonder about the mental stability of someone who didn’t at least hesitate. The professor’s point was that some images have an effect on us that goes beyond the logical or economic.

When I think about people playing violent video games, watching violent movies, etc., I want to say that it’s very clearly just a game/movie/whatever, that we should leave people alone and let them enjoy themselves how they please, and so on. But to me, the thought experiment with the photograph proves the existince of a potent gap between rational and actual human reasoning that I don’t know how to deal with, and leaves me feeling I’m in the dark about what effect these media experiences really have on me. Is it really plausible that it would have no effect? It’s hard for me to believe that our mental boundaries between fiction and real life, especially when it comes to whatever informs unprompted emotional reactions, are so logical and firm.

I am not ready at all for a moral audit of my life choices. You did tell me about your job search at the time. I can tell you that my memory is disappointingly flexible about things like what opinions I expressed at the time, but I admire you for your choice now. I wanted to understand better how the brutality in GTA worked with you, given my own strong reaction; I hope it’s clear I wasn’t accusing you of being callous.

In GTA, you elect to do those things, yourself, as a means to achieve some personal gain.

is really accurate, for two reasons:

• I am not doing these things. I, to some extent, am controlling a video game character who engages in actions that, if they were performed by a real person, would be abhorrent. Similarly, it is not for pesronal gain – the benefits (other than my enjoyment) accrue to the video game character, not to myself.
• My actions are closely constrained by the game world – there is a strong plot to the game, and becoming a pacifist while continuing to make progress simply isn’t an option. (Refusing to play the game at all, of course, is.)

Anyways, I don’t have a big, coherent all-arching thought on this matter, but here are some random things which come to mind:

• I would be happy if there were games out there with a similar depth of plot, range of experience, range of challenges to GTA that were less violent. I am not aware of any such games. The reliance of video games on violence for their challenges is a weakness in the art form, and has been one historically. Fortunately, people within the industry are continuing to explore other possibilities; they should do so more often. In the mean time, I very much enjoy the sorts of challenges I get from video games, and I’m not planning to give them up any time soon. So, from that point of view, your claim that this is “needlessly ugly” is very interesting – in some sense, I completely agree, in that I’m pretty sure that it would be possible to design a game that was just as rich as GTA but much less violent, and I would prefer playing such a game to playing GTA. But right now, it is needfully ugly for me as a video game consumer: if I want the richness of a GTA, I have no choice but to accept the violence that goes along with it.
• It sounds like you’re relatively consistent in your dislikes across art media; from my point of view, that counts as a point in your favor.
• I don’t know for sure, but I imagine that, as games get more realistic, there will be more situations in which I refuse to play a game or feel actively uncomfortable playing a game because of what I see depicted on screen. GTA sometimes makes me feel that way, but not very often; maybe that’s a sign that I have an overly thick skin…
• There are situations in video games where I refuse to play in a certain fashion. For example, a recent trend is games where you can choose a good path or an evil path; I always do the good path in those situations (though, in the Star Wars game I just finished, I was kind of tempted to take the evil path). An older example is in the Civilization games – when playing those, I would like to win via diplomatic means but don’t know how to (I am a lousy diplomat in games, as in real life), so I end up winning via technological means. I never choose to win by completely annihilating my opponents (don’t get me wrong, though, I conquer quite a bit of their land, I just stop short of wiping out any competing civilization); I also never choose to use nuclear weapons in those games.
• Which raises an interesting question (to me, at any rate) – isn’t valorization of war much, much more potentially serious than valorization of beating up cops? (I don’t think that the GTA games really valorize beating up cops, but let’s accept that they do for now.) Why do games with violence on a personal level get more of a reaction than games in which millions are impersonally killed? (And I don’t mean “why?” in the sense that “why don’t those idiots out there realize that those games are just as bad?” – I also am more viscerally bothered by depictions of violence on a relatively personal scale.)
• I know lots of people (including Liesl) who got into The West Wing; I’m sure it had many virtues, but I got turned off because the first episode that I happened to see was about the US government killing a bunch of people in Iraq, using some sort of justification that the show accepted uncritically but which, in real life, I found dubious at the time, and which has had horrific analogues in the intervening years. I’m not in favor of censorship either, but I’m a lot more worried about artistic choices that support those in power causing large-scale deaths than I am about artistic choices that support relatively powerless people causing deaths on a relatively small scale.
• I’m a lot worried about real-world choices than I am about choices in works of art. I’m certainly no saint, but I have in the past avoided pursuing a job in which I could have ended up working on contracts to improve software so that it could be used to design “better” nuclear weapons, for example. I’m pretty sure we had conversations on this matter at the time, where your point of view was that the peaceful uses of the software meant that the virtues of the work outweighed the negative aspects; I guess we draw the line in different places. (And David Carlton 2003 drew the line in different places from David Carlton 1990 or David Carlton 1994, and I’m not about to swear that I won’t change my mind on that issue again.)

Still, you’re hitting some weird notes. The question is not whether all art should be acceptable to five-year-olds; the question is why that art is sought-after by adults. Similarly, what of it if someone judges video games inconsistently with other art forms? If you have a good answer as to why people enjoy vicarious brutality in whatever medium, why not present it, instead of concentrating on the questioner’s rhetorical inconsistencies? Isn’t there some defensiveness here?

Maybe the valorization of brutality is kind of an arbitrary cultural characteristic: it can be okay, or not. And it’s difficult to find an outside vantagepoint from which to assess it. I just think it’s needlessly ugly. I’ll take a wild stab (um) and say that the lives I and almost everyone I know lead are removed from real death and brutality, which is something to be thankful for, but I suspect it makes fake violence more palatable to us as entertainment. I wonder if infantry combat veterans also enjoy brutality in this way, since they’ve actually seen it and done it.

I don’t go to see movies like Resevoir Dogs. I think they would turn my stomach, too. But I think there’s a difference in that one is not invited to sympathize with a character cutting off someone’s ear or sodomizing someone in a basement (to pick on one director). In GTA, you elect to do those things, yourself, as a means to achieve some personal gain. I didn’t go see it myself, but I’m told the movie Sin City has a good guy — someone you’re supposed to empathize with — who hacks off an evil character’s limbs while they’re alive. And I also want to know why that’s okay.

I agree video games should be judged as an art form among others. But if a friend of mine were really into the movie Sin City (in which, I’m told, a sympathetic character cuts off the limbs of an evil character while the latter is alive), I think I’d ask them the same question. As it happens, the friends I have who went to see it walked out. Karl and I walked out of the original La Femme Nikita when it showed at Oberlin, in the opening scene. My general feeling is that the world has always been full of people I don’t understand and mostly wouldn’t like to know, so it doesn’t surprise me that they like horrid films. They eat lousy food, too. But when my friends do it, then it becomes a more interesting question to me.

And no, I don’t really know what I mean by something “being okay”. I’m not in favor of censorship. I don’t feel like decisions should be taken out of parents’ hands. There’s just some sort of “going with the flow” here that seems very weird. And I ask my friends about it as a way to help me turn that gut feeling into something more articulate.

I like that Dykes strip a lot, too. Madoka is still young for that kind of situation to have come up in that exact form, but similar choices about what sort of force to bring to bear do come up. I totally agree with the underlying principle. But you can’t see the screen at the end of the strip; I bet she’s not beating someone up.

(Hmm: for that matter, why does my stomach churn more when watching Reservoir Dogs than when playing GTA? I’ll have to think about that one.)

I’m not about to let Miranda watch it; Liesl, however, has watched me play it, and expressed appreciation for the game. (But she has shown no desire to play it herself; admittedly, she doesn’t play that many video games.)

I’m happy to talk more about the game, but it would help if I had a bit more background: do you play video games regularly; if so, which ones? Have you in the past; if so, which ones? Do you feel the same way about violent movies, or are video games special; if so, could you speculate as to why you feel that way?

(And, because I love it so much, I will link again to the strip on the subject in Dykes To Watch Out For.)

I was at a friend’s house for a party, and they had a PS2 with some GTA thing going. One time I walked by and the player was just beating the living crap out of a policeman. Each blow made the policeman crumple a little further, with bits of blood or sweat or something flying off, until he had collapsed to the ground in a twisted pile. It was so graphic it turned my stomach. I had to go away. I sure didn’t want Madoka watching it.

Why is this okay? Why is this fun? What does Liesl think about it?