blowing brains out, 1978-2016

image
image
image
image
image

That’s from a 1978 episode of Columbo I re-watched this past week. I like how Columbo says “I work nights a lot” in response. That wouldn’t make any sense as an answer today. Violence in mass entertainment is hardly relegated to the hours between 9-11 PM. It’s everywhere. It’s in your face. Literally.

In [virtual reality] Fallout 4, Bethesda does its job a little too well. My session ended shortly after I inched toward a final raider gleefully harassing my German Shepherd. Whether because of the usual Bethesda bugs or because of his preoccupation with my dog, he didn’t see me, even from a distance so short he could probably hear my footsteps. With my right arm, I raised my shotgun and aimed it inches from his head.

There’s always a sense when you’re playing with a controller or a mouse and keyboard that you’re playing a game; that you’re popping off pixels toward masses of other pixels. But taking the effort to raise my right hand and aim a weapon at the head of someone who doesn’t even see me? That kind of deliberateness is something else entirely. It feels a little too real, and it made me feel dirty in light of last week’s events.

I pulled the trigger anyway. Boom. Down he went, sprawled over the cracked cement. The dog looked up at me, panting. I shuddered as the demo went dark.

The guy was a vicious raider who was attacking my loyal dog in an irradiated wasteland. He arguably deserved it. But it’s that image that sticks with me two days after walking out of Bethesda’s booth, and it’s that image that haunted me briefly last night in my sleep. I’ve killed hundreds or thousands of fake people in Fallout 4 since it went live last November and now it’s this guy who’ll remain stuck in my brain.

Is this the reality we’re asking for?

From Leif Johnson’s Motherboard story, Fallout 4 in Virtual Reality Isn’t As Fun As It Sounds.

The violence keeps becoming more intense and immediate, and the concerns keep falling by the wayside. And I don’t know what the answer is. My concern isn’t some notion that violence on television or in games makes all of us violent or anything of the sort. But I am concerned that while we are constantly designing mechanisms to make the violence more real, more visceral, we as a culture do not have a mechanism of critical thought for distancing ourselves from the violence and questioning what it suggests about the values we want to prize. And I think that lack of a mechanism of distancing critical engagement is part of how we wound up at a point where no small number of people seem willing to openly admit that the same values that make their heart race when they’re watching Game of Thrones are the values they want and admire in a real political leader.