My obligatory video game post comes at an interesting segue from studying; what better way to spend scant study break time than on stress-relieving video games? Or alternatively, we can analyze it: how much do we enjoy, say, embodying the adventurous life of a story from the comfort of our couch? It’s easy to get absorbed in games (usually, that’s the point), and although the discussion around the influence of gaming’s violent themes has died down in recent years, it’s important not to forget what our influences become when we do become absorbed.
Meet “Call of Duty: Ghosts”; a first-person shooter game that I will use for a simple case analysis. Featuring a number of psychologically thrilling, mentally challenging, aesthetically provoking, and thematically violent experiences, the game’s campaign mode (single-player, story mode) not only portrayed war as the ultimate stage for heroics, but more disturbingly inundated players in a patriarchal paradigm. Subtle ideas like male dominance are readily accepted by younger audiences, or uneducated players (who for our purpose, can be male) cruising through the game feeling purposeful, influential, and bound to settle “dad’s score” with the evil murderer wreaking havoc to the United States. Here, I’ll save Bandura’s bobo doll experiment another citation, and simply ask why girls should play with dolls, and boys, guns? History tells us that that is not the way people naturally behave; I believe that people with bigger muscles are not naturally more violent. We can see that the same ingenuity fuelling the proliferation of diamond engagement rings in the latter half of the 20th century is at work; the same forces behind successful marketing campaigns.
21st century, value marketing has resolvable roots in recognizing the power of involvement. If you readily subscribe to a belief (a broken paradigm, for example), it can become part of your unquestioned status quo. The danger is when this bias erodes our grasp on reality; perhaps this status quo is the reason we have so much constant, impenetrable clutter, vying for our divided attention in our lives.
Although the scenery is spectacular and mesmerizing in-game, is it really fair to experience it as a young man killing men with my brother and my dog, for my country and my father? Sounds like a bit of a… vulgar success, wrought with distractions. Humans were not designed to stand alone against a constant barrage of everything coming at once; or is that what we call heroic?