The most violent thing I saw while playing my original Nintendo was Hitler's face exploding at the end of Bionic Commando. However gruesome (albeit cartoon-like) that may seem, it was a rare kind of image in Nintendo's largely kid-friendly and heavily censored games library. Consoles are now capable of presenting incredibly detailed, almost photo-realistic visuals, and violent images can range from wildly bloody decapitations to brutal war simulations. With gaming as popular as it is, is this power being handled responsibly be game developers?
Video game violence is, of course, not inherently bad. Jack Thompson is mostly wrong when he claims that violent games are a direct cause in violent criminal behaviour. Violence novels, movies, and games should all have the same capacity for emotional impact on the viewer. The question is where to draw the line; if you are going to hold game developer's responsible for acts of violence, as Thompson did last year when he sued the creators of the Grand Theft Auto series, then you could logically extend that argument to movie directors and authors whose works feature violent content as well. Millions of people prove that wrong every day... nobody walked out of any of the Saw movies a deranged serial killer.
Graphically, consoles used to make gigantic leaps with each successive generation. From 8-bit to 16-bit, then 2D to 3D, the jumps between systems were incredibly exciting. The difference between the Playstation 3 the Playstation 2, or even the original Playstation, is minuscule in comparison. There is a limit to how realistic flames or skin textures can be, and to this extent hardware developers have hit a wall. Successive consoles can only creep ever closer towards absolute graphical realism.
Another thing that may factor in to how people perceive lifelike characters in games is something called the Uncanny Valley, a theoretical model devised in the seventies by Masahiro Mori. His hypothesis basically states that as three-dimensional models become increasingly lifelike, players will have increasing feelings of empathy for them. This will continue until the character is almost human, but isn't quite there yet; they will be noticeably fake, their inhuman qualities shining brighter than their human. That's called the Uncanny Valley. As technology improves and characters themselves are human enough to pass for the real thing, Mori's hypothesis states that empathy will shoot back to up to near human-human levels. This entire theory has been heavily criticized, but it remains a possibility in gaming's future.
Newfound graphical realism also means that game developers need to be more attentive to content than ever before. Case in point; Capcom's upcoming Resident Evil 5. The trailer, released at this years E3, left many people feeling uneasy. It shows the hero running through an African village gunning down what look like mobs of angry, machete wielding villagers, at one point stating “I have a job to do. And I'm gonna see it through.” The villagers in question don't look like monsters, as they have in almost all of the previous games in the series. They look like people. This was also the case in the previous game, the fourth, which was set in Spain. The difference, though, is that Spain's history differs slightly from Africa's, particularly in regards to heavily armed white guys in military outfits dispatching angry villagers. Surely, someone at company headquarters must have seen that video before its release and noticed something a bit wrong with it.
Of course, the developers have the artistic right to do what they want with their game. You could argue that the appearance of Africans as enemies is merely a byproduct of their chosen setting, Africa, since that continent just happens to be where most Africans live. It remains, though, that they could have set it anywhere in the world. They had entire creative control, and they chose one of the most controversial places they possibly could have, and presented that choice in what ended up being an insensitive and offensive manner.
Chances are very good that any game developers who don't currently take this kind of thing into account will start soon, or at they least will after they notice that their games aren't selling nearly as well as their competitors. It will be good practice to start as soon as possible, too; it's likely that your children will be able to kill a near perfect, photo-realistic digital replica of a human being, and at that point creators will need to be as responsible as possible.
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