Will somebody please think of the children?
Submitted by lobster_king on Thu, 01/10/2008 - 14:32.
One of my first thoughts after playing Passage was "Wait, why did the girl die first?! Everyone knows that the lifespan of the average human female is longer than that of the average human male! Blasphemy! Ridiculous! [Assorted sounds]!" Well... something like that, at any rate. Which brings me to the point that 'video games aren't real life'. Which is an obvious point. Which is thus easy to overlook. But necessary to make.
This game isn't a substitution for actual reality - that much is made clear by the graphics alone. I know that I'm not some thing comprised of a very small and limited number of pixels, and so I'm not confused as to whether I'm the wonderful and amazing creature poking at the directional arrows on my laptop keyboard or if I'm the little pixel people on the screen. But what about games that -are- striving for a much higher degree of realism? It'd be a bit easier to accidentally/unconsciously read those games more literally. I guess that's where you can find some validity in the arguments of those lovely individuals who are quite concerned about violence in video games. (Think of the children!)
It's easy to disconnect from the characters in Passage - though the 'message' of the game might stay with me, I'm well aware that I haven't died in the process as they have, and I can separate my actions (up, down, left, right) from the characters' (as it's not everyday that I run into boxes that explode into giant blue stars, although I have, on occasion, opened boxes full of moths). If I'm playing Halo (read as: generic first-person shooter du jour) - while I don't run into evil alien hordes on a day-to-day basis - I have a lot more control over and connection to the action, so I'm aiming and shooting to kill. Hmm. Still not real life... but somewhat more -like- real life.
Basically, what I'm trying to say is that (I guess) I'll forgive Jason Rohrer for letting the woman die first (even though that is like just so totally, completely, utterly, ridiculously unrealistic - am I right, or am I right?). Because the point of Passage isn't to be realistic. It's to make one think (or some variation on that, I'll bet).
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Verisimilitude
That's an interesting connection between the iconic representational status of Passage (like we discussed some in class) and the question of violent videogames influencing our youth. It's something we'll talk about about more at some point, I'm sure, but you may not be aware that the moral panics over videogame violence started well before games were capable of rendering human figures in anything near a photorealistic representations. One of these games which drew a fair amount of criticism, Berzerk, depicts a "humaniod" stick figure shooting robot stick figures. This was in 1980, and the self-appointed defenders of childhood decried the "desensitizing" violence this game presented.
Also, I titled this comment "verisimilitude" because this idea (of something appearing to be true or "real") comes up in Chapter 2 of Story and Discourse, but Chatman is using the term to mean something more complex than just photo-realistic representation. Do you think your interpretation of Passage demonstrates his kind of verisimilitude?
fighting the good fight?
It'd be interesting to see how much controversy a revival/re-release of Berzerk would generate now... I mean, violence is violence, right? Or would the 'self-appointed defenders of childhood' (an awesome phrase, by the way) themselves be desensitized now since there is other, more 'offensive' material being released?
I guess my post was arguing against Passage's visual verisimilitude, but thinking about it more, the game does have a 'metaphoric verisimilitude' in its narrative to the 'narrative' of a person's life (as boiled down to five minutes).