Stuff to See!

War Games

I am now unemployed. More on that later.
Knowing that I would be in for a period of inactivity, I decided to pick up the new Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction game for Playstation 2. The story behind it is that you're going after the head of an authoritarian regime in North Korea set in the not too distant future. You are a mercenary and you get to pretty much blow up the whole country. Sounds like something I'd enjoy, so I gladly plunked down the $50 for it.
I was right.
There's something about running around and causing unspeakable chaos by proxy in a make-believe world that gives me much pleasure. In real life I'm about as gentle, if quirky, as they come. Luckily I grew up with enough common sense to realize that games are games and life is life. Apparently others have had difficulty making that basic distinction. Oddly enough, the game has a Teen rating (thanks to Joe Lieberman and Mortal Kombat). No blood, I guess.
Ratings on games (a recent development) and movies have always interested me. The movie ratings have some sort of connection to real life, as they allow for the flexibility of parents to assess what is and what may not be appropriate for younger viewers. For instance, I probably shouldn't have been watching A Clockwork Orange or The Exorcist when I was a lad of eight, but my father thought I could handle the mature themes and the disturbing images. On the whole, I think he was right, although Clockwork did actually bother me.
Then again, a movie like Short Circuit 2, rated either PG or PG-13 if I recall correctly, featured this scene that literally had me in tears. The protagonist, a sentient robot, gets jumped in a back alley and endures the most disturbing beating I've seen on the silver screen, with a hammer to the eye thrown in for good measure. I was crying about that for hours after the movie, yet the various and more seminal images from The Exorcist didn't bother me nearly as much. Go figure.
The role of violence in our society intrigues me, to say the least. With the evolution of the video game market, games like Grand Theft Auto have established, or perfected, a new genre: the free-roaming thug simulator. Mercenaries takes the genre and applies it to war. Wholesale slaughter is discouraged in several ways: if you kill a civilian, you take a hit to your money supply; if you kill an Allied soldier, you get hit in the pocketbook AND endanger your standing with them; if you kill a member of another faction, your relationship with that faction suffers, leading to difficulties later in the game (and perhaps costing yet more money for bribes); if you kill one of your targets, the bounty for eliminating him is cut in half. The fact that you cannot carry infinite ammo is another type of discouragement, but one that adds challenge and realism to the game.
Having said that, there's plenty of carnage to go around.
Since the game is set in a relatively realistic mock-up of North Korea, the line between reality and fantasy is sometimes blurred. It's one thing to go on a killing spree on the streets of an imaginary San Andreas; it's another to do the same thing against a background plucked more directly from the world at large. In the end, though, it is a game, rated T for Teen.
Video game ratings are another beast altogether. They are a product of the politically correct era of the early 1990s that spawned such words as downsizing (as opposed to eliminated), or phrases such as otherwise-abled (as opposed to handicapped). The net effect of the rating system is a compromise between outright censorship, the need for a ready-to-hand system to see what little Johnny should or shouldn't be playing, and the general erosion of accountability in our society. The first point, censorship, is an idea that should be anathema to the principles upon which our forefathers crafted this nation, although in point of fact it seems that the powers that be do not believe that the American people are ready to face the realities of everyday life as depicted on the six o'clock news.
The second point is a half-hearted attempt to placate the powers that be on the part of the business persons (pc strikes again!) to show their consumers that they actually care about the moral and ethical development of little Johnny, where in reality they care more about income. There's nothing wrong with a business, an establishment that offers goods and services, being openly concerned about the bottom line, although that idea must be cloaked by advertising (literally turning people toward a product). With good advertising, the prospective consumer forgets about the company's ultimate wish to enrich itself and thinks solely about the product offered. The business of America is business, as Henry Ford said, not moral grounding. The rating system in place (E for Everyone, T for Teen, and M for Mature) isn't enforceable by law, nor do I think it should be. The ESRB seems to me like nothing more than good money thrown at a problem (the slow death of accountability) in an attempt to bribe it into nonexistence.
A young cousin of mine, younger than the idea of ratings on video games, was having a birthday party. His younger cousin on the distaff side wrote a message to the effect of 'hopefully you'll be getting more T-rated games'. While it's admirable that a seven-year old would pay heed to such things, perhaps this is evidence that the rating system has actually had an effect on the consumer base. For my part, I'm comfortable judging which games would be appropriate for a small child and I purchase them accordingly. As of right now, he's a very well-adjusted kid who has benefited from solid parental and familial influence, even mine.
But the third point, accountability, is the most disturbing to me. More and more often I see people blaming their actions on the various hurts and incidents that have occurred in their pasts. Take for example the Menendez brothers, who committed patricide. They walked because of the unspeakable things that happened to them at the hands of their father many years before. While I sympathize with what they had to endure, I find it hard to make the logical leap from having sympathy to condoning murder. When that decision was handed down, I realized that there was something very wrong with society as it exists today.
The idea that video games can contribute to horrendous acts committed in the real world seems to me to be a bullsh*t dump. Sure, it's possible for an impressionable young man or woman to perform the infamous spine rip from Mortal Kombat and then wish to do the same thing to a person who has done wrong to him/her, but there is a world of difference between wishes and actions. The person who acts upon such a wish has already the capability for committing heinous crimes, and all that the game does is give an admixture of imagination to something gone horribly wrong. Yet there are some who will blame the game for the act, and not the one who committed the crime. It is even possible that such blame will exonerate the perpetrator, although that is less likely. More likely is the possibility that the makers of the game in question will be sued. But who sues the parents that were asleep at the switch?
Video games are highly visible targets by their very nature, but this same demented thinking and illogic can be applied to many other things. If I wanted to, I'm sure I could blame some incident or three from my youth for any crimes I would happen to commit, but in the end, I realize that I am responsible for my actions, and although I may be the product of some questionable experiences, I have the company of six billion people in that regard. We are all products of our upbringing, our environments, and those things are no excuse. Sure, a hardened criminal may know no better than to live a life of crime, but is that person any less accountable for his actions? There is a world of difference between understanding the root and pardoning the action, and we seem to be forgetting that. That's too bad.