In a piece published this week, Rolling Stone issued one of the more ridiculous headlines of recent memory:
Rolling Stone later changed the title to “GDC Panel: Video Games Depictions’ ’90 Times’ More Violent Than Actual War,” but the essential point was unchanged: that video games, because they focus on the killing in war rather than offer a more complete depiction of what soldiers do in addition to killing, are doing a disservice.
Rolling Stone was covering a panel discussion called “Depiction of War in Games: Can You Do Better?” when it spoke to Andrew Barron, director of design for Bohemia Interactive Simulations, who served in Afghanistan in 2010 for seven months. Barron stated, “In general, I’d say people have a deep appreciation for the military, but a very shallow understanding of what the military does and war itself.”
Barron asserted that video games that focused on combat, excluding the routine jobs the military undertakes, are similar to writing a movie about relationships solely about sex. He said that focusing on “hero s**t” ignores the routine jobs of the military involving “hundreds of tasks — not just shooting.” Thus he posited that games about war need “less killing … more war,” adding, “I think in general, video games are much, much more violent than military operations or military simulations. And I mean, orders of magnitudes more violent.”
Barron outlined a typical scenario in video games in which a lone soldier wipes out a group of enemies, pointing out that in a normal real-life scenario, the military attacks with three times the number of attackers. He said, “Essentially that level, you would be having the player doing the killing that would normally be done by 90 soldiers in real life. In other words, you could say that level would be 90 times more violent than a military simulation.”
Barron noted the “hundreds and hundreds” of tasks soldiers must anticipate, such as convoys using turn signals to indicate when an upcoming turn is coming to vehicles trailing them.
Well, that’s exciting.
Barron concluded that if combat is to be shown in video games, it should be dangerous, “not a cartoon.”