Walkthrough: videogames and technocultural form - Seth Giddings

epresentations of violence then are not so clearly embedded in the moral universes common to conventional
television or film narratives. Videogames rarely (though there are exceptions) present any consequences,
moral or otherwise, to acts of violence beyond those of reward and progression to the player. Videogame play
is frequently cited as a possible causal factor for actual acts of extreme violence by children and young
people, most famously (along with other commercial youth-oriented media, particularly popular music) in
the shooting of school students by classmates in Littleton, Colorado in 1999. In such cases the longer-
established ‘media effects’ assumption that (for children and young people in particular) the distinction
between the real world and media representations is sometimes dangerously thin is supercharged by
concerns specific to the nature of videogame scenarios and the modes of videogame play. The drive within
the videogame industry to develop more photorealistic or cinematographic imagery adds to this perception.
The games are so ‘realistic’ as to fatally collapse the players’ sense of difference between the virtual and the
actual world.
Widely quoted in press and television reports on the Columbine killings, the military psychologist Lt.
Col. David Grossman argues that, just as the videogame Doom was used by the US Marines as a training
simulator, so it 'trained' these disturbed adolescents to kill. In a New York Times article reprinted in The
Guardian, Paul Keegan discussed Grossman's views, concluding:
And that's what makes shooters [first-person shooters or FPSs] unlike any other form of media
violence we've seen before. You're not just watching a movie, you're in the movie. You're not
just empathising with Arnold Schwarzenegger as he blasts the bad guy to smithereens, you're
actually pulling the trigger (Keegan 2000: 3).
This then is an extreme form of realism - the interactive manipulation of pixellated icons of hyperbolic
violence mapped directly, unmediated, onto real world behaviour.
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