Under the Influence

One trait of a game, according to Murray, is that a game is without consequence in the real world. Yet some of the most heated game discussions in academia focus on simulation and the boundaries of reality in games. We can learn from games, and that makes them appear dangerous to some and glorious to others, depending on the perspective and the experience.

America's Army--your training begins here.

Beyond the fun they provide, games also "transmit ideas and values," according to Frasca, who believes that this is what makes them attractive to groups that share "strong views...such as artists, political candidates, advertisers, Hezbollah, and the US Army." He sees games as having evolved to a "more respected communication genre," which allows us to go beyond explosions and car chases and into the realm of exploration of human nature. Again, the popularity of games like The Sims emphasizes this point.

Three decades transformed video games from singular tasks with barely identifiable characters to scripts with fully formed humans, complete with emotional motivations and lifelike reactions. But still, are they serious? "Dead serious," says Miller. "It's a huge industry, but outside of the academic community, I don't see how people can accept or understand it as anything but a role-playing-game theater."

Why do people worry about issues like violence in games if games are only role-playing theater? People who don't study, or at least observe games in a dedicated way, try to bridge consequences of the real world to game playing, particularly in the area of violence.

Murray says we can't dismiss these concerns. "I think that there are two fallacies. One fallacy is to assume that imaginative behavior is equal to behavior in the world. I think that's a really profound mistake," she says. "But then there's another mistake, which is not to take into account that in interactive environments, we don't just watch and identify and do things within our minds. We do take action in an imaginary world, but we are enacting something." Murray explains further how she is not a "dog-loving person," but after petting her virtual dog onscreen by moving her mouse in Petz, a pet simulation, she became more affectionate toward dogs after modeling this behavior. This is partially due to the fact that the pet simulation offers a "dramatically compressed experience," Murray says, "abstracted from the world of consequence, [which includes things] like dog poop."

Games can certainly inspire behavior and teach us, but this is not to say they make us violent. In some cases, though, such as in the game America's Army, perhaps inspiring behavior is just enough. "We, as a civilization, are only beginning to understand [that] games are not just vehicles for fun; they also communicate messages," says Frasca. "The military understands this very clearly. America's Army is not just about fun, but also [it is] about conveying a certain idea of how life is in the US Army."

Frasca says that no one expected Dean for Iowa to be the next Tetris and that addiction was not the main goal. "There is no such thing as an ideologically neutral video game. To different degrees, they all show a certain way of looking at the world. The Sims, for example, shows homosexuality as a normal lifestyle. However, it does have problems with showing nudity. Those little design details are communicating ideas, even if the designers are not aware of them."

Lowood's extensive background in the study of military simulation gives him an analytical eye for the current trend toward military-infused video games and the ever-growing military-entertainment complex. In essence, Lowood agrees with Frasca in that designers may not be aware of the subtle communication messages games are sending but notes that this is only one side of the issue. Frasca is approaching the issue from more of a critical media perspective, according to Lowood. "I'm more from a history of technology perspective," Lowood says. "I would look at it as not just the content, but possibly, maybe, the technology is not fully understood and that this technology is still being negotiated in many ways." Lowood explains that the people who create and play a technology negotiate what a game actually is. By negotiation, he means--as in The Sims, for example--it may be that a life sim has been created, but the people creating the game values of the people creating that technology "may or may not include things that actually happen in real life as part of that simulation." A political or gender issue, for example, may be left out, because the creator's notion of the technology may not include simulating those issues. Taking this even further, Lowood suggests that the inclusion or exclusion of such features could be a "purely technical" issue. "In America's Army," he notes, "[you] may recognize that cowardice is an issue on the battlefield, but the technology itself is not able to present that richly enough and with enough subtlety that it can be included in the game." So it's a technical decision, because games technically can't deal with representing emotions like that.