By Nelson Schneider - 04/13/14 at 04:29 PM CT
What gamer hasn’t been looked at askance by their elders, perceived to be some kind of ticking timebomb of violent rage just waiting to erupt and destroy the idyllic 1950s lifestyle America has come to worship in perpetuity?
The bad news is, among those who hold this view of gamers, little is likely to change, as “change” itself is a dirty word to these people.
The good news is that researchers in the UK have finally discovered the one true source of all videogame related violence.
“What is this source?” you might ask. Is it blood and gore? Is it first-person immersive violence that places the player directly in the role of perpetrator? Is it unbridled gunplay?
No, as it turns out the source of videogame-related violence is incompetence and failure. The study that discovered the source took two different games, the decidedly violent and gory FPS “Half-Life” and the decidedly peaceful and meditative puzzler “Tetris,” and applied different hacks/mods to the games in order to change how they work, such as removing the visual violence from “Half-Life” or giving “Tetris” a nonsensical control scheme. The study also provided two versions of each scenario for its test subjects, one which provided a tutorial and another which threw the subjects into the game to figure things out on their own.
In all of the test scenarios, the researchers discovered that the presence or absence of graphic violence and/or gore did nothing to affect the test subjects’ anger and aggression levels. Instead, it was the scenarios that were frustrating, unintuitive, and that set up the subjects for failure which drove an increase in rage.
Now that science has fingered incompetence and failure as the source of gamer rage, hindsight can paint all kinds of gaming scenarios – past and present – in a more revealing light. Was playing “Goldeneye 64” a cause for violence among people from my age bracket when we were in high school and college? Yes, but not because of the violence taking place on screen or friends participating in the act of symbolically shooting each other to death, but because of screen-looking cheaters and uneven levels of experience among the participants. Is “Call of Duty” the modern equivalent of a Gaming Al-Qaeda, training a new generation to rage against each other? Yes, but, again, not because of the acts of violence taking place within the game, but because of the vast skill disparity between a ‘n00b’ joining an online session for the first time and the #1 Ranked Leaderboard Whore who plays the game 16 hours a day and can snipe an opponent from across the map without taking two seconds to aim. Is the ‘Souls’ trilogy (“Demon’s Souls,” “Dark Souls,” and “Dark Souls II”) leading players down a path of depression and psychosis? Yes, but not because of the superficial imagery of demon worship and necromancy, but because the franchise is based entirely upon frustrating players with trial-and-error gameplay and never explaining any of its rules or mechanics.
Without the need of a scientific study, my decades of gaming experience have taught me that scenarios like the ones I just described make me feel unhappy and I avoid them as much as possible. But even with my aversion to this style of game, I have managed to run into rage-building scenarios in completely unexpected places. Case in point: The last time I became so enraged with a game that I stormed out of the room, pulse pounding and teeth grinding, it wasn’t an online game, it wasn’t a grimdark realistic game, and it wasn’t a particularly violent game: It was “WiiSports’” take on boxing. My inability to make my on-screen counterpart throw right hooks or power attacks left me with nothing but an arsenal of weak, left-handed jabs… thus preventing me from succeeding against even the easiest opponents. The fact that I was unable to figure out what, exactly, I was doing wrong and correct it left me feeling helpless and foolish in the face of what was supposed to be a fun activity. I haven’t played “WiiSports” since that day, all because – despite the fuming indignity that comes across in my articles – I don’t enjoy being angry.
It is unfortunate that the Golden Mean (also known as the Happy Medium) has been lost. Where once we had games with meaningful instruction manuals and/or brief and succinct tutorials, we now either have games that purposefully leave the player completely in a lurch (“For FUN!” scream the fans of “Dwarf Fortress” and the ‘Souls’ franchise) or bore players to death with 15-hour pre-school-level tutorials that are unskippable.
At least we now have unassailable evidence (at least until another study comes along) that gamers are not all easily-influenced potato-brains who see something on screen and are then compelled to replicate it in the real world. If winning and losing are the strongest influences on human behavior, the modern era’s worldwide obsession with sports – and the ‘fans’ who mentally/spiritually/physically associate themselves with teams they have NEVER met or played with – seems to be a far greater danger to society and individuals than videogames. Just look at the all-too-common instances of soccer hooliganism and psychotic parents at children’s sporting events. At least we gamers can rest easy that, going forward, any institution that wants to attack our hobby legitimately will first have to dismantle a sporting industry that has become a religion. The archetypal nerd hobby being inadvertently protected by the archetypal bro hobby is almost too ironic…
Comments
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 04/20/14 at 02:11 PM CT
Yes, GameFAQs is the digital-era equivalent of the Red Cross.
Chris Kavan - wrote on 04/19/14 at 04:44 PM CT
So you're telling me Ghosts and Goblins had a much more detrimental effect on me than the Grand Theft Auto Series? No wonder I threw so many more Nintendo controllers in my day - because (even with instructions) those games were meant to make you suffer. I guess you can also say GameFaqs is saving lives by providing solutions to more problematic issues.
