Simulated Reality and Telling the Difference

Violence is too prevalent in reality to assume that kids who play video games get their inspiration for school shootings from the first-person shooters they enjoy. With the recent shootings at Va. Tech, it is hard for the public to examine the nature of the shootings subjectively as they would rather generalize one kid's problems so as to find a scapegoat and perhaps prevent future massacres. While this is of course a good idea, attacking simulations of reality is not the failsafe solution. Recently I was watching an interview with Quentin Tarantino on his film Kill Bill. http://youtube.com/watch?v=NYu6fpaNrBA The interviewer asked him what his response was to critics who claimed that his movies had no message but simply glorified violence. He responded that "cool" parents should take their twelve year olds to see it because it was highly entertaining. The interviewer became upset and claimed that twelve year olds could not tell the difference between films and reality. Being a seventh-grader myself once, I remember being perfectly able to tell the difference between deaths and violence in films and that in real-life. Both affected me, but I remember always being more impacted by real-life occurrences of car crashes, shootings and Columbine versus The Matrix. This interview also reminds me of the first Gamer Theory chapter that explains coming out of "The Cave" arcade and having a hard time adjusting to the reality of the shapes you see outside versus the shadows in the game that you are used to. I do not think that it is the ability to distinguish the two (reality and simulations) that kids lose (or do not have) because, like Kristina said last week, there is a difference between aggressive behavior and aggressive play and kids can tell the difference.

People who play aggressively in controlled environments are aware of the fact that the actions they take in simulations have no affect on the outside world, besides perhaps their own frustration and anger rising. To reiterate another of Kristina's points, having the control over the environment leads one to think that video games would be more of a release rather than an expression of violent tendencies. Being able to power off the game, save the game and rest, pause the game to look up the cheat codes, these actions help to detach the player from the alternate reality he or she may be trying to immerse themselves in. They are no longer squinting when they emerge from "The Cave" but rather frame the game in their computer or television screen, giving that simulation a completely different meaning in which the lines are not blurred between reality and fantasy.

Penny argues in his article that simulated play is in fact a learning tool for how humans behave in the real world. While this is true, especially in cases like flight simulators and even army-training simulators, people do not lose the distinction between killing someone on screen and killing them in real-life. Just because the actions are simulated and those that play these types of games learn how to kill people, it does not mean that players then lose their moral sense of right and wrong and that they immediately enact what they learn in simulation. Perhaps then video games do teach kids and adults how to be violent, but the fact that they turn these simulations into real-life situations is not indicative of video games advocation for violence. It illustrates rather their tendency to be violent in real-life and their choice to apply what they have learned in simulations to real-life situations where it is not necessary at all (such as high-school revenge versus defending oneself on a real battlefield).

I think this point can be stretched further in response to that first chapter in GamerTheory which asserts that all of life has become a game of sorts where people now work and consume in order to "win." Perhaps consumer culture has become a sort of game, but treating all of life as if the money and family and lives that hang in the balance during war as if they were simply pawns you manipulate to reach an ultimate goal is not entirely correct. As stated above, the difference between games and reality are the real-life consequences. People who would treat life as a game they could win might often lose everything in that quest, and although one must take risks in life, they are certainly better calculated and involve different outcomes that may not always lead to an ideal "winning" lifestyle. I think that having that simulated reality where one controls everything is more correct than assuming that all of life has become a game and that video games have become the inspiration for such a change. If anything, life has become so meaningless for so many Americans wrapped up in consumer culture that escape through simulations and cinema, with their glorification of violence, sex, drugs, romance, is one of the few ways that Americans feel happy.