On Madness and Pixel-and-Code Men

As this is a gaming blog and not a political one, we don't often discuss politics here. However, I felt that this time, we could make an exception.

Anyone who has been following the news lately will know of the current military crisis occurring in the Gaza Strip between Israel and Hamas. Now, I do not wish to discuss which party is right or wrong here. However, regardless of who I believe is right or wrong, or even if I believe there can be a right or wrong in this situation, I couldn’t help but feel disgusted at both sides involved in the conflict. Even with Israel “mulling” over the possibility of a 48 hour ceasefire, I am shocked at the Israeli official who earlier declared that Israel “would fight to the bitter end,” at the Israeli citizens who felt that their government was not being heavy-handed enough against Hamas, and at the Hamas vow to avenge the more than 300 Palestinians killed by Israeli ordnance. Their entire cosmology seems to be one of absolutes – some delusional world of black and white.

What I find troubling is not the sense of justification and blamelessness that both sides seem to embrace. Instead, it is their inability to see the humanity that lies behind the rockets and the F-16s, the insurgent’s scarf and the Israeli tank. Members of both sides seem to hold the illusion that Hamas insurgents are born with bombs strapped to their chests, and that Israeli soldiers develop with fighter jets and assault vehicles en-utero. They forget that every rocket is a cry of protest and for help against the treatment of the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip, and that the scream of jet fighters overhead is the echo of a voice of an Israeli citizen or child forever silenced.

What shocks me even more, however, is the ability of the current conflict to shock me out of my usual apathy. Those of you who know me know that I am, in no way, a bleeding heart utopian advocating some fantastical notion of world peace. I am one who sees humans as naturally predatory creatures whose only sources of true competition and danger are each other, and I believe that this should not be shunned but embraced. I am one who is not troubled by the concept of war, not even one motivated purely by expansion or a desire for resources. I grant that this worldview is the result of my existence as an American, fortunate enough to have been born into the most powerful and prosperous country in the world, and that my stance might very well be different if I were born in, say, Israel or Korea or Africa. I am a privileged person, part of the global ruling elite, and my views are a product of that. However, removed elitism and madness are two different and disproportionate evils, and the blind demonization of Hamas militants by Israeli officials and citizens or of Israeli soldiers by the extremist Muslims is the latter of the two.

This makes me wonder if demonization is necessary for combatants to partake in combat. In video games, and particularly in shooters, there is an unquestionable tendency to demonize the party or group that is in opposition to the player. The common trend is to reduce the player’s enemies to inhumanity behind overriding personas of “Mercenary” or “Nazi,” or “Red Team” or “Blue Team,” or to even remove the human aspect altogether using robots, aliens, true demons, or other sorts of intrinsically inhuman characters. The Call of Duty series, especially its most recent installment, is a notable exception to this. Activision’s commercial for World at War is narrated by a Japanese soldier who states his motive as the defense of his homeland – a commendable motive that can be appreciated even by elitist assholes like myself. The game’s single-player campaign builds upon this, using the brutalization of German soldiers at the hands of the Soviets to call into question the true motives behind some of the player’s allies, including the man who has stood by him since saving his life in Stalingrad. However, even these attempts stop short of showing the true humanity of the opposing force. The human is lost behind a high-resolution façade of Swastika and banzai charges. Ultimately, you are left fighting the usual Nazis and an interesting and new but ultimately equally inhuman Japanese infantrymen.

I can remember only one kill that I found to be truly difficult and jarring. It was the first soldier I killed in Goldeneye 007, the first shooter I ever played. Since then, I have mowed down millions of polygon men regretting little more than perhaps wasting more ammo than was necessary. RPGs like Fallout 3, to be fair, presented scenarios that have made pulling the trigger difficult. However, these do not strike me as being as poignant as shooters. For every potential murder in an RPG, there is the possibility of sparing the person’s life and playing the game a different way. Even when pursuing the evil path, I found it too easy to avoid the most difficult and sadistic tasks by simply slaughtering a town of rifle-toting do-gooders. Shooters, due to their linear nature, do not offer such a multiplicity of possibilities, and as such may offer much more jarring and poignant moral dilemmas to the player in preventing him from avoiding to make the undesirable choice. In Goldeneye, I could either kill the guard, or blow the mission. I killed the guard, and stood over his corpse with jaw ajar and PP7 smoking. I wish to stand there again, staring from the edge of morality into the maddening abyss of necessity, and to see with innocent eyes the humanity of a faceless guard and yet be demanded to pull the trigger. Only then will the pixel-and-code mask be pulled away to reveal the true human hidden underneath, who is too often forgotten in the world of reality.

- Mike