Just last week, friend of the blog Kris Ligman completed a three-part series of posts detailing the major problems with E3. In part 3, which you can read at Gameranx, she explains what she means when she says that E3 is a “technosexual military fetish orgy”:
From military research we arrived at the first computers, and from these emerged the first war games, thus creating a continuous narrative of combat and contest that stretches from Space War to Spec Ops: The Line. If the latter recapitulates the war gaming genre in a more critical light, it does so in the same ways that corporate marketing cynically adopts anti-corporate imagery. And for every The Line, there are a dozen Modern Warfares and Homefronts, all gleefully reproducing the tropes of warmongering military-funded Hollywood blockbusters. It’s to these we give our accolades, not whatever is the equivalent of a Hurt Locker or an Apocalypse Now. It’s to this kind of gory yet clinically disaffected, unrepentent violence that we stage a three-day summer fertility festival each year.
(That is just one paragraph; you should definitely read the whole thing.)
I was immediately reminded of this piece today when I read this article by Ryan Smith at Gameological pointing out that EA has partnered with a number of gun manufacturers for Medal of Honor: Warfighter:
But EA takes the realism factor further by allowing players to test out a photorealistic replica of, for example, the TAC-300 sniper rifle. Like the way the gun drops terrorists or racks up headshots in multiplayer? Feel free to visit Warfighter’s official website and click on a sponsored link that will take you to McMillan, the manufacturer of the gun. There you may purchase a real-life TAC-300 to your own specification (night-vision kit is optional!) and have it shipped to your local federally licensed gun dealer for pickup.
Looking at the partners page, there are spaces for sixteen total companies, with eleven currently revealed. Each space includes the company’s tagline, featuring delightful slogans such as “The Dead Center of Precision” and “Speed is Fine, Accuracy is Final,” just in case you thought these guns were just for the shooting range. The page also links to each blog post announcing the partnership and talking about the company and its products.
I am honestly at a loss for words except to say that this is disturbing.
Smith relates the story of how his nephew, a 13-year-old Call of Duty fan, got caught bringing a BB gun to school, and concludes:
I can’t say for certain whether or not my nephew would have brought a gun to school without the role of military video games, nor can I say if gun sales will increase because of Medal Of Honor: Warfighter. But if we want the vicarious thrills of violent video games to remain morally justifiable, we need to protect the fourth wall between the first-person shooter and real life. EA’s willingness to make a connection between a video game gun and an actual firearm is the strongest evidence yet that we’ve already let the wall crumble too much.
Yeah.
I’m not normally the kind of person who goes around insulting violent games for influencing people. But that’s because I normally draw a distinction between real life and games. I think for some people, that might be less distinct. And with something like this that practically removes any barrier between a violent depiction and enacting it in the real world, I get very uncomfortable.
I think at a minimum, this is tasteless. I’m more inclined to view it as “scary as shit” though.
I’m not certain, and I’m going to have to think for a while before I am, but I have a feeling that this might be what finally pushes me over the edge into boycotting EA. At the very least, I find this deeply disturbing.
I can’t say for certain whether or not my nephew would have brought a gun to school without the role of military video games
….Yeaaaaahhhhh…. my older brother brought a BB gun to school when he was in middle school, too, and the only game he’d ever played in his life was Super Mario.
So that’s a stretch. School shootings far predate the rise of the military shooter to dominance in the industry. EA’s move may be tasteless, but this is baseless speculation, pure and simple. Parents (and I suppose in this case uncles) are always reaching for something or someone to blame other than themselves.
Did you read the linked piece? He’s not trying to foist responsibility onto someone else. He’s talking specifically about how his nephew is obsessed with guns and the military BECAUSE of Call of Duty, and how things like war games are all part of the same culture of violence that does lead to school shootings and other kinds of violence every day.
As a kid, I was obsessed with castles because of Great Castles of Europe. I could name just about every major castle in several nations. My brother? Obsessed with ninjas, because of TMNT. Wanted his own throwing stars and nunchaku. It’s not surprising that this guy’s 13-year-old nephew is obsessed with guns because of Call of Duty. Kids love their entertainment media.
It’s the link between childish infatuation and violence where you lose me. Not only has the violent crime rate amongst youth continued to plummet, but gun violence is also much lower now during the years of the CoD series’ release than it was during the early and mid-90s. If CoD is causing children to shoot each other, it’s doing a piss poor job of it! …I’m sick to death of the “video games cause violence” trope – it’s old, it’s been debunked ad nauseum, and it reeks of trying to shoulder personal responsibility onto entertainment.
For example, parenting. Why are these parents letting their 13-year-old son play a game that says “18+” right on the box? That’s mother/father of the year right there. How could Activision have dared corrupt their precious little angel?
The argument isn’t video games cause violence. But video games do impact our overall culture, influencing the thoughts of everyone, not just children. If they didn’t, we wouldn’t bother criticizing sexism and other bigotry in games, like we do every day. The problem is that games like MOH fetishize war and are now being used to sell real guns, not guns for hunting but guns that soldiers use to kill people, blatantly linking in-game violence to real-world violence, violence that isn’t fun but takes lives and causes PTSD and other kinds of trauma, affects our culture, and not for the better.
I really don’t have the time or energy to rehash the entire complex argument–just read Kris Ligman’s piece.
The fact that EA wants to create a direct link between the real and virtual world is worrying. Their sales pitch is basically “Like shooting someone in game with a TAC-300? Buy the real thing!”. That is dangerous (and more than a little worrying). The debate around games and violence is going to be ongoing; pushing the real version of a virtual weapon takes away the argument that a game isn’t real and the distinction is clear. Obviously people know the difference, but if some kid shoots someone with a TAC-300 you now have a games publisher who encouraged players to pick up the weapon. That is a hole gaming will be hard pressed to crawl out of. The industry as a whole should dissuade EA from this promotion.
These games say “18+” and “for mature audiences only”. If someone’s “kid” shoots someone with a TAC-300, it means that a) someone purchased a game that explicitly states it is not for children for a child, that b) someone had the TAC-300 in their home in the first place (unless I’m mistaken and 13-year-olds can legally purchase assault weapons and generally have $3000 lying around with which to do so), c) left it and its ammunition unlocked and readily accessible to their child, and d) have raised an imbecile/sociopath who doesn’t understand the difference between killing people in real life and doing so in a game.
In other words, a hole the PARENTS should be hard pressed to crawl out of, not the gaming industry.
I’ll rephrase, “… but if someone shoots another with a TAC-300, you now have a games publisher who encouraged that player to pick up the weapon.”
It doesn’t matter if it’s some 13 year-old kid, a legal (but still young) 18 year-old adult, or someone in their 20′s or 30′s who can legally purchase the weapon. The fact that you have a sales pitch involving selling weapons based on how fun it was to shoot virtual people with one. This is something the games industry doesn’t need. From a purely PR perspective, it’s a ticking time bomb. What happens if someone shoots up a mall, and then it turns out they owned a copy of Warfighter and a TAC-300? Your one-time promotion designed to stir up controversy (especially in the months post-Aurora) could end up burying the industry for a decade.
As for people blaming the parents. I guarentee you no opponents of gaming will ever do so. Especially when they have a indisputable link between a games publisher and an arms retailer. As you said these games are marked 18+, and we’ll continue to say so when people try to link school shootings to violent games. We have really solid arguments against that link. What we don’t need is to give them something concrete as “Like shooting someone in multiplayer with that SMG? Buy the real thing!”. Regardless of who might be to blame, people will twist the truth to suit their ends and EA might be doing all the work for them.
The virtual space should be limited to the virtual space. No matter how realistic they might make it, it’s not real and any rational person knows that. There’s no reason to start merging the two in this way. Except that this is the first time I’ve discussed Warfighter and did something other than make fun of the name.
I won’t argue that Warfighter isn’t stupid and crass – it surely is – what with treating it like one of the many iterations of their sports games, only this time it’s NATO 2012 and the soldiers are your “teams” in one big ol’ arena with “just for fun” gunplay. Stay classy, EA.
But isn’t the bigger problem that these products are legally available for purchase in the first place? I’m not an American, so I couldn’t but the weapons promoted by Warfighter even if I wanted to, but as it stands they’re throwing the brand name behind a perfectly legal produce – just like CoD’s support of Mountain Dew. EA might be demonstrating zero class with this campaign, but they’re well within their rights to do so.
Isn’t that the problem?
Just because they have the right to do this, it doesn’t mean that it’s the right thing for them to do.
Pretty much everything covered on this blog is well within the rights of whatever games developer, publisher, journalist or player that we’re talking about. People have the right to make crass rape jokes during PvP matches. Writers have the right to write stories in which women only feature as objects and trophies. Doesn’t mean that they’re right in either case, and doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t want to call them out for the behaviour.
While you’re right that (many) guns are legal in the USA (and as an outsider, I also find American gun law and gun culture baffling and troublesome), I think it’s important to remember that guns are only legal for certain uses, and “shooting people in the head” is not one of them.
As an analogy, imagine that there was a puzzle game where you mixed various chemicals to create explosives or illegal drugs, which then told you where you could go and buy those chemicals. The chemical precursors are totally legal, but that wouldn’t make this a good idea in any way, shape or form.
I see the issue with guns as similar. The game portrays killing people and then essentially says “if you enjoyed killing these virtual people, here’s where you can buy the necessary equipment to do the same thing in real life”.
While this presumably stays on this side of the line when it comes to legality (I have next to no knowledge of law, and I presume that EA can afford countless lawyers to check these things), to me personally, it crosses the line of taste and decency.
At the very least, this sort of thing contributes to the perpetuation of US gun culture, which in turn perpetuates the laws you seem to be opposed to.
Minor note, MoH and similar are generally 17+ in the US (which is, unless I’m mistaken, where this promotion is taking place) rather than 18+. Such ratings are generally only used for pornography.
Sorry, my mistake. They’re 18+ where I live and I assumed it was the same. Is there a special cultural significance attached to 17 in the US? I thought 18 was age of majority, 21 was voting age.
In the US, 18 is voting age and majority, 21 is the drinking age.
17 is also the age to buy a ticket for an R-rated film, which I guess is where the ESRB got that number.
This is just sick. Those guys should be put on trial for corrupting minors.
Is this a serious comment? Is this hyperbole or do you really think EA should be criminally charged for making commodity tie-ins for a game that says 18+, mature audiences only? If so, what actual crime would they be charged with in the legal code?
I was not aware that it was 18+. And I was, at the point when I wrote this comment, too angry to go looking it up.
As for calling it sick, that is my honest opinion. One does not reward virtual killing and then links it with the sale of real weapons.
These games also perpetuate the hatred of stereotypes by constantly painting the enemy as “someone that needs killing”, without regard to the other sides politics. Thus you get lots of people wanting to shoot up ANYONE that happens to look like they are from the Arabic countries without regards to who they are. Why? Because they are the “bad guys”.
This has me worried. Does buying a game with the EA logo on it mean I’m indirectly sponsoring the military industry/military mindset? I’m now even less happy with the big EA logo on my new Bejeweled 3. I think it is good to have an alternative where you can “blow shit up” that doesn’t involve simulated weaponry and bloodshed and infinite shades of beige, but if that alternative is indirectly sponsoring a real version of that kind of ‘game’..
Yeah, I think my own feelings about this issue are more in this area. Definitely the issue of whether this could directly cause some real gun violence is very serious, but the mere fact of a company whose products I might otherwise enjoy having a real, direct connection to the arms industry is enough to… At least make me think seriously before buying anything they sell.
About 10 years ago I would’ve thought this was the awesomest thing ever. Then I learned how industry lobbies worked.
Frankly I’m a lot more disturbed that this is being marketed to vulnerable, easily influenced adults. Your typical 5-year-old is pretty good at smelling out bullshit and knowing when something’s just being done in good fun and they’re just playing with toy soldiers. But grown men who think they can do anything they want who’ve had their moral compass trained out of them over decades of being pressured into ridiculous notions of what it means to be a man, now trained to obsess over making huge investments of their (presumably) disposable income over means of violence? That can do a lot of damage – not so much “I play gun I kill people” but “I play gun I pay huge scads of hard-earned cash to prop up industry based on and with clear interest in perpetuating culture of violence, more people kill people”.
But as far as actual immediate effect… right now I see MoH potentially getting a huge boost in perceived legitimacy with this endorsement and in exchange possibly becoming a bit of a “gateway drug” into hobby gun collecting. I doubt it will ever be noticeably causally connected to a murder (short of, say, someone being stabbed or run over in a road rage incident on the way to pick up their gun), but it is another very visible drop in the bucket of institutionalized violence so old and established that I’m going to quote this bit from Chesterton’s Orthodoxy:
While this is a tasteless stunt by EA, the bigger issue is a parenting fail.
I played Doom and Mortal Kombat as a kid and watched Rated R horror movies since I was a teenager. I am not alone in that regard. My mom taught me right from wrong. Gaming is a fantasy.
The gaming industry does not need to a nanny state. Parents or guardians should be the ones held responsible.
I am shocked that a gaming site like this one would pander to anti-gaming perspective.
“Parenting” is absolutely NOT the “bigger issue.” The bigger issue is the military-industrial-entertainment complex. Read the links instead of having a knee-jerk reaction to seeing kids and Call of Duty mentioned in the same article: http://www.gameranx.com/features/id/8444/article/three-things-at-e3-that-need-to-stop-part-3-quit-perpetuating-a-legitimately-evil-empire/
No offense, but you can say that about consumerism as a whole. The Western world is indifferent and complacent.
Also, many marvels of current society have come from military applications.
My reaction is to the primary point of this article, which is trying to tie real violence to video game violence. If this was the case, we would have a massive rise in violence. This is a dangerous mindset.
EA is desperate to sell this game, and has taken a shameful approach to do it. If you talk to any soldier, they will tell you that COD and its ilk have no bearing on true combat.
I read the primary point of this BHB pice to be to point out a member of the gaming industry itself was trying to tie real violence to video game violence with this real-gun tie-in… along with everything you just said from “If this was the case” onwards.
Yes.
It is a systemic, cultural problem, and Warfighter is taking the problem to new extremes.
Second comment because I just saw some connections. The idea of guns in the wrong hands leads to paranoia, especially when the number of the wrong hands is unknown. Paranoia leads to increased gun sales where guns are legal or at least available. Using a video game as gun advertisement leads to people assuming someone will feel inspired to buy a gun and go on a killing spree, especially with enough media coverage, which leads to the afromentioned paranoia just fine, leading to gun sales. Given that the gun manufacturers may have been involved in sponsoring the game in the first place, it makes perfect sense.
If you see a flaw in this logic, please point it out. I do not want to be right with this one.
Chalk me up for a “Yeah.” response as well. Wow. The motivation, the timing, the implication — every manner of this arrangement seems off and wrong and bad and unsettling.
Unless you want to incite paranoia. The more afraid the people are the more guns they buy.
Really? Well, I am not gonna join troubled and worried on this one, nor do I agree with passivity and self awareness proposed by Ligman in her article, yeah that’s gonna be a big blow to the the military-industrial-entertainment complex. Nope, that is still perpetuating it, I admit I am guilty of this myself, I bought and played the hell out of Bf3, but not any more, I am uninstalling this shit. I’d jump on violent video games are evil and should be banned bandwagon then let this atrocity slide.
PS. And I am really tired of “parents” excuse by people who don’t know a thing, you can be a best parent in the world and still peer pressure of teens is stronger then parents influence.
How is blaming bad parenting an “excuse” when those games are not purchasable by minors, and said parent would have had to, quite literally, ignore a big red warning label on the box explicitly stating that the game was not suitable for their child, and buy the game for their child anyway?
Naw, that’s just shitty parenting. No two ways about it.
Tom Bramwell at Eurogamer provides a British perspective: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-08-14-the-medal-of-honor-tomahawk