Death in Video Games
While I was growing up, my mother would always watch me play video games. Even at a young age, I was exposed to various games that had violent content. I would slay hordes of enemies as my mother would watch in concern about my activity. She would often tell me that I needed to stop playing those violent games. To me they were just fun, but I never truly understood why she would ask me to stop. Now, many years later I have come to realize what she was getting at, that death is a horrible thing. At a young age, we do not truly understand what death really is. Then comes that fateful day when we realize that we are mortal, that our every action could be our last, and that death is permanent. This is not a happy fact, but I write this in hopes that my readers have already discovered this.
Death in video games has developed greatly over the years. Graphics have improved, leading to new and horrifying ways to die. I would place examples but quite frankly, there are just too many. Yet, how do these deaths compare to death in real life? Do they hold the weight of reality with them? Do these deaths make people feel the way they should, as if they had just witnessed them? The sad answer to these questions is no. The reason being is the elimination of death. Yes, the main character may suffer a horrible riddling of bullets but in the end they are only “dead” until the player pushes the continue button, then voila! The character comes back to life as if nothing had ever happened. If only life were that simple. If that was truly death then that character would be gone. The game would be over. The bad guys would win. That is not the case though. It is merely a means of punishment. It is a slap on the wrist and does not truly hold the gravity of death.
It is obvious that nobody in modern day gaming is going to buy a game where you have to restart every time you die. Instead, game developers try to insert death elsewhere. Some games succeed, while others fail horribly. I will give an example of both. The good example being the ever lasting memory of Aeris from Final Fantasy VII. I along with many other gaming writers have beaten this example to death, and for good reason. It is the first true example of a powerful death in a video game. Hours into the game you view a cut scene where Aeris is praying at a temple. Just as the hero of the story arrives to save her, the villain plunges from the ceiling driving his sword through her heart. The following sequence of dialogue brings a tear to the eye as the player witnesses her last words. This is an amazing example of just how much power video games can actually hold. As game developers continue with bigger and better stories, we should expect to see more tear jerking moments just as we are seeing further involvement in plot and story.
The bad example, and I hate to say it, but Halo Reach’s Noble Squad. Everyone who knew the Halo series, knew the planet of Reach and its fate. After a full scale planetary invasion, the planet is glassed from orbit by the alien race of The Covenant. The burning question was how each of the noble team members were going to meet their fate. High above the planet your character, Noble 6, along with the spartan demolitions expert Jorge sat with a bomb ready to take out one the enemy Covenant’s space ship. The catch came when the bomb was damaged and had to be manually detonated. Jorge was the only one who could do this. So he gave Noble 6 his dog tag and threw him out of the ship. As Noble 6 plummeted to earth you watch as the ship exploded taking Jorge and the Covenant Capital ship alike. This moment was meant to be Jorge’s symbolic moment of ultimate sacrifice. He gave his life for his planet yet there was no true emotion in this scene. This emptiness in Jorge’s death was also present in the passing of each of the members of the Noble squad. If Bungie, the creators of Halo, wanted the player to feel something, than they failed at portraying death as an event filled with loss and pain. It was the mentality that they were soldiers. Oh well, is what was felt at their passing.
What is perhaps the biggest disconnect comes with the most played aspect of video games, multiplayer. Players have spent countless hours slaying their friends and foes alike. It has literally made killing a game. The goal is to see how many kills someone can rack up. I remember my senior year English teacher over hearing my conversation about playing Modern Warfare 2. She heard my comment on my kill to death ratio and said, “You should feel something when you take another’s life.” and quite frankly, she’s right. However, video games are a way to have fun without being tied down to reality. So this escape into arena styled game play is a means of competition pure and simple. Multiplayer cannot be viewed as critically as a story component. The “people” giving their lives in the game do not exist or feel. They are merely computer animations created for the purpose of simulation.
Now before this becomes a hate speech against the thing I have to come to make my hobby, I would like to offer a perspective. Death in video games has become common place but we as gamers have to separate the game from reality and realize the actions we are performing. Death is nothing to be taken lightly. Here is the main distinction though, video games are games. They are simulations meant to pull us out of our daily lives and put us behind the guise of someone else. So it is okay to play these titles with the focus of putting a long day in the dust.
Before I leave you to your contemplation, I would like to present you with a statistic to think about. It is a very large number that holds a lot more meaning than the gaming community has taken it for. If you were to look at this number from the eyes of a non-gaming person it might bring a certain level of disgust. To the people who play this game is viewed as a mile-stone. This number only proves our blindness as a video game community. As I present this, I hope you will take this to heart. Do not put down your controller and quit gaming altogether. You should instead go back and play the campaign and take notice of what this game presents death as, a moment of truth that we all must face. It is horrifying but at the same times gives us a reason to live our lives. That number is the current number of times that the Call of Duty: Black Ops community has killed the entire world population: 6.7 times. This number climbs everyday and it is only one number, for one game, in the incalculable number of video game simulated deaths.
After all these years my mother was right in a way. Death is a powerful thing, never to be pushed aside. Films and literature use death as a device for emotion. When someone important dies the viewer is disheartened at their passing. It is meant for us to cry, think, and reflect. Sadly games are drifting away from this and we cannot let that happen. Consider the people who you have lost in your life. Think of what their death meant to you and hopefully the next time you play a game where the main character experiences loss, you can shed a tear or have a heavy heart towards their pain. Video games are an escape from real life. That does not mean we should be devoid of the emotions we have. Instead, we should experience video games just as we cry from watching characters in a movie pass or read about the death of our favorite protagonist in a book.
