Exploring Misandry in Video Games: Part 1

Trigger warning for a description of (video game) violence.

A thank you to Hugh Ristik in the comment section of my last piece for inspiring this.

I have actually managed to find a positive in the whole Duke Nukem thing: at least in DN you’re gunning down aliens and not your fellow man; that’s something FPS games (First Person Shooters) were all about at one point.

Looking over the history of video games, these days one does seem to get a strong sense that they are feeding into the myth in our society of men as expendable.  I’ve never been a big fan of RTS (Real Time Strategy) games for that very reason — having to create a barracks to house your recruits, only to then send them off to die, sometimes only to advance a few yards up the game map.

When games were in their infancy back in the 80s and 90s, and graphics made everything look, well, like a game, there was a barrier between you the player and what was going on, on screen. You weren’t shooting a man, you were shooting a cartoon-like graphical representation of a man, there was some degree of distancing. So you could merrily mow down enemies in a game like Wolfenstein 3D and not feel anything, because it really was just a game.

As games have gotten more sophisticated however, with the advent of motion capture and HD graphics making games seem more real than ever — especially in the areas of facial expression — this barrier has all but been removed.  These days there’s not much to distinguish the soldier you kill in game, who might look exactly like the guy you might have seen walking down the street with his family.

We’ve had to find a way of coping, to get that distancing effect back; the easiest way to do that is to dehumanise that character (who is almost always exclusively male), a tactic the actual military uses to effectively train recruits. What I’m saying is I worry we’re training ourselves not to notice and not to care about all the punishment we dish out in games as long as the charicter is male.

The relentless drive towards realism has given us amazingly realistic 3D environments and what do we use them for? Well, to kill young men in a variety of visceral and often gruesome ways, and the technology to do this is always improving — just this year we’ll see Modern Warfare 3, Battle Field 3, Dust 501, Ghost Recon online and Farcry 3.

I guess you could say these new ultra-modern FPS’s can be useful in teaching young men some very harsh truths about the nature of war. A game that illustrates this perfectly is the first Modern Warfare game, which actually had the guts to kill off one of its main protagonists in a nuclear explosion. I still remember playing the game in college and the shock I experienced on reaching that scene. I remember watching open-mouthed as the young US Marine Corps recruit I’d been playing as for at least a good quarter of the game dropped to his knees, as radioactive dust particles whipped around and him, coughing and spluttering out his last breath miles away from home, before succumbing to radiation poisoning. No saves, no continues, no extra lives, no going back to the start of the level and doing things differently* but death — a very real possibility for many young men who join up to serve their country. But this is the exception rather than the rule.

I don’t want this piece to be seen as an attack on violent video games, and let me assure everyone that I am fiercely anti-censorship. I’ve been consuming violent media all my life, and it’s had no detrimental effects on my psyche. I just feel that there’s a lot of stuff that needs unpacking about video gaming culture, and men’s place within it. I will be returning to this subject, maybe not right now, but some time in the future. For now I hope this serves as a primer for things to come.

*A couple of my friends actually tried this.