I just played the most off-putting online video game. You play as a devilish “Little Deviant” with an xD emoticon for a face, and you wander through a dark cityscape populated by frightened-looking “Sheeple.” Because these Sheeple have been labeled “conformist” by the narrator, who sounds like Vincent Price, you are encouraged to murder, eviscerate and generally make life unpleasant for these pacifist pedestrians.
Some you simply kill in cold blood, others you skin in order to “customize” your appearance with their epidermis, and the rest you force to donate their green blood to fuel an auto factory.
The game is an advertisement for the Toyota Scion xD, and its dark nature is likely an intentional bid for controversy, because any publicity is good publicity, and the vehicle is being marketed to edgy young adults. But what struck me about the Book of Deviants game was that this is what people who hate and criticize video games think that video games are: Violence without context in a virtual world void of morality.
The first time I saw a video game through the eyes of someone who doesn’t understand them was in Gus Van Sant’s 2003 film Elephant. This was a movie about a Columbine-like high-school shooting, and one scene featured the film’s two eventual killers playing a video game. Unsurprisingly, no existing game publisher wanted to authorize the use of one of their titles in this context, so the game that appeared in the film was a low-tech, generic first-person shooter, created specifically for the scene, in which the player ran around a blank, white environment, shooting unarmed loiterers. To a gamer, the mock-up was absurd, even laughable for the essential gaming components that it omitted, but then I realized that this was the sort of pointless exercise in violence that my parents saw every time they looked at a video game. At a glance, this is what games seem to be about.
But this isn’t the case at all, and I should know, having played most of the games released in the last four years. The vast majority put you in the role of the hero. Typically you encounter characters with problems and selflessly solve them, and sometimes this requires violence and some admittedly shocking body counts. But this violence is always committed against aggressive villains, hideous monsters or lifeless robots. Even in games that thrust you into the role of a bad guy, you’re always fighting worse guys.
The character designs of the Little Deviants remind me of an Xbox and PlayStation 2 game called The Suffering, which features similar impish monsters with blade-like appendages. Of course, in that game, the creatures are the bad guys, but your avatar isn’t such a good guy himself. Players assume the role of a convicted murderer in a game that raises (or lowers, depending on your tastes) the bar for video-game gore and profanity. But throughout the story, players are faced with moral decisions. They can protect other inmates and correctional officers (a formidable task), or they can shoot them in cold blood (which is as challenging as tic-tac-toe). The more challenging route leads to the better ending. So even an exceptionally edgy game like The Suffering offers incentives to be good and consequences for being bad.
Having an option to be bad at all is a novel idea in video games and is almost exclusively tied to mature-rated titles. In The Legend of Zelda, a series of generally E (for Everyone)-rated video games, players aren’t even capable of drawing their swords when they’re in the presence of the innocent. In the homes and shops of the quaint folk of Hyrule, your “attack” button suddenly becomes your “talk” button. You can only fight when faced with a villain out on the battlefield, so you have no choice but to be heroic. In contrast, a similar but M (for Mature)-rated fantasy adventure game called Fable allows players to kill almost anyone they come across, but that game makes a point to give players as much freedom as they would have in real life, and in some cases even more freedom (gay marriage is accepted in the land of Albion). If you choose to slaughter NPCs (nonplayable characters) indiscriminately, you’ll eventually sprout horns from your demonic head, and villagers will flee from you in fear. But if you choose a righteous path, NPCs will respect, applaud and even fall in love with you, making it easier to gather information about profitable side quests and enjoy multiple other benefits. So even though the player can behave in an amoral fashion, he’s still doing so in a world based around moral rules—rules that when followed will reward privileges and when broken will deal punishments. But in Book of Deviants, the only discernible reward is in getting to create Toyota Scions, and to achieve this, you must prey on the innocent.
Consider another car-related series of games, the Grand Theft Auto franchise, which is the present whipping boy of video-game controversy. Now, let’s apply the rules of this allegedly amoral game to the sixth and most violent level in BoD. You get out of your car, approach one of the pedestrian Sheeple in the park and launch an unprovoked attack. Under GTA rules, this Sheeple might run away but is just as likely to fight back, chipping away at your health bar (if you had one, which in Level 6 of BoD you don’t). In fact, occasionally, the Sheeple might even retaliate with a weapon greater than your own, in which case you could be forced to run away yourself. But supposing you manage to kill the innocent bystander, you would then notice a flashing yellow star in the upper left-hand corner of your screen, indicating your Wanted Status. Any nearby police will now approach to brain you with their nightsticks. But there are five more Sheeple to kill. Once you’ve finished all the Sheeple in the vicinity, you can count on a four-star Wanted Level, at which point a virtually inescapable police chopper will make short work of you with heavy gunfire. The lesson here? Stick to the game objectives and don’t mess with innocent pedestrians or there will be consequences. There are no such consequences to discourage senseless violence in BoD. Senseless violence is the point.
But despite the claims of video-game opponents, this brand of senseless violence is all but nonexistent in the world of interactive entertainment. And those few controversial games that allow players to commit a handful of atrocities before the consequences kick in are rated M, intended for an audience mature enough to choose whether or not to perform such acts. And for the sake of argument, let’s say—God forbid—a child got his hands on one of these games. What other child’s plaything regulates itself with moral incentives? When I was a kid, I couldn’t afford video games, but my handful of G.I. Joes could do and did whatever horrible thing my warped young mind could imagine. When a parent wasn’t within earshot to stop me, I could wage wars with violence the likes of which I’ve never seen in a video game.
Even in the most violent video games, the point is not to satisfy any kind of latent homicidal urges with the simple press of a button. The point is to challenge oneself, to skillfully ascend to the next level and ultimately, to beat the game. Book of Deviants’ insultingly simple point-and-click game play is sadistic, but worse, it’s entirely without challenge. Unlike in most video games, you commit murder without opposition or consequence. It doesn’t offend me as a moral person so much as it offends me as a gamer.
Matthew Scott Hunter is a local freelance writer. He covers video games for LasVegasWeekly.com.