I have to admit to feeling a pang of guilt when, playing Resident Evil 4, I noticed that the zombies being slaughtered in that game were not some kind of random monsters, but otherwise helpless folk, living at the bottom of the social order, who happened to have become pawns in someone else's sick game. And yet, they were trying to kill me. Moral ambivalence. Existential angst. These are the ingredients of thoughtful horror.
We've been claming we want games that will force us to feel for some time; chasing the holy grail of the game that will finally make us cry. Well, here it is.
Whether your angst over the Resident Evil 5 trailer is induced by misplaced White Man's Guilt or genuine ambivalence toward simulated acts of violence perpetrated against those with whom you can identify or pity, the result is the same: You've felt something. If it's taken the images of realistic-looking villagers being slaughtered by a white male protagonist to cleave away the scar tissue layered over your heart through years of playing games in which a white male protagonist kills practically everything else imaginable, perhaps what the anti-game violence pundits have been saying for years was correct after all.
We've had our fingers plugged in our ears our whole lives, pretending not to hear the suggestion that violence in videogames can create real-life feelings of empathy or enmity. Perhaps now it's time to actually listen. Perhaps it's now time to actually consider the emotional weight of holding a gun in our hand and using it to put a bullet into another being.
Whether it's zombies, robots, aliens or Nazis, we've been committing genocide against virtual opponents for years and in most cases thinking little of it. And for good reasons, although whether or not we've ever stopped top think about it is questionable.
A zombie, after all, is an aberration of nature; an "other" to the extreme. By killing a zombie, we're doing the world a favor. The same with killer robots and aliens (who, buy definition are "alien"). Nazis, although human, are just as vile. Who doesn't hate Nazis? You may experience the sensation of a single salty tear squeezing out of your eye when you put a bullet in his brain, and he murmurs a soft, "Mein leben!" as he slumps to the floor, but really, it's either him or you, and you're not the one killing Jews.
But normal, otherwise pitiable people turned rotten against their will are a different story, and if a videogame featuring simulated violence against otherwise normal, pitiable human beings (albeit zombified) generates a hint of remorse, causing you to consider, if only for the briefest of instances, what the price of all this simulated violence may be after all, then I suggest it's about damn time.
Violence, like racism, is inevitable, and whether we like it or not, violence is occasionally the only means of resolving certain differences; the difference between my will to live and a zombie's desire to eat me, for example. But we should never allow the gravitas of wielding a weapon against a fellow being, putting bullets into his body to end his life, to be glossed over. If we play these games without giving any thought to the ramifications of our actions, simulated though they may be, we can hardly blame those who suggest they're only murder simulators, and we murderers in training.
For my part, I can honestly say a videogame has never explored this territory in such detail before, and I am ecstatic. Capcom - whether intentionally or through a happy accident of catastrophic proportions - looks to have constructed a scenario ripe for exploration of man's place in this world, and the intestinal fortitude of the player. I, for one, look forward to the experience.
