The Philippine Online Chronicles

One of the main draws of playing video games is the medium’s ability to take the player into a different universe, to allow them to manipulate and interact with a space completely different from their own mundane existence. For years, games like Super Mario Bros., Contra, and Street Fighter filled that role just fine. As technology grew more sophisticated, however, developers began to push the envelope and began making games more involving, more interactive, more “real.” And gamers responded with gusto. But what sort of alternate reality are game publishers pushing? What about these games makes their version of reality so appealing? Most importantly, what effect does it have on players only beginning to realize how actual reality works?

If you’ve been playing video games at all in the past four to five years, you probably recognize titles like Crysis, which boasts hyper-realistic graphics and a realistic physics engine; the Metal Gear Solid series, featuring enemies that discover bodies and limbs that can get broken or injured in combat; and the Grand Theft Auto series, where the player has access to an area populated with computer-controlled people, police chases, and restaurants that the character must patronize in order to maintain his health. All of these games are only realistic in the sense that they’re influenced by reality, and were hugely successful because while maintaining a realistic environment for the gamer, they still allowed players to live out their fantasies of taking out terrorist cells, infiltrating top-secret military organizations, and running from helicopters and SWAT teams in a huge chase through a metropolitan area.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, we have games like Katamari Damacy, which involves rolling up a big ball of everything from paperclips to rainbows, with the goal of creating a brand new planet for the King of All Cosmos; Loco Roco, where you rotate the game world to collect little yellow blobs in order to become a big yellow blob; and Plants Vs. Zombies, where the player raises a garden in order to fight off a horde of the undead. Brightly-colored, silly, and sometimes nonsensical, these games provided whole new universes with their own crazy sets of rules, and were not at all “realistic.” Yet they still received rave reviews. What gives? Do gamers want gritty realism or fantastic worlds of wonder and enchantment?

The truth is that it’s both. Gamers love getting lost in different worlds when they feel that a world is “real” – whether it be by looking as much as possible like the gamer’s own “real world” or by making a player vulnerable to the game world’s little quirks and requirements – but they still need an element of fantasy to keep it interesting. Crysis balances the two by looking impossibly realistic while letting aspiring super-soldiers blow up tanks and perform superhuman feats of strength and speed, and Katamari Damacy’s reality is shown in its citizens running away from the giant ball of junk threatening to roll them up into its depths. A certain connection between game and player needs to be formed, whether with the player’s competitive spirit or with their funny bone, and video game developers seem to be hitting their mark. But with all of the incredibly realistic fantasy worlds available comes the risk of gamers losing themselves in the digital universe, and the possibility of young, impressionable minds trivializing the consequences of real-life occurrences of events often seen in video games.

When buying a new video game, many people look at its features: single-player or multiplayer, what kind of game it is, how well it will play on the user’s computer, how much potential replay value it has. But what many people tend to overlook is the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) rating, which is a good guide for determining which age bracket the game is catering to. Is the game listed as Teen (T), Mature (M), or Adults Only (AO)? There’s a good chance it will be at least moderately violent, featuring situations that no person in real life would want themselves in, while providing a suitable fantasy world for gamers of the appropriate age to interact with. Yet many people buying video games are not made aware of this rating, and such games often make their way into the consoles of younger, more impressionable minds. Without supervision and guidance, there is a good chance that these younger gamers may begin to trivialize violence, and not realize the true repercussions of in-game actions if the events were to happen in the “real world.”

I am in no way advocating further censorship of videogames; what I am advocating is proper guidance for gamers who need to be reminded that what happens in a game is far different from what happens in the real world. I’m advocating more quality time spent with children while they play video games, which nearly all of today’s kids do. I’m stressing the need for people to remember the difference between their game and their “real life,” and to help remind others of this fact. For while today’s videogames may look and sound more realistic than ever, Contra, a game released over 20 years ago, already gave gamers a heady dose of reality: one shot can kill. And unlike the Contra heroes’ three (or 30, depending on your geek cred) lives, we mere mortals have only the one, and there’s a lot more to it than pixels and polygons on a screen.

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image is from Crysis, used under fair use.