Killing in the Name of

A number of gaming sites have been reporting with a not-so-subtle flair of irony the release of Medal of Honor: Rising Sun in Japan. The game, developed in America, places the player in the role of American soldiers during World War II's Pacific Campaign... You know, the one where the US fought the Japanese.

Game Girl Advance's write-up and discussion on the release is here. The basic questions stem from Japanese players simulating the slaying of what could in real-life have been their fathers, uncles, grandfathers, etc. There is generally this type of pondering when a game based on recent historical conflict is released, but this debate is possibly greater because it relates to a work in the birthing place of the art form.

Now, I don't want to say this is a non-issue, because there are without a doubt a number of very interesting issues involved with this release of Rising Sun.

But.

When a person plays a video game, they are knowingly entering a fiction... No matter how detailed and realistic it may be, it is a known fiction. This is what allows a gamer to "kill" in the video game world and never give even a thought to killing someone in the physical world. We play Grand Theft Auto or even Midtown Madness with an understanding that oncoming cars could--in the real world--potentially be us or our families...

There is a definitive line between fact and fiction; although we may try to blur it, although we may astonish audiences by nudging them closer to the line than they have previously witnessed anything go, it is there. Our maturity is in some ways measured by our ability to discern each side of this line, and it is definitively immature to claim that a Japanese player is killing a relative while playing a somewhat accurate portrayal of World War II's Pacific Campaign.

Or... to claim that there is betrayal against the nation in fighting against Japan within the game. The problem is in a critic's application of the player's reality onto the fiction of the game. The avatar and the player are two separate entities and such projection ignores this. While I eat a bean burrito from Taco Bell, my character could be starving in Siberia. As much as the game or I may try to trick my mind in order to make the game's fiction more absorbing, any bond between character and player is an artificial one.

While my character dies from a gruesome head wound, I sit in an upholstered chair at a computer desk sipping a glass of milk. While an enemy may be killed in the game world, its code still exists just as it did before and can be resurrected by simply reseting a level or the game entirely (and arguably, just by coming across an identical enemy). If I kill in the real world, I wipe out the code for that being; there will be no revival or cloning. It's gone. By nature, the deletion of a crappy game from your harddrive is closer to real-world killing than in-game slayings. Shouldn't it be considered more morally absurd to kill the avatar of a friend down the street in multiplay, than to halt an autonomous character? Well, maybe not... because both events are equally part of an entirely fictitious universe.

Again, our eyes may be fooled by pretty particle effects, but the game is still fiction. Only in the most tremendous of Philip K. Dick stories, does the line between the real and the artificial become blurred to an extent that there is a problem of morality. The key to these stories, though, is the erasure of an individual's memory of entry into the fiction.

But the Rising Sun issue is one based not on morality but on business (specifically, marketing). How do you get Japanese players interested in the Rising Sun story? Once they decide to play the game, they are knowingly entering a fiction. It's getting there that's the tough part.

If we try to turn fiction into reality and force ourselves to put real constraints upon the fiction, we destroy the purpose of it ever existing in the first place. No longer could we explore the unreal. And that's the real danger.