Hired Guns: The Real Price of Game Violence

Adam Maresca

America is slowly recovering from a flashpoint of public violence. Having learned nothing from the , our news media has fostered an environment for a succession of copycats in the slaughter of the innocent. Motives may be varied, but the yield of needless death has come due in Oak Creek and Aurora in just the past month alone. In that last case, even through something as innocuous as Guitar Hero , again video games have wormed their way into dialog over American gun culture.

It is in these times that EA’s Medal of Honor: Warfighter is under (well-deserved) fire for their strategic sponsorships with gun manufacturers . Including links to websites where weapons found in-game can be made to order and purchased for real-world ownership should be the kind of crass behavior more thoroughly decried, but that isn’t the world we live in. There’s a gulf in difference between a Porsche and tomahawk , so it’s probably for the best that there are at least half-measures being taken in response to criticism. Licensing the likenesses and brands of real guns isn’t new or shocking by any stretch of the imagination, but the shamelessness of the cross-promotion is worth a few red flags.

This isn’t the only dubious partnership recently fostered by a triple-A shooter, either. Several weeks ago, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails happily made public his soundtrack work for Call of Duty: Black Ops II . We’re a long ways out from Quake , and everybody from HEALTH  to David Bowie has tried their hand at video game soundtracks in that time. Those soundtracks, however, didn’t involve going against the image and ideals you’ve come to espouse over the course of two decades. Who knows, maybe there’s some hidden dimension of meaning that comes with sharing space on credits with a man responsible for selling arms to Iran to help fund to Nicarguan guerillas who  murdered nuns . Or it’s a paycheck. “Bow down before the one you serve” indeed.

In essence, these sorts of reprehensible marketing bullet points are the endgame you get after competing for the worst atrocity developers can get a player to commit as part of a military FPS. There’s a through-line running from the sensation caused by “No Russian” to the revolting artlessness of the ‘hide in the mass grave’ objective in  Homefront  to the debunked faux-profundity of the white phosphorous civilian attack in Spec Ops: The Line . The boogeymen are almost always poor and/or foreign, and the leader soldier of the heroic superhuman squadron is a white male brunette with equal frequency. Because being blonde and blue-eyed would be a little too overt for the 21st century.

The reason these are the game we talk about are because of the magnitude of their commercial and critical success. (Or failure, in the case of  Homefront. ) There have been forays into video games by organizations with even more blatant agendas. There was the Kinect-supported game glorifying the exploits of Academi ,  née  Xe,  née   Blackwater . It was fortunate, then, that compounded with the disgusting heritage of the game, it also happened to be an utter failure . Of course, when that same intrusion of reality happened for the three-game America’s Army  series on PC, there was far less of an outcry. Even if it has been a few years since an installment and the daily player base is only three digits, the presence within the industry is felt at all level. Their ads find their way into other games and on “gamer-friendly” networks like Spike and G4, and recruitment booths are always fairly easy to find on the floors of major conventions. Even if they don’t come away with much meat for the grinder, this is one of their primary bases of support.

These are the words of President Dwight D. Eisenhower , speaking in 1961 on the changes seen after World War II and in the time before, during, and after his term in office. In in speech, he takes a great deal of stock in his 50 years of service in some capacity.