Modern Warfare 2 makes you shoot people, the world freaks out

You may be familiar with the kerfuffle over a leaked video depicting an optional section of Modern Warfare 2 that lets you play as a terrorist. I don't know the full context, but you and some allies wade into a crowded airport with automatic weapons and start unloading said weapons into civilians.The controversy has gotten to the point that the Australian government is threatening to refuse the game a 15A classification (not that that really means anything any more).

I watched the footage. It's violent and disgusting ans shocking.

So what?

You could put a scene like this in a film and no one would bat an eye-lid. Schindler's List has far worse material and no one is trying to ban it. The very idea would be ludicrous, offensive even. Yet for some reason having violence against innocents in a video game is not acceptable.

Maybe people think it's more shocking when you're actually acting out the violence yourself. If so, I have news for you: video games have been doing this for years. Hitman 2, released seven years ago, featured a level set in an office building lobby crowded with civilians. If you so wished, you could equip an assault rifle and go on a bloody rampage. Blood Money had at least three levels with a similar set up. You weren't supposed to run around shooting people randomly, but the game didn't penalize you for it. And of course the GTA games have been letting players depopulate entire cities since 1997. It's true that GTA atracted a lot of controversy, but most of it wasn't about the fact that you could kill civilians if you wanted to. And as far as I can tell no one even noticed that Hitman let you gun down hundreds of innocent people whenever the fancy struck you.

But wait, maybe that's not the point. Maybe it's the fact that you're supposed to shoot innocent people that's getting everyone so up in arms. If so, it would be an odd complaint. Like I said, the whole scene is skippable and while I can understand someone being umcomfortable with the idea of being told to shoot unarmed people, I don't see how that makes the section in question inherently more repulsive.

I think there are three main reasons for this controversy. Number one, people are panicky, reactionary, small-minded morons who care deeply about the content of fictional stories even if they never intend to see them. Okay, that wasn't really the first reason. I was just venting.

Numer one: The "T" word. Terrorists are bad and having them in things is therefore bad, for reasons no one seems willing to explain.

Linked to this is the second reason, the odd and irrational idea that putting something in a game is automatically glorifying it. Video games, the reasoning seems to go, are more about entertainment than other visual mediums and so anything in them is suppoed to be fun. Therefore, Infinity Ward is trying to make terrorist activities seem like fun. To return to my Schindler's List point- ultimately, people watch that movie and others like it for entertainment as well, yet no one has ever suggested that Spielberg was trying to glorify the actions of the Nazis. Just the opposite, a fact that everyone seems to automatically grasp. So why can't they see Modern Warfare 2 in the same light? The entire sequence is obviously meant to be horrifying. Why does that stop being true once you put people in control of the action instead of making them watch it?

The last reason is tied in with the usual attitude people have to controversial issues in video games- they're just not allowed to depict things that movies and books are. I remember a few years ago a semi-educational DS game about the Holocaust was announced. It took place in the imagination of a young boy in a concentration camp. Instantly a huge furor arose over the game, with one guy (I think he was actually a survivor of the holocaust himself) outright stating that he would have had no problem with the idea if it was a movie, but a video game? That's not on. Why not? No reason was given. Similar complaints have been aimed at any game attempting to portray the events of 9/11, even, in one case, a mod that was historically accurate and intended to be purely educational. Again, this was after two movies about the attacks were already well into production, neither of which got much attention. But a video game showing the same thing? God Forbid. In one case an actual video game magazine called one of the 9/11 games "the most sickening thing they had ever seen" despite the fact that it didn't seem to include any violence or explixit gore at all.

Ultimately the root of all of this is the still-pervasive idea that video games are for children, or at the very least are more similar to toys and to story-telling media. So when people see them depicting terrorist attacks it's as if someone came along and made a lego set about the same thing.

This is a ridiculous and out-dated view. Video games should be free to depict anything movies and books can (ie anything) without instigating moral panics. If Infinity Ward's terrorist gameplay section helps wake people up to this fact, I say fair play to them.