I wonder how many soldiers are really required in our civilized western countries. I do so because if I watch the presentations of the latest and hottest computer games in 2011 at the E3 games convention, I mostly see combat training. I truly believe that it is not necessary to be or become an effective killer to have some amazing hours within a computer games world.
The actual state of ethics in computer gaming industry has one advantage for me: it’s easier to pick the suitable title out of the huge supply. Assassins Creed? Rage? Bioshock? Far Cry? War in the North? – No way! They may look and feel amazing. The virtual worlds may appear as beautiful, realistic or creepy as never before, but they lack basic ethic rules. I get a bitter taste that ruins the gaming experience playing the assassin or merc. It doesn’t matter, if the world in which the killing takes place is corrupt to the bone and you’re character may be the last ‘good’ fighter. Question is, why do we buy a game in which the player may kill in the imaginativst ways? Why don’t we refuse and take titles that are closer to real life? In real life we have to coexist with most of the living beeings around us.
So, I don’t want to perverd more than I already did and I refuse to play games in which the goals are mainly killing and destroying.
I don’t feel comfortable with the mind-set of a warrior, a person who believes only in his strength and not in his social and communicative abilities. And most of all: A person you feels more comfortable in a destructed world than in a intact and bloomy.
In the discussion in Germany about the ‘killer games’ the pro fraction mentions, that an adult knows the difference between game and reality at any time. Studies show that the convertion of the sensation during the game happens in another region of the brain than the conversion of real violence experience. I admit that. But gaming has always been a symbol for the real life. We are responsible for the symbolic content of the games we choose to play.