Stop Trivializing Games

If Six Days in Fallujah has shown us anything, it’s that the general public still does not take gaming seriously.

The controversy surrounding the game stems from the belief that a video game can never communicate the horrors of war. They, the critics, believe Six Days would merely trivialize the bloody event by turning it into entertainment.

What the general public fails to realize, though, is that games not all games are there for mindless entertainment. No, many games are an experience with emotional ups and downs that players can empathize with and even learn from. To claim that games can not communicate complex emotions of remorse, respect, or sadness is downright ignorant and insulting.

Gamers have brains. To some this may be a shocking revelation, but many gamers do not simply play something for hours without analyzing its events. Granted there are some gamers who just like to blow things up, but there are also action flick junkies that just like to see things blow up.

While playing any game, players create emotional connections with the characters just as viewers make connections with characters in movies or shows.

War movies, such Saving Private Ryan, are known and praised for attempting to accurately depict war and its horrors. Throughout the entire movie, audiences were constantly reminded of the cost and sacrifice of war. Even the premise of the way the story was told, through an aging Private Ryan’s memory, reverberated the message that war is unforgettable.

But those who claim that a video game can never have this emotional or moral impact are blind to some well known examples that say otherwise.

Aeris’ death in Final Fantasy 7 was not only shocking, but it was also tremendously moving. Her death was equatable to the death of a companion, although not in the same degree, and it served as an example for players of someone sacrificing themselves for a cause more meaningful and greater than their life.

For any player that was actively engaged into the story (and with a single player RPG it is virtually required), her death took an emotional toll. They did not simply conceive her death as just another group of pixels disappearing into the virtual world.

When handled correctly, death and other tragic or traumatic events, can be accurately experienced in a game. Final Fantasy 7 is just one example where players were able to forge a significant bond with the game. Others would include Warcraft III, Halo, as well as the other other Final Fantasies.

A quality game can portray emotionally demanding events much more effectively than any book or movie.

Games create a vivid environment in which players can immediately project themselves onto characters. No book can do this, and movies are severely limited in this regard because a viewer is not in control of what happens in a film.

So, let’s stop trivializing games by generalizing them into a hobby for a bunch of a thirteen-year-olds, and let’s begin to recognize the complex and mature dimensions that many games have to offer.