Sanitized Violence

In these “civilized” times, we have an odd relationship with violence. I’m forced to acknowledge that I have a split personality. When I was in the reserves, I loved learning to strip, clean and fire the FN FAL assault rifles. I love martial arts. I love blowing stuff up. I love swords, the history of warfare, tanks, etc. I can recognize and name 95% of WW2 airplanes (little trouble with the Russian planes), yet I deplore violence and consider myself a borderline pacifist. I’m a hypocrite.

We seem to prefer different levels of sanitized violence in our entertainment. I don’t like horror games or movies, but the body count of a typical slasher movie is less than most action movies. The slasher movie forces you to come to terms with the consequences of the violence much more. I don’t find that fun or entertaining.

Fantasy may be about the epic triumph of good over evil and in that genre we often have very simplistic definitions of what is good or what is evil. So what? Just give me some stupid premise and let me slay the dragon already.

This split personality we have with violence may ultimately be a good thing. The struggle between the pacifist and the warrior inside us is necessary for our long term survival. The main lesson I hope we’ve learned in recent years is not that we need to be pacifists, but that it’s possible for nations in the west to be wrong and that we are not automatically the “good guys”.

Nature favors extremes. “Clean and sanitized” gets you rack space as many retailers serve “family” markets. “Graphic and dirty” gets you a place in history. Pirates of the Caribbean and The Boondock Saints are examples.

They are, effectively, two different business models. You can go the mass-market way where first-week box office sales determine the future of a franchise as well as the careers of the people involved, or you can go the “cult following” way where merchandising is the focus and enough revenue can be generated to sustain a business over the long run.

Big businesses, like Universal, favor mass markets because you need a lot of money to keep thousands of people employed and just as many projects afloat. Small businesses favor niche markets because they can’t directly compete with the big boys and, at their level, “personal” sells more. In the movie business, aspiring screenwriters are even advised to write character-driven screenplays instead of epics. I think you can puzzle out why.

That said, graphic violence doesn’t make me uncomfortable. I’ll readily watch movies, such as Pulp Fiction, Sin City, Reservoir Dogs, and Hell Ride, as long as the story keeps me interested. I find gratuitous violence, however, boring.

I would like to boldly claim that by nature and upbringing and origins I do not have a puritan bone in my body, and yet I think that the visceral exposure to torture, rape, or other forms of “personal” degradation — especially when you’re the one supposed to be doing it — has a vastly larger impact on a person than the death, at 40 paces, of a generic humanoid with whom you have no particular connection.

I have no doubt this instinct can be overridden, that it’s easy to beat it out of a child… but I do believe we are largely born with it, and that all in all it’s served us well over the eons. I think empathy is a very gut-level thing, and the degree to which the pixels represent genuine identifiable suffering and pain decides the effect it’ll have on the player.

I read a blog post this morning about children in holocaust camps and the nature of their play.

Excerpt below.
Even in the extermination camps, the children who were still healthy enough to move around played. In one camp they played a game called “tickling the corpse.” At Auschwitz-Birkenau they dared one another to touch the electric fence. They played “gas chamber,” a game in which they threw rocks into a pit and screamed the sounds of people dying. They made up a game called klepsi-klepsi–a common term for stealing–that was modeled on the camp’s daily roll call. One playmate was blindfolded; then one of the others would step forward and hit him hard on the face; and then, with blindfold removed, the one who had been hit had to guess, from facial expressions or other evidence, who had hit him. To survive at Auschwitz, one had to be an expert at lying–for example, about stealing bread or about knowing of someone’s escape or resistance plans–without giving oneself away. Klepsi-klepsi seemed to be practice for that skill.

The article that players use games to not only play out fantasies but also to process realities. Perhaps, the approved use of torture in our culture is has a psychological effect that needs to be worked through via games. Just throwing it out there. Read the article here:
http://blogs.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/200812/the-value-play-iii-children-use-play-confront-not-avoid-life-s-challenges-

If you are truly interested in the psychology of taking human lives, may I suggest a book I found years ago in the PX bookstore called “On Killing” by retired Lt Colonel Dave Grossman. Amazon link for easy reference:
http://www.amazon.com/Killing-Psychological-Cost-Learning-Society/dp/0316330116

After filtering my own experiences through what I gleaned from that book, I would have to say you are mostly correct Matt. There are far fewer people who would be comfortable with killing other people from rifle range. There are fewer still who would be comfortable with killing people from pistol range, and fewer once more who would be comfortable killing people with their bare hands or a knife. Distance allows for disassociation and eases the conscience.

The reason you are only mostly correct is that the actual number of people killed is less important than how close a person is to the death. Either you are willing to kill or you are not. Once you have established that willingness the number of times you do it is irrelevant. There have been cases where soldiers did not actually make any kills, but still suffered the psychological effects because they had established the willingness to kill.

The book references studies that show a person is more likely to pull the trigger if their target is not looking at them, or if they cannot distinguish facial features. If they are viewing their target through a scope, people are more likely to shoot than if they can see the target with their own eyes. By extension, long range weapons such as cruise missiles and high altitude bombing provide such a degree of disassociation that the person who fired the weapon rarely feels the effects at all. In some cases the people watching gun cam footage on the nightly news feel as connected to the action as the people who were actually there, because that’s the same footage they saw as they were steering the guided munition to its target. Artillery gunners don’t even see the effects of their shots.

People are more likely to shoot if they’re part of a group than if they’re alone, because when 20 of you are shooting at the same guy it’s hard to say who actually killed him. There are a lot of coping methods, distance, mechanical separation, shared responsibility with a group, flat out denial, and all are necessary unless you’re one of the 2% of people who are natural killers. In short, I think most of our soldiers would be uncomfortable with just plain executing a bunch of people at close range.

That covers the soldiers who would be carrying out the acts, but for the people at home I don’t know if I could say as much about their reaction. I think a large number of people would express outrage at the thought, but would they really feel the loss of life in any meaningful way? In this context the word “meaningful” is pretty subjective, so that’s probably going to end up being a matter of each individual’s perception. From my perception of the difference between being there and seeing it on TV, only in extremely rare cases do I think people at home will truly feel the deaths. To most people it would just be an idea to which they object. The distance between them and the deaths would be too great to feel the full impact. Even close up images are still just images. If such images deeply affect you then I hope for your sake you never have to see it in person.

I’ll buy the theory that a game can teach you to be comfortable with firing the most expensive weapons we have, but as far as humping a rifle out on patrol, standing watch at a checkpoint, or evacuating a crowded area after an explosion, even the most “realistic” game doesn’t even come close.

No edit button

A quick thought to finish the point I never got around to making:
No matter what you do in the game, the fact that it’s presented to you on a monitor provides a degree of separation to distance yourself from the acts occurring within. Even the most graphic game is pretty harmless compared to the real thing. If you think killing 500 million turkeys grinding levels in a game desensitizes you to turkey killing violence, try killing and cleaning your own bird next Thanksgiving. I expect you will find it is quite different.

Adding to the great post by “Nerd Rage” above: when people casually state that they would be willing to kill (e.g., to protect their family), there is at this time no way to tell whether this would be the case in actuality. Saying you’ll pull the trigger and pulling the trigger are two entirely different things. Men of war have known this for awhile. Professional militaries are organized the way they are for efficiency. From a system-level perspective, militaries expect a certain percentage of assets to fail their missions, which is why there is a lot of continuous physical and mental training, foxhole buddies, etc.

I think the reason why people dislike kill or torture (even on a bad guy) is religious. The 3 major religions of the west all believe God created us and placed us as special, which give humans special place among other animals. This belief passed on and even has influence among the non-believers.

In another word, what is wrong with torture some guy who admitted kidnap and hide a girl in a dungeon who will run out of oxygen in hours?

In Buddhism there is no God, so humans and animals are treated as equal. However Buddhism extends the “higher” rights of humans to animals, you are not suppose to kill animals because they have life.

However we can apply it backwards, that is we can treat bad guys as animals and do whatever is needed to them in order to maintain a good environment for the majority of others. Everything should be based on strict logical reasoning instead of emotions etc.

I think the reason why people dislike kill or torture (even on a bad guy) is religious. …

…because no member of Christianity, Judaism, or Islam ever tortured anyone throughout history? Never heard of crucifixion, stoning, stake burning, or dismemberment? And karma can be considered a form of psychological torture.

Nope, because there is no logic behind it in a clear cut case as I specified.

hmm. I am playing GTA IV now and there they actually made killing look pretty natural and sometiems shocking when you need to kill face to face some people there which dropped their guns and trying to tel you that it is not their fault and stuff…

And somewhere in the middle I started to think on differences of GTA IV from previous games and one thing I noticed was that as game representation was becoming more and more realistic I was making less and less violence trough out the series. I remediable how in first GTA I was going to a station with flamethrower and making a big massacre to build up combo multilayer and make a lot of money this way… I was not seeing humans in those top-down pixel figures…

And now playing GTA IV I noticed that I am not making those massacres anymore… I am trying to ride so that I don’t hit people and I am not making shootouts with police just for fun as I was doing sometimes in previous games… Why? Well picture of blooding cop whispering that everything will be okay and that he has children and trying to crawl away from you… That’s not fun anymore… At least for normal people as those NPC are looking too human… We see ourselves in them… We don’t really want to kill them…

Or at least as it feels for me like that…