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关于电子游戏中的暴力(一):歌颂暴力

发布时间:2014-12-23 10:55:33 Tags:,,,,

作者:Keith Burgun

当提到电子游戏中对于女性的塑造时,我很高兴看到明显的文化觉醒。总的来说,人们越来越反感“比基尼战士”的角色设计,并且这种反对在之后几年将会越来越高涨。

violent(from keithburgun)

violent(from keithburgun)

于此同时,另外一个边界便是对于暴力的歌颂这一问题,这一问题蔓延于我们的媒体中,但最严重的应该属电子游戏和电影。

本文并不是关于游戏设计,实际上,我将在此使用一些游戏外部的例子,因为我认为这些例子更能突出问题,并且这一问题并不只是针对于互动娱乐。本文将处理游戏和其它媒体的主题与设置中一个常见的问题以及它对于更广泛的文化的影响。而在第二部分中我将处理游戏中的暴力问题以及它对于游戏设计的消极影响。

我非常反对任何审查制度理念,也不提倡这种理念。相反地,我希望说服人们关于这一主题的社交和文化改变才能带给我们最大的帮助。

非暴力

实际上,暴力并不是什么很酷的行为。它并不吸引人也不有趣。如果存在它具有必要性的情境,那么这些情境通常都是悲剧—-会表现出劣势和懦弱;以及人性的弱点。

直到现在,我仍不知道自己是否完全理解这一事实。不要误解我:我始终都知道真实的暴力是丑陋的行为,我也始终都提倡反对暴力。我从未跟别人打架,我深刻记得在中学时亲眼目睹别人打架的情景。

但想出一个理念与亲自感受它是不同的。在理智上,你知道暴力是可怕且丑陋的,但同时,在潜意识里你可能“并不介意”暴力,甚至会期待暴力。就拿我来说吧,在我的生活中便经常出现这样的矛盾,并且我相信不是只有我会这样。

关于这一主题总是存在一些矛盾。我并不喜欢暴力也不是个暴力的人,但是作为一个在我们这样的社会中长大的男人,我当然会喜欢动作类电影,电子游戏,漫画书以及各种具有暴力倾向的媒体。

关于这点的解释是在幻想与现实间存在着一条明显的界线,所以即使是非暴力的人也可以使用暴力媒体。实际上这并没错。就像大多数会玩比基尼战士游戏的人并不是性别歧视者—-他们中的许多人甚至称自己为女权运动者。

与此同时,所有的媒体(不管是什么)都会传达文化价值。大多数动作类电影的打斗场面的潜台词便是:“看看这个角色是如何使用暴力出色地解决问题,”或者“使用暴力是一种英雄行为,”或者有时候只是:“暴力很迷人/很酷。”

shootout(from keithgurgun)

shootout(from keithgurgun)

我们可以在带有讽刺性的动作类电影(游戏邦注:如《机械战警》,《敢死队》或《蓝博》系列)中看到这种矛盾。在这些例子中,作者为了让观众享受暴力而创造了一个“借口”。这就像是拥有一篇名为“来自电子游戏的前20件最无力的单薄衣物”的文章的网站一样—-它们只是在利用那些他们声称自己被冒犯的点而已。

我认为对于暴力的歌颂是人们(特别是男人们)所学到并赋予其价值的内容。我不认为这是我们自然会认可的内容。关于男人身上具有暴力基因可能具有历史/进化原因。我的猜想是,对于暴力的歌颂在历史长河中对于我们来说是一种有用的工具,而这是发生在比我们所了解的今天更加暴力的世界。

在这一方面我们已经取得了巨大的进展,可能关于暴力的现状以及性别歧视的现状之间的区别在于我们在前者的进步赶超了后者。然而,我认为即使我们致力于创造抵抗暴力的文化,我们还需要更加努力做得更好。因为这个赌注实在是太大了。

例子

最近我看了《行尸走肉》的前几集。一开始我非常犹豫要不要看,因为直到最近我才真正搞清楚其“僵尸启示录”的前提。不管怎样这在今天都算得上是个文化中心,所以我至少需要去了解下它。

与我们文化中的任何其它丑陋部分一样,歌颂暴力也知道如何进行伪装。当我还年轻的时候,我会说这很酷。在我20多岁的时候,我可能会说这很有趣或“具有戏剧性”。但现在,这让我感到烦恼。我发现它其实是让人讨厌,不正确,愚蠢且是糟糕的设定。

因为“僵尸启示录”的背景让我感到不舒服,作者创造了这一一种情结,即基于暴力的内容不仅是有道理的,同时是值得我们歌颂的。换句话说,其出发点便是“我想要歌颂暴力。”如此看来,一些古怪且基于可怕的暴力元素的场景便是我们的唯一选择。“如果游戏世界中的所有人都遭到了诅咒并导致他们要杀了我会怎样?那么我是否能够使用短枪直接向他们射击?”

“超级英雄”和“孤独的大坏蛋行动英雄”的比喻也是典型的例子。你拥有一个角色,他将出于任何原因射击许多不知名的“暴徒”。人们在听到这样的比喻时总是会想到Sylvester Stallone,Bruce Willis,Arnold Schwarzenegger等人,我们也倾向于将男子气概冠于一代又一代的小男孩们身上。

关于英雄的描述只是杀死周围的“暴徒”,甚至可能更糟糕。在电影和电子游戏中,“暴徒”甚至未做多少值得被杀的事。在以前他们至少射击了我们的英雄或者威胁到我们的英雄。但是现在,他们可能只是与一些“邪恶的”组织有联系或者站在HQ附近就足以决定了他的死亡。这类型角色如果出现在“喜剧”电影中可能会被当成是无害的人,如最近的《银河护卫队》。

我听到的一个反论是,这些电影和游戏的主要价值是关于“善良战胜邪恶。”对于该反论我的反驳观点是:“善良战胜邪恶”只是描述同一个问题的另一种说法。在这两种情况下,问题将把人类贬低为“需要杀戮的对象。”

这里存在另外一个例子,即来自《孤岛惊魂4》。

我认为我们似乎对我们正在着眼的内容有点麻木了。在《孤岛惊魂4》中,一个人类杀死了模拟者。不要担心,他们是坏人。

作者本来可以写许多不同的内容,但实际上他们选择创造暴力中的场景是他们揭示其价值的唯一可行选择。

当暴力是件好事时

我并不是在说“永远别在媒体中描述暴力。”暴力是可怕的,但假装不存在暴力却非常可笑。当我们在描述暴力时,我们应该如实进行描述:它是丑陋的,无力的,让人讨厌的。这种讨厌是你在看到公然的强奸威胁,听到三K党首领发表言论或在YouTube视频中意外滑到评论部分时的感受。

我最喜欢的虚构作品是《绝命毒师》,而它便经常描述一些暴力内容。然而,其大多数暴力内容的描述都是笼罩在消极的阴影下,特别是当我们的主角做错事时。它并未假装这是什么很酷的事(不过第三季中的墨西哥兄弟却是个例外,这可能是这系列电视剧最糟糕的一部分)。

(如果你看过《绝命毒师》,你便可以直接跳到下一段。)第一个场景(带有Crazy-Eight和管道)对于暴力的描述便是我非常喜欢的。边挣扎边流着眼泪的Walter反复说着“对不起”,显然他对自己所做的事感到极端懊悔。更别说作者花了一集的内容去讲述Walter尝试着寻找办法去避免做这件事。发生的这件事一点都不酷,这也是我非常认同的价值。

《绝命毒师》对于暴力的描述唤醒了我们的社会;它所做的是与歌颂暴力相反的事。暴力是件坏事,所以如此描述它将能够带给人们启发。而如果将其描述为一些正面内容便是一种退化。

为什么它如此重要

体验歌颂暴力的作品将导致你扭曲自己的反同情感。人类总是会自然地同情别人;而如果为了真正杀死对方,我们就需要学会放下同情心并将敌人当成是对立方。

现在我认为自己可以每天花8个小时去玩暴力电子游戏,并且只要我活着就不会伤害任何人。我并不相信体验暴力媒体与作为一个暴力的人之间存在直接关系。

我真正认为具有直接关系的是文化价值与作为一个暴力的人,而电影,游戏,音乐等等只是塑造我们文化价值的一部分内容。

这些文化价值不仅会从个人层面影响我们,同时也会从政治上影响我们。就像刺杀奥萨马·本·拉登从道德上来看是否正确?我并不这么认为—-可能是因为我并不具有发言权。但大多数人都会认为这是件对事,因为他的确是个坏人。

我们经常会遇到像我们是否应该与一些国家进行战斗的问题。反同情感会让我们将坏人当成是《银河守卫队》中的“其他人”,并导致我们做出这样的回答:“只管去那边炸死他们就好!”

显然,这个世界并不是充斥着好人与坏人。即使是作为坏人,ISIS也不应该遭遇可怕的谋杀,对吧?就像有些女性和孩子虽然从理论上是ISIS的一员,但其实他们并不想要惹出任何事端。我们很容易说出应该将其彻底消灭的话。而部分原因便是我们习惯于触动自己的反同情感。

我个人主张废除死刑,我也曾多次与那些主张死刑的人进行争论。不可避免的,这样的对话会导致一些非常极端的情境,即可能从未发生的情况或者在讨论政治时很少出现的内容。我们的对话便曾出现以下假设内容:

“如果有个人强奸并杀害了5个小女孩,并且我们非常肯定他做了这件事,他也承认了,并且不带任何歉意那该怎么办?”

尝试着去寻找杀人是可被接受的情境是多么奇怪啊。我们的文化中存在某些部分便是在寻找可消灭的内容。

男孩们在成长过程中会接收到两种不同的信息。大人们会口头教育他们远离暴力。然而媒体却不断传达着一些关于暴力的信息,告诉你只有杀死那些坏人你才算得上是真正的男人。这听起来很愚蠢,但这的确是我们所接收到的信息。

男人的确比女人更支持死刑。

结论

进步意味着调整我们的道德指南。而这么做也意味着我们将更加挑剔媒体中所出现的信息和价值。将暴力歌颂作为一种无意义行为而勾销是远远不够的。我们应该拒绝这类型的作品并要求创造者的作品达到我们的道德标准。也许这种改变会让人感到不安,但却是需要做出的改变。

本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译,拒绝任何不保留版权的转功,如需转载请联系:游戏邦

Violence, Part 1: Glorification

by Keith Burgun

I am very happy that we seem to be having a bit of a cultural awakening when it comes to the portrayal of women in video games. In general, the degree to which the “Bikini Warrior” character design is met with disgust is rising, and it will continue to rise in the coming years.

I think while we continue to work on that, another frontier is the problem of violence glorification, something which plagues all of our media, but perhaps video games and movies worst of all.

This article is not about game design, and in fact, I will be using several examples from outside of games because I think these examples highlight the issue best, and the problem is culture-wide and not specific to interactive entertainment. This article does, however, address a common problem in the themes and settings of games and other media and how it affects the wider culture. In Part 2, I will address a separate problem with violence in games and how it negatively impacts game design.

I should say that I am strongly against the idea of any kind of censorship and am not advocating for that. Instead, I am hoping to convince others that a social and cultural change on this topic is in our best interests.

Dissonance On Violence

Actual violence is not cool. It’s never glamorous, and it’s never fun. If there exist situations wherein it becomes necessary, those situations are all tragedies – displays of weakness, and cowardice; a wasteful failure of humanity.

Until recently, I don’t know if I completely internalized this fact. Don’t get me wrong: I’ve always known that real-life violence was ugly, and I’ve always been vocally anti-violence. I’ve never been in a fight, and I recall feeling profoundly embarrassed for those involved when I’d see a fight break out in high school.

But there’s a difference between thinking an idea and feeling it. You can consciously, intellectually know that violence is horrible and ugly, and at the same time subconsciously either “not mind” violence, or even relish it. In my case, I would say that I’ve had a bit of this dissonance for my entire life, and I don’t think I’m alone.

There’s always been this dissonance surrounding the topic. I don’t like violence and I’m not a violent person, but being a male who’s growing up in our society, I of course always liked action movies, video games, comic books, and all kinds of violence-heavy media.

The given explanation for this has always been that there’s a strict dividing line between fantasy and reality, and so a completely non-violent person can enjoy violent media. On the face of it, this is true. Just as it’s true that most people who play Bikini Warrior Game do not hold sexist views – in fact, many of them would probably describe themselves as feminists.

At the same time, though, all media, no matter what it is, communicates cultural values. The subtext of most action movie fight scenes is something like, “look at how great this character is for solving this problem by using violence”, or “it’s heroic to use violence”, or sometimes just: “violence is glamorous/cool”.

The dissonance is seen somewhat clearly with action films that are borderline satirical, such as Robocop, The Expendables, or the Rambo sequels. In these cases, the author is setting up an “excuse” for you to enjoy the violence. It’s a bit like one of those websites that has a “Top 20 Most Offensive Skimpy Outfits from Videogames” article – they’re actually cashing in on the thing they claim to be offended by.

I think the glorification of violence is something that people – particularly males – are taught to value. I don’t think it’s something we would otherwise naturally value. There may even be historical/evolutionary reasons why this Men Are Violent meme appeared in the first place. My guess is that glorification of violence was a useful tool to us throughout most of history, which took place in a vastly more violent world than the one we know today.

We’ve made a ton of progress on this front, and perhaps one difference between the status quo on violence and the status quo on sexism is that we’ve simply made more progress overall on the former. However, I would argue that even if we are doing fantastically on developing an anti-violent culture, we need to do even better. The stakes are just too high.

Examples

I recently watched the first couple episodes of The Walking Dead. I had been very hesitant to watch it, because I’ve been skeptical of the “zombie apocalypse” premise for reasons which weren’t completely clear to me until recently. Regardless, it’s such a cultural centerpiece these days that I figured I should at least check it out.

Watch the following clip, which compiles “kill shots” from the first few seasons. (NSFW)

Like any of the other ugliest parts of our culture, violence-glorification knows how to wear a disguise, but in this clip, the disguise is thin. When I was much younger, I would have said that it was legitimately cool. In my 20s, I might have said that it was “funny” or perhaps “dramatic”. But now, this bothers me. I actually find it to be extremely distasteful, incorrect, stupid, and just straight up bad writing.

The reason that the “zombie apocalypse” setting is so offensive to me is that it’s the author manufacturing a scenario under which violence could be not only justifiable, but so clearly justifiable that we can even glorify it. It’s going to great lengths to manufacture such a scenario. In other words, the starting point is “I want to portray violence”. From there, we come up with a rationalization – some bizarre, weird scenario under which horrendous violence is our only option. “Uh… well, what if every human in the world got taken over by some curse which made them just want to rip me apart alive!? THEN could I shoot them point blank in the face with a shotgun with a grin on my face?”

The “superhero” and “lone badass action hero” tropes are also great examples of this. You have a guy – and it’s almost always a guy – who has to, for whatever reason, gun down dozens of faceless, nameless “thugs” who “have it coming”. Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger and a few others quickly come to mind as people who embody this trope, and who tend to embody the concept of manliness for generations of little boys.

The portrayal of our hero just wantonly killing nearby “thugs” might even be getting worse. “Thugs” have to have done less and less to deserve being murdered in films and video games. Early on, they had to at least shoot at our hero, or threaten him somehow. Now, they just have to be associated with some “bad” organization and be standing around at HQ, and this merits their death. This appears even in more “comic” movies one might consider benign, like the recent Guardians of the Galaxy.

A counter-argument I’ve heard is that actually, the primary values of these movies and games are about “good defeating evil”. My counter to that counter-argument is: “good defeating evil” is just another way of phrasing the same problem. In both cases, the problem is reducing human beings to “objects that need killing”.

Here’s another example, this time from Far Cry 4 (Should probably be NSFW, but disturbingly, I kinda think it might actually be SFW…)

I think we’ve gotten a bit de-sensitized to what it is we’re looking at with things like this. The above is, among other things, a human killing simulator. They’re bad guys though, don’t worry.

A writer could write about a billion different things, but the fact that they are choosing to create a scenario wherein violence is so obviously the only reasonable choice reveals a lot about their values.

When Violence Is Good

I am not saying “never portray violence in media”. Violence is horrible, but to pretend that it doesn’t exist is also absurd. When we portray violence, we should portray it as it really is: ugly. Weak. Disgusting. Not disgusting as in “blood-and-guts yucky” disgusting, but disgusting as in the feeling you get when you read public rape threats, hear a KKK leader speak, or accidentally scroll down to the comment section on a YouTube video.

My favorite work of fiction is Breaking Bad, which portrays violence often. However, most of the violence in the show is portrayed in an extremely negative light, particularly when our main characters commit the acts. It’s almost never supposed to be cool (the one possible exception being the Mexican brothers in Season 3, which is probably the worst part of the show).

(Spoilers ahead, so skip to the next paragraph if you haven’t watched Breaking Bad yet and (erroneously) believe in spoilers.) That first scene, with Crazy-Eight and the pipe, is a depiction of violence that I really like. Between a tear gliding down his face as he begins the struggle, and the repeated whispering of “I’m sorry” after the act is done, Walter’s tremendous sense of remorse for having done this is thoroughly apparent. Not to mention the episode-long struggle that Walter experienced trying to find some way of avoiding having to do this. What has just happened is not remotely cool, and that is a value that I strongly agree with.

By the way: that video has a kill counter on it. Let’s take a moment and imagine if there was something else just as horrible with a “counter”. Perhaps if there’s some crime show that has more than one rape scene, we could have compilation video with a “rape counter”? Does that seem tasteful? While there might be small disagreements, I think for the most part we’d generally agree that killing is at least roughly as horrible as raping (here‘s a good lengthy discussion on that topic).

Breaking Bad‘s portrayal of violence actually advances our society; it does the opposite of what glorified violence does. Violence is bad, so portraying it as such is illuminating. Portraying it as glorious is regressive.

Why It Matters

Experiencing works that glorify violence allow you to flex your Anti-Compassion muscles. Humans are naturally compassionate for one another; we really have to learn to drop that compassion and see our enemy as “other” in order to actually want to kill them.

Now, I think I could play violent video games for eight hours a day, every day, and never hurt a fly for as long as I live. In fact, I sort of did that for about half of my years on this planet. I’m not convinced that there is a direct connection between experiencing violent media and being a violent person (although I should mention that there exists a good amount of research on this subject suggesting that there is such a connection).

What I do think is that there is a direct connection between one’s cultural values and being a violent person, and films, games, music and everything else absolutely is a part of what builds our cultural values.

These cultural values then go on to not only influence us on a personal level, but also are likely to influence us politically. Was it morally correct to assassinate Osama Bin Laden? I don’t know – partially because we never even had the conversation. Most people just accepted that of course it was correct, he’s a freakin’ BAD GUY!

There are times when we’re faced with a question about whether we should go to war with some country. The anti-compassion muscles that let us see the bad guy as “other” in Guardians of the Galaxy are the same ones that we flex when we say, “just go in there and bomb the hell out of them!”

Obviously, the world is not full of good guys and bad guys. Even the bad guys of the day, ISIS, are certainly not all deserving of a gruesome murder, right? There are women, children, and probably a bunch of dudes who just don’t want to cause trouble that are technically members or affiliates of ISIS (certainly all of them would be “justifiably” murdered by a marauding Bruce Willis). It’s so easy to just say we should completely wipe them out. Part of what makes this so easy, I think, is that we’re used to flexing our Anti-Compassion muscles.

I personally advocate for the abolition of the death penalty, and I’ve had a number of debates with people who are in favor of it. Inevitably, the conversation leads down a path that leads to some super-extreme scenario that would either literally never happen, or is so incredibly rare as to be useless when discussing policy. Hypotheticals such as the following appear in our conversation:

“Okay, well… what if you have a guy, and he like, raped and murdered like five little girls, and we KNOW with 100% certainty that he did it, and he admits it, and he’s not sorry at all.”

You see how there’s this strange effort to try and find a situation wherein killing might be acceptable. There’s some part of our culture that is looking for something to kill.

Really, though, we should expect that – especially from males. Boys are given two distinct messages as they grow up. They are verbally instructed, of course, to never be violent. However, media sends the message that yeah but actually you know that when it comes down to it, you gotta be a man and fucking KILL THE SHIT out of some bad guys. It sounds silly, but I really think that’s the messaging we get.

By the way: men are significantly more likely to support the death penalty than women are.

Conclusion

Progress means fine-tuning our moral compass. Part of doing that means being more critical of the messages and values being put forward in the media we intake. It’s not enough to write off violence glorification as just a meaningless skin on top of a “fun thrill ride”. We need to reject these kinds of works and demand that creators come up to our moral level. It may be uncomfortable, but change always is.(source:keithburgun)

 


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