Normalization and the hyperreality of morality
Here's Robot Chicken's light-hearted take on the violence and other "inappropriate behaviour" in video games today:
People who argue about video games are often focused on the question of whether playing them makes people more violent. This argument continues, with new research suggesting that playing video games does not make one more violent or aggressive, undercut by mainstream media stories about mass murderers who seemingly warmed up for real life violence by playing months or years of violent games. There is still no clear causation. It could be argued that the games had actually provided a cathartic "steam-valve" that kept the killers from doing real-world violence for a long time, and that the desire to kill people was already there, not nurtured or created by the violent games. Personal psychology is the difference between millions of people who play shooter games and are not violent at all in real life and the rare psychopath who kills a bunch of real human beings.
But. Even if the violence in our media does not make the typical person more violent, it does arguably add to our desensitization to violence (and other behaviour often considered immoral in real life) and also perhaps to the normalization of these tendencies, our readiness to consider them "human nature" and be unmoved when we see them in real life, our acceptance of them as "normal."
For me, the more serious question about violent video games is the one that I have with other aspects of the mass media "entertainment" products manufactured by capitalist corporations. This comes back to the issues raised around the "virtual citizen-soldier" in the lesson on war. The average citizen lives in a "reality" that is actually a hyperreal mix of lived experience and media fabrications. A huge aspect of our mass media is normalization. In the post-religious world of 20th century North America, many things that have been considered immoral in the past are now normalized (made to look like common, ordinary, or natural aspects of being human) in the media: crime, killing, racial hatred, self-destructive behaviour, prostitution, adultery, even rape.
Normalization is the process whereby social standards become norms, and in the 21st century this happens largely through mass and social media. To mention porn again, briefly, critics argue that mainstream porn normalizes attitudes between men and women that are often disrespectful, detrimental, or disempowering to women. I'll return to this in the lesson on Sex.
Normalization through mass media works for both good and evil. Until the 1990s there were almost no openly gay characters in network sitcoms, for instance. Then shows like Will and Grace started to normalize homosexuality. These actually influenced the attitudes of reactionary straight people in the real world by making it seem more normal to have gay friends, celebrate queer sexuality, and so forth. What society is supposed to "accept" is largely determined by what people see in the media; hence the wish to make entertainment media more inclusive. It is surprising and encouraging (to me at least), how quickly drag queens, gender transition, non-binary identities and other previously "out there" ways of living have been normalized in the media recently. The morality of such normalization seems entirely positive to a left-leaning cuck like myself. LOL.
On the other hand, American mass media since the 1980s has shown an ever-increasing focus on crime, pathology, objectification of women, and other arguably negative social "norms." Is this just a more realistic brand of entertainment, because we are all naturally attracted to these things and it is good that we can finally acknowledge that humans are malicious, self-serving, exploitative, etc, that masculinity is naturally toxic, and so forth? Or are these more the dreams of the people who make our mass media, or what they think we want as their customers? It's hard to find an HBO or Netflix series that isn't about criminals. Wealth, power, sex appeal, celebrity, narcissism and crime are promoted by everything from Donald Trump to Netflix dramas to rap songs. Is this a realistic mirror of humanity, or are these the fever dreams of the privileged people (still mostly men) who make our media for us? Most of the people I actually know in real life are not criminals, not rich, not powerful, and seem to have limited interest in exploiting other people, murdering anyone, and so forth. Whose ideals are they really? Do they become our ideals if we consume them regularly enough? Not just normalization - romanticisation and idealization.
Is this media cathartic in the extreme, allowing us to vicariously release all our violence, misogyny, and self-serving criminality in passive viewing of tv shows? Even that argument, however, normalizes the behaviours as "natural" (though unwanted and bad if acted upon by ordinary people).
The Grand Theft Auto franchise makes the goal of the game to carry out crimes, including delivering drugs and murdering people. Along the way, one may glibly run over senior citizens on the sidewalk and beat up prostitutes and steal their stuff. (Of course, you can also borrow an ambulance and race injured citizens to the emergency room, but nobody ever talks about that.) The game is self-consciously over-the-top and satirical in many ways, and in theory its players recognize that not only is it not a realistic depiction of life in Southern California, but it is in many ways a parody of the glorification of amoral gangsta lifestyles in much mainstream video culture. On the other hand, you can take your crimes deadly seriously if you want to. And hyperreality has broken down people's ability to distinguish truth from fiction, or heavily fictionalized scenarios and representations. Even parody is arguably a normalizing form of media. I have seen someone on social media claim that he would have no trouble in his move to L.A. because he already knew all the streets and the lay of the city. Was that a joke, or was it partly serious? (One thing that is definitely different between Liberty City and Los Angeles is the traffic. Try to go anywhere in L.A. in under three hours!)
The exaggerations and absurdity of the action possible in GTA could be said to protect intelligent people from the danger of thinking it tells them anything about real life. "It's all just a silly game, and no one thinks real life is like this," say the fans. Everything in Western culture is now automatically "ironic" and therefore we don't have to take responsibility for it if we make it, enjoy it, or on some level actually believe it is normal (or ideal) human reality.
Is it entirely true that it's just a silly game, especially in terms of our unconscious sense of what is real? Doesn't the consumption of these scenarios potentially help to normalize them in the real world? Doesn't it make it seem like the real world is sort of like this, even if our own personal real worlds are not? And if one spends a lot of hours every day playing GTA, isn't that their "reality," and is it not likely to influence their view of the real world as well? And yes, maybe even their behaviour. Take a look at this news footage, and ask yourself what games that carjacker might have been playing and how ready the media are to treat this footage itself as an entertaining gameplay video (and how about you?):
The 2019 release of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare continued a long tradition of people worrying about the kind of violence it treats as "escapist entertainment." YouTube essayist Jacob Geller played the game for a couple of months and then released a think-piece called "Does Call of Duty Believe in Anything?"
The makers of CoD assert that the game is "not political." Is that a realistic claim for anything, let alone a game that is about American forces in a mythical country called Urzikstan, fighting terrorist organizations and playing dirty to protect those of us back home from the evil factions over there? This is part of the ideology of the "virtual citizen-soldier" that Roger Stahl was worried about: that Americans are encouraged to see the world this way, and to look the other way if the American military sometimes bends morality to get the job done. There are many opportunities to kill civilians in the course of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, and some civilian deaths seem "gratuitous" to critics, including Geller. Geller quotes Twitter commentator @Campster (Chris Franklin): "The shoot-a-baby scene in Modern Warfare is absolutely manufactured. The game doesn't even let you pull the trigger in a situation that would be friendly fire. As hard as I try, I can't shoot Captain Price. But I can shoot this baby."
Here is the conclusion of Geller's analysis:
When it comes to the idea of normalization, the question I would have you think about is not whether playing violent video games makes an individual behave violently in real life. It's more about the hyperreal message that the normalization in such games (and our movies and Netflix etc) sends to our collective consciousness about humans and violence. It's about the impact on our shared morality, and our sense of what is normal and natural - "what it is to be human." If we see violence and crime and misogyny portrayed as normal and "natural" - indeed maybe even ideal and celebrated - in entertainment, does it not affect our feelings about the rest of the social world, even if it doesn't affect our own individual behaviour? The message may sometimes be that violence is a great, the only, the best - an admirable! - solution to problems, for instance. The message is that violence is a natural human trait, and a normal response in a difficult situation; perhaps even masculine, heroic, laudable. Have we gone too far in this normalization of violence, especially in situations where it is not necessarily all that manly or virtuous or worthy of praise?
For most of us, the conception of extreme human violence is a hyperreal thing. So it doesn't make a particular individual more violent, perhaps. But it may help normalize violence - or help keep it normal, when our attitudes toward it could actually change if we embraced new norms. And some video games seem actually to promote negative attitudes about violence and unsavoury moral sentiments in those who must carry them out to play the game. You can say you just wanted to play a game. But you're playing Call of Duty, not Farmville. What do you want to believe is normal, natural, or positive in human life?
Is violence natural? And why is it natural? Is it just baked into human DNA or is it a cultural choice as well? A lot of our media over the past 75 years, the most popular parts of it perhaps, suggest that violence and criminality are natural, normal, acceptable and maybe even - transcendant, true, heroic in some way. The violence could come from the criminals, the tough guys, the independent outcasts, or the defenders of our country. The gun is fetishized as a scarcely cloaked phallic symbol, an erotic focus and proof of power. This also ties into to the preference for weapons over discussion and compromise alluded to back in "skill-thinking" part of the lesson on War. Because I think what Jacob Geller wanted to suggest in his analysis of "what Call of Duty believes in" was that what it believes in (and a lot of its players may end up believing in) fits well with aspects of the American government's propaganda about its own righteousness, even using immoral forms of violence in the War on Terror.
Thus, people who play CoD might be more likely to take for granted the assumption that unethical violence is necessary and indeed laudable, and therefore not to question such violence when it is performed by their government, even if they wouldn't do it themselves. Some might not agree with their government's actions, but might still say "that's just the way the world is," because of this normalization trend. But the hyperreal representations in the media themselves might actually be a big part of what decides "the way the world is." Maybe that's how those who make our media see it, or want us to see it.
Similarly, normalized (and often idealized!) criminality in GTA or in the dozens of HBO and Netflix shows focused on criminal families, serial killers, pimps, gun-running bikers, and other underworld escapades, might make it easier for the public to accept the criminality of crony capitalists, unethical corporations, dishonest politicians, crooked police officers, and violent criminals, by presenting such people as either normal or actually exceptional and also admirable, "flawed heroes" (such a trope now), and so forth.