Achieving Peace through Total Annihilation

[errantember]

I've given a lot of thought recently to whole warrior mythos male role thing. This examination has lead me to reject a lot of what I've been brought up to believe, and has changed my behaviors in certain ways as well. Although I don't buy the whole "I shot my teacher because I play violent video games" cause-and-effect scenario, I do believe that when a culture constantly glorifies violence it makes a big difference in the way children raised in that culture see the world. I see violent video games as more of a symptom than a cause, but it's always amazed me that such a high percentage of gaming was so violence-based, especially considering how much more potential the medium has.

One project that's been stewing in my mind for years is the idea of a game where the goal is to *stop* the violence without using violence yourself. To be worth doing it couldn't just be a little trinket game that people would think was cute and then forget about. It would have to be good enough to actually steal mindshare away from more violent alternatives and get people thinking. I'm not willing to devote enough time to this right now to "lead a team" or start from scratch, but adapting an existing RTS framework might be doable, at least as a first stab at manifesting the idea. Ironically, the best one I've found for this kind of major modding is Total Annihilation. Although quite old, it's still considered one of the best RTSs of all time, and it's framework is about as open as you can be without being 100% Open Source.

So once those Core fuckers are sucking on my iron boot, it'll be time to get started creating Peace.

Comments

[jb-27.livejournal.com]

It's not just that our culture glorifies violence, IMO. It's that our culture, and specifically television and movies, dramatically over-represents the occurrence of violence as an effective conflict-resolution mechanism, and dramatically under-represents the occurrence of other conflict resolution mechanisms. I'm not sure what effect this has on people, since we are able to distinguish fantasy from reality to some degree. Nevertheless, I do think that it must have some effect.

Another issue, that I think ties in with violence, is the dividing people into binary "good" and "bad" categories. The message that is often sent in popular culture is that it's okay to do evil or immoral things to "bad" people, like killing them, or torturing them. This message, IMO, is even more sinister than the "violence-as-conflict-resolution" message, because it is propagated not only by our popular culture, but by our government, our religion, and so forth. It's far more accepted and pervasive.

I completely agree...

[errantember.livejournal.com]

...on both points.

Part of the appeal of the game is that your #1) trying to stop the violence, and therefore not necessarily treating either side as "the bad guy" and #2) you can show how problems can be solved with a different methodology.

I think, though, that making the whole thing a ra-ra only for peace would make it to simplistic and just at jingoistic (in it's own way) as constantly pimping violence. I think there needs to be ethically challenging situations, methodologies that maybe are themselves questionable (suicide bombing would be a good example) and even situations where attempting to "enforce peace" could lead to a worse situation (like maybe not stopping Hitler.) I'd also like to see no-win scenarios where it no matter how good you are, you can't stop the fighting because the society, for instance, is too predisposed. If, through the obviously simplified mechanism of the game, it were possible to see *why* this was true, it would have a lot of value as social commentary.