The player uses a moulded plastic handgun (with properly aligned sights and a force-feedback system to simulate recoil) to shoot directly at enemies on screen...to increase the sweating tension...you always hear Time's winged Chariot. But relax into your task and revel in the challenge, for the blissfully simple rules are still the same. Kill them all. 1
This description of the gameplay involved in the arcade game, Time Crisis II (Namco, 1998), is equated by Poole with the basic concept originally present in Space Invaders (Midway, 1978) when the depiction of violence in video games was still in its technological infancy. As videogames became increasingly realistic, graphically, concern began to grow over the lack of formal classification according to disturbing narrative themes, use of drugs, violent and sexual content and socially inappropriate language.2 In addition, tragic events such as the murdering of innocent students at Columbine High School were linked to the videogame Doom (id Software, 1993) because the killers not only played it, but also created their own custom levels for it.3 With the evolution of videogame soundtracks from 'simple, single tone, electronically generated bleeps' into the fully orchestrated scores of Halo: Combat Evolved (Microsoft, 2001), music has been developed into a considerable tool for the depiction of violence as fun and exciting action games to horrifying thriller experiences.4
Videogames present an entirely different form of entertainment to media such as that of film or television in that the experience by each player is individual depending on controller input. The relationship between player and the required control apparatus determines the resulting visual and aural feedback from the game which can have various effects on how aggressive character traits are perceived. Although surveys indicate that the average game player is over the age of eighteen, the incredibly expansive range of videogame genres makes it very difficult for parents to understand what types of content they are allowing their children to play.5 Around ninety percent of all titles released are exempt from legal classification which led to the establishment of voluntary rating organisations.6 Retailers and games console manufacturers such as Nintendo and Sony Computer Entertainment Europe require publishers to submit games for rating assignment before they can be produced for sale. The Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB), established in 1994, rates over one thousand videogames in the United States each year based on content suitability for varying age groups. The equivalent body in the United Kingdom is the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) and the Entertainment and Software Leisure Publishers Association (ELSPA) is the organisation that is used where a game is exempt from classification under the Video Recordings Act.
The latest installment of the Pokemon (Nintendo, 2007) series of videogames continues its theme of catching animal-like creatures, storing them in portable containers and releasing them only to partake in battles until they are knocked unconscious. In this game and many others, cartoon-like visual styles are frequently deemed sufficient to give a game a lower rating despite the violent concept of the gameplay and for Pokemon the rating is '3+' which means it is supposedly suitable for anyone aged three and up. If the purchaser of the game, i.e. the parent, does not have the time to test it before allowing their child to play it, then these ratings are the only available guide to understanding what type of content they are subjecting the child to. Although the Pokemon franchise remains seated in the unrealistic computer generated graphics of videogames and thematically corresponding cartoon television series, Computer Graphics Imagery (CGI) is capable of life-like imitation as seen in the film Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001) and many games now make frequent use of realistic cut-scenes. In a study by the Independent Television Commission (ITC), parents wanted a better understanding of the potentially harmful effects of violence and sexual content depicted in cartoons.
Almost all the children said they were never scared by cartoons because they knew they were not real. Children are able to make the distinction between a cartoon and real life...[mums] are largely unaware of the different kinds of cartoons available, and so tend not to set rules about which ones their children can and cannot watch.7
Just as visual styles can mask violent content, central to gameplay in certain videogames, so too can the musical styles. Apart from genre defying games such as lifestyle simulator, The Sims (Electronic Arts, 2000), most videogames are similar in that they involve the completion of tasks. This makes it easy to mistake all games as following a pattern in the way in which they utilise aspects of audio. In the Adventure genre of videogames a player may play through a number of different experiences. In the case of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (Nintendo, 1998) the player experiences a variety of orchestral melodies with very specific changes in musical style when the controlled player-character is approached by an enemy. In other games violent events are given the same musical treatment throughout the game as is the case with combat based games such as Guilty Gear X (Sammy Studios, 2000) which uses a variety of rock songs to represent the fast pace of gameplay appropriately. This is an association which the game creates, and although it is common to other similar fighting styled games, it is not a quality that is intrinsic to rock music that a concerned parent could be expected to be familiar with.
Visual and aural properties of a game are the only feedback through which a game player can form an understanding of what their actions have caused. It is never made clear whether music is used to promote or merely reflect the violence on screen. Semiotic aspects of the soundtrack are used in Star Wars Racer Revenge (Lucasarts, 2002) to associate music with a successful collision with an enemy racer. The music in 50 Cent: Bulletproof (Sierra Entertainment, 2005) is used mainly to combine the pleasure of listening to the music of that artist with a gratuitously violent game which rewards the player for acts of theft and excessive killing. These actions unlock extras such as music videos and CD tracks for listening to outside of gameplay. The effect is the explicit promotion of illegal and morally corrupt action which is rated as supposedly suitable for players aged eighteen and up.
The range of experiences provided by videogames is not restricted to the domestic household and exists in the public space as gaming arcades. Here, the more inherently violent games are best suited owing to the competitive aspect frequently associated with violence. In the popular genre of 'Fighting' games, a player can begin by playing against a series of computer controlled opponents until a human opponent decides to join the game and challenge the first player. In Street Fighter II (Capcom, 1992), one of the most successful Fighting games of all time, if the human challenger wins the best of three fight rounds, they are allowed to continue playing the game, quite literally forcing the original player off the machine.8 Virtual aggression, however, needs not to be directed at another human and many arcade games rely on the co-operative efforts of two players to defeat computer controlled enemies. Time Crisis II is just one of many arcade 'Shoot 'em Ups' that utilise the light gun controller whereby a player actually aims the plastic device at the screen in order to target virtual enemies. These games utilise music to fully control the feeling of tension and resolution in order to create a more immersive experience in addition to surprising or even frightening the player.
The one major facility of music that Shoot 'em Up and Fighting genres of arcade videogames share is that of attraction to the game. Arcade games cost money to operate, hence the term 'coin-op', and the specific experience that a game provides needs to attract players who are not even looking at the machine. Music for these types of games now serves two purposes of attraction; the first is to have theme music that entices a player to begin, and the second is to have in-game audio that encourages other players to either challenge the current player or join in to co-operatively annihilate the unending hordes of zombies on screen as in House of the Dead (Sega, 1996). Although many arcade games are based on premises of mindless killing or the skilfully controlled humiliation of an opponent in front of fellow players, the array of flashing lights and the cacophonous aural environment of such a place combines to provide an atmosphere for non-aggressive social interaction.
Half the kids were playing games less than half the time they were in the arcade. The rest of the time they were socializing. The arcades, like the ice cream parlor of yore, were providing a social gathering place, more than a place for compulsive play.9
The promotion of multi-player gaming is positively sociable but Newman suggests from a study by Anderson and Morrow that 'the competitiveness of the situations may be largely responsible for any observable post-play aggressive feeling'.10 The nature of violence in each videogame genre is so varied that it can be difficult to know whether the physical action represented on screen will cause physically aggressive attitudes between players. The first-person form of the Shoot 'em Up, owing to the visual perspective during gameplay, can only be played by a single person per games console. Consoles can overcome this by linking remotely through the internet or hardwiring over a Local Area Network (LAN) to create LAN parties provided by gaming centres such as 'Combat Strike -Nottingham' where players sit at separate computers but compete within the same virtual world. By listening through headphones the player can experience the soundworld from their perspective alone as they play games such as Half-Life 2: Deathmatch (Valve, 2004) where the main objective is to kill the other players. As with other deathmatch games such as Quake III Arena (id Software, 1999) and Unreal Tournament (GT Interactive, 1999), matches are timed and players come back to life when killed so as to allow the individual to kill the same opponents repeatedly for points in order to win. This emulation of killing for points, although violent in its representation, is much like sport and retains a less aggressive function.
Something that might on the face of it look extremely violent on the screen may in practice have quite a different function. The players might for example blast one another and everything else in a violent game...while at the same time enjoying extremely peaceful, playful relations...11
When killed by an opponent, the player is not punished visually or aurally. In fact, by 're-spawning' after being killed in a deathmatch game, the player is actually granted the opportunity to continue fighting but with the benefit of a renewed health guage. The only aural punishment one might receive is through verbal taunts if the players are wearing headsets with microphones attached.
The uses of music in violent videogames are extended further by the interactive nature of the medium. Every game has its own rules of gameplay which comprise its ludological system. The complexity of this system in a videogame defines how the player forms an understanding of how visual and aural stimuli fit into the controller input to feedback loop. Games such as Burnout: Revenge (Electronic Arts, 2005) respond to specifically aggressive driving skill by rewarding the player with gameplay bonuses and short musical chord stabs which signify achievement. This use of aural stimulus is what causes the game to become an immersive feedback loop rather than merely engaging the mind through inconsequential button presses. Greenfield conducted a small experiment to investigate why children found interactivity preferable to engaging, but less immersive, media such as television.
[At the zoo] they prefer pigeons and squirrels, with whom they can interact, to the more exotic animals isolated behind bars...They were unanimous in preferring games to television...One nine-year old girl said, "In TV, if you want to make someone die, you can't.".12
As videogames respond interactively to player control, music can no longer be viewed purely as a background effect as the ludological system imbues it with the added property of function, but what effects do these subtexts have on players? In a psychological study carried out by Craig Anderson and Karen Dill, experiments were carried out in order to better understand if there are correlations between 'Videogames and Aggressive Thoughts, Feelings, and Behavior in the Laboratory and in Life'. The various tests and methods used were specific to the measuring of the effects that videogames have on short-term post-play aggression and before the tests were even begun studies in 1998 showed that eighty percent of the sampled thirty-three popular games by Sega and Nintendo were violent in nature and that '21% of these games portrayed violence towards women'.13 After subjecting one hundred and ninety-six students to gameplay in Wolfenstein 3D (id Software,1992), the participants were then placed on consoles to play a competitive reaction time game which they believed to be against another human player. The instructions they received were as follows.
You will set a noise level that your opponent will hear if they lose...How long you hold down on the bar determines how long your opponent will hear the noise...If you lose you will hear the noise your opponent has set for you.14
It was understood that the actual increase in aggressive behaviour would be linked to the immediate provocation of receiving a noise blast for reacting too slowly. However, the results still showed an overall increase in aggressive behaviour after playing Wolfenstein 3D, and interestingly women delivered longer noise punishment than men. This further exposes the disappointing futility of this study as it does not take into account the already skewed gender differences in gameplay statistics which note that sixty-two percent of gamers are male.15 The study understood also that certain female participants may have felt uneasy and hence, further provoked by the unfamiliar situation.
Unfortunately, the evidence for links between violence and videogames is made clear by the Role-playing styled game, Super Columbine Massacre RPG! (Danny Ledonne, 2005). The game, created by twenty-four year old Ledonne, was submitted for the 'Guerilla Gamemaker Competition' was never published but is available to download on the internet. Using the genre of the Role-playing game, the player is given control of the murderer Eric Harris and the game is painstakingly reconstructed from publicly released dialogue transcripts from the day of the massacre. Role-playing games are played from a third person perspective and are generally based on gameplay that presents the player with a compelling narrative. Clive Thompson suggests that it may even be capable of having 'artistic merit -- offering a new way to think about Columbine' as it forces the player to be empathetic with a killer through the immersive experience of gameplay.16 It uses unrealistic 'characters the size of sugar cubes, and cheesy MIDI music', does not pretend to emulate the actual feel of physically killing people and allows the player to critically explore Harris's psychological state, rather than dismiss it.17 The gameplay directs the player through the last words of students before they are killed, but also shows the lives of Klebold and Harris as they sit down to watch Apocalypse Now (1979), one of their favourite films.
Danny Ledonne came under fire specifically after his game was blamed for the violent attack by Kimveer Gill that killed one and injured nineteen others at Dawson College in Canada. After it was discovered that Gill's favourite game was supposedly Super Columbine Massacre RPG!, Ledonne defended his creation understanding that his artistic statement should not be blamed more than any other violent media associations.
Though it was far from shooter Kimveer Gill's favorite game, it was among the list of games he liked to play. I can only assume, after 150,000+ downloads of the game, that it is also a game that other people like to play...What else did Kimveer like? Black clothes? Goth music? Pizza? 18
One game which suffered the most scrutiny after the events of the Columbine High School massacre was Shoot 'em Up Doom. Featuring an unrelenting Heavy Metal styled electric guitar riff, the game was one of the first to realistically allow a player to experience the killing of enemies in a three dimensional space from a first person perspective. Harris and Klebold did create their own levels for Doom, and these were distributed on the internet but in an article by Barbara Mikkelson, the myth that these levels resembled Columbine High School is recognised as just that.19 The effects of associating a violent game with specific types of music cannot be measured, but certainly explored. Punk Rock bands, such as Sum 41, frequently approach the subject of avoiding conformity and praising alternative music to that of popular charts.
Heavy metal and mullets it's how we were raised,
[Iron]Maiden and [Judas]Priest were the gods that we praised,
'Cause we like having fun at other peoples expense,
...Become another victim of your conformity.20
Association between videogames, violence and popular music culture is under constant scrutiny on the television. A brief scan through the backlog of complaints to the Advertising Standards Association and Ofcom yields frequent issues in videogame advertising. For the promotion of a game entitled Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction (Lucasarts, 2005), the advertisement uses a voice-over and on screen text to state 'You are a mercenary. Blow up anything. Blow it up again. Keep Blowing stuff up. Blow the living hell out of it. Blow the living hell out of it some more'.21 To say it was an incitement to violent behaviour is an understatement. A complaint referring to Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (Rockstar Games, 2004) was upheld due to the threatening 'carrying, loading and use of guns as well as fighting and graffiti spraying'.22 The combination of multiple forms of anti-social behaviour are used to cumulative effect and it should be noted that this promotion of violence is highly personalised. The Grand Theft Auto series of games offer the unique musical feature of realistic in-car radio entertainment which allows the player to listen to whatever style of music they believe to be appropriate to the current mission. The dual-role of music here is to portray the villainous missions in an enjoyable light whilst creating an innovative method of gameplay immersion, a moral issue that Janet Murray warns us of in Hamlet on the Holodeck (1997).
...a common anxiety about the new technologies of simulation. Do we believe that kissing a hologram (or engaging in cybersex) is an act of infidelity to a flesh-and-blood partner?...would the power of such a vividly realized fantasy world destroy our grip on the actual world?23
The specific association created by videogame designers between music and violent action depends entirely on the ludological system within which the game acts. We can delineate these systems into categories roughly divided by the broadly encompassing genres in which videogames are reviewed and sold. Browsing to the popular website, Play.com, separates games according to platform and then further categorises them into fifteen marketable genres. For reviewing purposes, a website such as Ign.com divides games into even more categories for a total of fifty categories in order to provide the most accurate description of new and innovative game types. For the purposes of the study of the relationship between music and violence in videogames, we will be exploring the following ten genres: Arcade, Platform, Adventure and Role-playing, Shoot 'em Up, Fighting, Sneak 'em Up, Driving and Racing, Real Time Strategy, Flight Simulation and Other which incorporates the various games that do not fit neatly into any previous category.
