On Videogame Morality and the Decline of Heroism

Or

How I Came to Hate the Sniper Rifle

To re-appropriate a phrase, “sniper rifles are like assholes, everyone has them”. Or, like red (or whatever) is the new black, sniper rifles are the new stealth mission; a game element that is seemingly de-rigueur in any game that features a gun, or, let’s face it, any kind of projectile weapon. Unlike the humble stealth mission, the sniper rifle at least has the upside that it can’t be used in every game that involves the player having an avatar, but nevertheless it’s become pretty much ubiquitous in the modern action game. Ask any gamer what you might do in a “sniping section” and they’ll know just as intuitively as if you’d have said “driving section” or “fighting game”.

To cut to the chase, I think I hate sniper rifles. To explain this sweeping statement, let me illustrate two different game experiences. Back in the glorious, innocent Eighties, gaming was in the midst of a simpler time. Operation Wolf lured the player and his cash to its camouflaged cabinet by mounting a full size replica Uzi sub machinegun up front; now this, Mr. Arcade Gamer would say, is a shooting game – so much so that I don’t even need a joystick or buttons to control my path of carnage, just a big honking gun. So, after depositing your coins, the player smoothly scrolled sideways crab style through a military base, slaughtering the hapless bad-guys in his path, soaking up their bullets like a perforated sponge until the inevitable “You have sustained a fatal wound” screen appeared (the cold brutality of that speech sample still echoes fresh in my ears many years later). Into this cold-war den of vipers were placed a bunch of generic pink-jump suited hostages (it was obviously inevitable they’d be captured, with outfits like that, or perhaps it was a punishment from the malevolent terrorists); when a hostage appeared, he/she would limp across the screen to the nearest edge, whereby, assuming you didn’t accidentally mow them down with a never ending stream of gunfire, they would be miraculously rescued. The player character in Operation Wolf had three lives; if you did gun down a hostage, he’d lose a life, if all the hostages in a stage were killed, the game was over. It was a simple and effective way of making the player manage screen space and not just carpet the entire screen with gunfire; it was never explained what exactly caused this damage – whether it was soul-wrenching angst at the senseless waste of human life or damage from explosive hostage bone fragments, it was a mechanic which was used throughout hundreds of games in the Eighties and Nineties. The assumption behind it (in terms of player behaviour rather than mechanically), is that the character is a “good-guy”; as we well knew back then, good-guys shot bad-guys, they didn’t shoot hostages, because it was wrong.

Back in the present, a group of friends have scraped enough consoles, TVs and joypads together to find the holy grail of Xbox gaming, eight player Halo. As they play, numerous amusing situations and heroic deeds occur, like when one player, out of ammo and fleeing his opponent, is saved at the last minute by a team mate running over his pursuer in a jeep, or when the players killing spree is ended by a flying Street Fighter style pistol whip from the top of a nearby building. How we laughed. One player though, is positioned behind a big rock with a sniper rifle. Every now and then, a player is slain from out of nowhere, and an ominous gloating laugh kills the aforementioned joy in the room. Soon, people begin to complain. It’s no fun, I can’t get anywhere without being shot in the face by Mr. Ninja. It all goes sour, and soon, Mr. Ninja is the only one having any fun. Beforehand, the player’s were creating a shared experience together, celebrating each others’ skills and playing for the moment; now, ugly competition has reared its head – Mr. Ninja loves sniping people, it’s the best way to win, he says.

Now, you could say that this is a bad comparison, and in fact, I’m not even talking about the same thing in each example – I’m not really. The link occurs when you look at why the sniper rifle is so popular in Halo and games like it. The bible talks about not suffering a witch to live, and years later lots of nasty people would use this as an excuse to kill people they didn’t like – these nasty people defined witchcraft as “the power to harm another over distance” – that then, is the appeal of the sniper rifle; it feels more powerful than the other weapons, because it kills over such a long range, because the victim is unsuspecting of such a powerful attack when the coast seems relatively clear. Going with this then, the sniper rifle is all about power – it’s about killing who you want, when you want, without them having a chance to counter attack or defend themselves. This maps precisely onto the sadistic glee we get when shooting AI opponents right in the face during the one-player game of Halo; that’s ok though, right, since we’re the good-guys, and they’re not – good guys kill bad guys. But what then, if, like in Grand Theft Auto and its demonic kin, we can simply stand wherever we like and shoot whom ever we like; what if we can use the same thing to humble our friends in a friendly competition (by shooting their virtual representative of course, I’m not implying the average gamer is into shooting his or her friends in the face with a real sniper rifle)? Then, it becomes about power over distance, killing whoever you like – contrast this with the acceptance of accidentally terminating a hostage in Operation Wolf and the ensuing loss of life, or even the game. It’s not about being the hero now; it’s about having the power; it’s masturbatory – the guy with the sniper rifle is a wanker. And that is how I came to hate the sniper rifle; I’m working on a game with one in – don’t make the same mistake I made.