Why we should be more confident talking about games we haven’t played

January 13th, 2014, 22:28 Posted By: wraggster

Torture in videogames, runs one argument, is too casual. The rapid, sadistic hurting of a recalcitrant enemy in your average military shooter is the gory equivalent of pressing a button on a vending machine that dispenses information. Cumulatively, such scenes also reinforce the highly dubious view that torture works. So in order to make us think about torture properly, a game should oblige us to perform it in a really elaborate and disgusting way.Such, presumably, was part of Rockstar’s ethico-aesthetic justification when it was building what rapidly became known as ‘that’ torture scene in GTAV. It generated a lot of intelligent commentary, almost none in its defence. Using a videogame controller to extract a man’s teeth or smash his knees, people said, did not make them feel any more convinced than they already were that torture is wrong. Nor was it justified, they said, as a way to widen the emotional distance between player and protagonist. We already hated that guy, they said. Personally, I agree with them.Did I mention that I haven’t played GTAV? Well, I haven’t. I mean, not for a second. I’ve read what other people have written about it and watched YouTube clips. Does this render my opinion about the torture scene invalid? Not a bit. We should all talk more, and more confidently, about videogames we haven’t played.I take my lead here from the French critic Pierre Bayard’s wonderful text How To Talk About Books You Haven’t Read. It is not a cynical bluffer’s charter, but a serious argument about how books fit into our lives. There are, Bayard observes, Books You Don’t Know, Books You Have Skimmed, Books You Have Heard Of and Books You Have Forgotten. These categories map quite nicely onto videogames. GTAV is a Game I Have Heard Of, having read about it and watched clips. This is certainly enough to form a view about some aspects of it, given Bayard’s observation that: “Culture is above all a matter of orientation. Being cultivated is a matter not of having read any book in particular, but of being able to find your bearings within books as a system, which requires you to know that they form a system and to be able to locate each element in relation to the others.” I can locate GTAV within the ludic system, and so can you.

http://www.edge-online.com/features/...havent-played/

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