When the Columbine shootings happened, the trenchcoat-wearing shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were eventually outed as avid gamers. Harris had gone so far as to recreate a portion their school in DOOM. Their hobby was blamed for their heinous actions, and the media went into a frenzy. Video games and violent real life actions were inextricably connected, some experts argued.
None of these theories were ever proven, but the connection has remained in large part thanks to social justice warriors.
The games media is back at it again with the upcoming release of Battlefield 1. For the uninitiated, Battlefield 1 takes place in World War I, promising to bring gamers directly into the battlefields of one of the most famous 20th century conflicts, and one which video games seldom touch. So what’s the problem? Since many outraged warriors downright argue that digital violence can lead to real world violence, they believe that the upcoming video game trivializes the tragedy of the Great War and glorifies armed warfare in the deadliest ways for our youth.
Of course, more reasonable men such as Penn Jillette, of Penn and Teller fame, have fought this claim before. In a talk on The Wendy Williams Show several years ago, Jillette faced a gaggle of hosts who blamed Call of Duty, a WWII and modern warfare-themed first-person shooter, for the actions of killers.
“To try to blame Shakespeare and the violence in art for violence that happens in the real world is something that has been tried for years and is always wrong,” said Jillette. “People must take responsibility. We must stop blaming society and actually blame the perpetrators.”
When one of the hosts suggested that video games trained children with Asperger’s Syndrome and poor social skills to become cold-blooded killers, Jillette shut her down quite nicely when he pointed out that there is not a single point of evidence to back up her claim, and that most people — including those with autism — have conscience and empathy and that she was spreading lies about people that society should love and take care of.
With Battlefield 1, the same argument used by Penn Jillette can be applied. The idea that the game would have a similar impact on young people is as flawed as the argument made by the show’s hosts.
In fact, one of the better things about Battlefield 1 is that it takes us to a time and place that’s different from the one in which we live. As gamers, we like playing games like The Witcher 3, where gamers can experience a medieval world inspired by Polish mythology. The game offers a snippet of a place that doesn’t exist. Conversely, if one plays Grand Theft Auto IV or V, one can live through a contemporary satire of post-9/11 America.
Battlefield 1 in its own way takes us out of the traditional Middle Eastern or WW2 backdrops that many shooters use and brings us to a disastrous war where 17 million soldiers and civilians died and chemical warfare was invented. In many ways, WW1 was the most impactful war in all of the world’s history. The rapid advancement of technology forced by the war effort in every involved nation brought us to the modern era — mixing old ways with the new. The war saw the advent of armored vehicles, aircraft, and portable machine guns. Mounted cavalry, which had previously dominated wars for millennia, were quickly rendered obsolete.
One tweet, made by game critic Dan Golding, spawned a bunch of hot-takes during the game’s announcement this past May. When one of these SJWs tweets, the rest of them echo the same thoughts like dominoes falling over. There are no original ideas left. The initial response is always to take umbrage every time a new video game shows off anything remotely controversial.
The so-called game critics who claim to want to further the development of video games as an art form instead stifle it with political correctness and a staunch refusal to offend anyone who may find offense from literally anything. As with demands for prohibited topics in literature, all of this moralistic pearl-clutching over war games is nothing more than censorship masquerading as criticism.
