Bad Managers - The Rumour Mill

Video Game "Baddies" are Real People Too

27 January 2002, 17:37 GMT

Don't do it! Murderer! You are a menace to society, you violence-obsessed cyber-freak.

Every time you "kill" someone in a game - whether it be blowing up a spaceship in Freelancer, cocking your six-shooter in Desperados, or point-and-fragging in the latest Virtua Cop saga, you may just be snuffing out a real life.

For decades, strictly sensible people have campaigned tirelessly for an end to violence in games (or "videogames"). So far they have not had much success, with the most common refutes being along the lines of:

"Video games actually allow you to work off your aggression, so you DON'T feel compelled to go out and shoot someone in real life"; and:

"Video games help teach children the distinction between fantasy and reality. Reality is life; fantasy is make-believe. Violence in one has grave consequences, whereas violence in the other is virtual, therefore has no consequence beyond a slightly sore trigger thumb"; and of course the entirely ridiculous:

"They're just pixels, they're not real people".

"Videogame violence is as real as the pixels you are murdering!"

Recent cutting-edge research at the City University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England, may just have dispelled once and for all that last myth, however. By hooking up a series of well-known videogame "nasties" to a prototype "soul spectrometer" developed at the Home Economics department of the University, bods were able to associate electromagnetic patterns, previously thought to be just "white noise" or interference, moving around the PC monitor in synch with animated computer sprites.

Similar patterns were detected around the PC beige box sitting beneath the desk. Distinctly tangible lines of energy were found to be travelling along the cable connecting the box to the monitor.

"It's as if the corporeal entity is in the beige box," one of the University bods explained, "and the spiritual manifestation - or astral projection - is projected onto the monitor screen. The energy lines moving back and forth are analogous to the "umbilical cord" that astral projectionists often witness leading back to their bodies."

"Cyber-Anger"

The University bod went on to describe the effects of extreme videogame violence and "cyber-anger":

"The ECM waves would actually transmogrify into solid matter, a sort of goo-like ectoplasm, which with increased anger and shouting would start bubbling and erupting violently, just like that scene in Ghostbusters II."

The implications of this discovery are mind-boggling.

Now you're just being cruel. They're real scientists for God's sakes!!
Anyway, aren't you supposed to be rescuing them or something?

"The sheer amount of carnage and destruction that goes on in videogame nasties around the world is horrific. I mean, the number of times Lara Croft has been killed - impaled on spiky things, crushed beneath stone crusher things, or just thrown off cliffs by jaded gamers fed-up with the latest annual Croft rehash. Every single time she dies, a little soul winks out of existence."

This is especially worrying, as the latest trend in 3D shooters has been to increase the number of on-screen enemies and to have wave upon wave of pig-faced aliens bear down on the player, all being mercilessly wiped out by big powerful guns and rocket launchers of course.

A case in point is Serious Sam and its recent (play it again, Sam, no I mean really, exactly the same again) sequel, which between them must be responsible for millions of untimely sprite deaths.

"It's all academic anyway," said Tim Bliney, head of BugBlast Games Ltd. "After all, if a game never gets played, its baddies wouldn't even exist. It's like breeding pigs and chickens especially to be culled. Same thing, innit?"

But that's hardly the point, the University bods argue.

"All dis killing mud end now!" pleads undergraduate Vinod Pallai. So the upshot is that all that carefree virtual killing isn't quite as consequence-free as we had all imagined. Just think of all those tiny little computer people squeaking and yelling as you splat them with what you thought was just a pretend gun.

This horrifying discovery will surely lend some much-needed credence to the anti-violence-in-games lobby. Which is nice, because without it they've got bugger all.