Red Dead Redemption 2: Calls to ban violence against women in games are too simplistic
There is a chance for developers to provide contexts that encourage moral behaviour and social instruction in video games
Red Dead Redemption 2 can have some peaceful moments, but much of the game can be violent.Ten minutes into the game’s snow-whipped, western world of weary cowboys, disintegrating crime gangs and staggering visual design, Red Dead Redemption 2 is riveting.
Rockstar’s latest blockbuster game is so captivating, and its powers of visual, narrative and interactive stimulation so habit-forming, that criticism of the potential the game allows for violence against women – an allowance being taken advantage of with glee by some users – has registered with sharpness proportional to its own extraordinary detail.
Tech and science site Motherboard reported this week that Red Dead Redemption 2’s inclusion of suffragette non-player characters in its turn-of-the-last-century setting has met an equal and opposite reaction online. Gamers have exploited the moral freedom granted to the player’s free-roaming character, the outlaw Arthur Morgan, to shoot and beat these female characters, to throw them down mineshafts and feed them to alligators. Something of a competition has emerged on YouTube, with some videos uploaded to the theme of “kill annoying feminist” receiving up to millions of hits.
We are not confronting new moral territory here. How the freedom to commit acts of violence within games is punished or rewarded is an implicit tactical – and moral – challenge central to the gameplay of an overwhelming number of titles, and always has been. Even back in 1994, MS-DOS era game Ancient Domains of Mystery allowed players to not only kill their enemies, but also to eat them. Feasting on the dead body of the peaceful female Oracle in the game yields a tasty points boost to your Learning and Mana scores. But it also dooms and corrupts the character, impacting the algorithms that affect the character’s capacity for victory, and closing doors on potential story events.
So it is with Red Dead Redemption 2, where these chosen acts do negatively affect character capacity in the game.
The difference between ADOM and Red Dead Redemption 2, of course, is the level of detail; while uploading YouTube videos of keyboard characters attacking one another is possible, it’s not that interesting. The toxic misogyny of gamer subcultures dominated by males brands itself with the visual explicitness of these cruelties.
There have been calls for these games to prohibit the capacity of players to inflict violence against women, as the game already prohibits acts of harm against children.
This appeals on an instinctive level, but to do so I think is a missed opportunity for games to powerfully instruct adult moral behaviour. Literary critic Georg Lukács advocated this transformational capacity in his 1938 essay Realism in the Balance, arguing that if “objective reality is reflected, then it becomes of crucial importance for it to grasp that reality as it truly is, and not merely to confine itself to reproducing whatever manifests itself immediately and on the surface.”
Like life, the game doesn’t oblige you to perform acts of immoral violence, even when it provides you the opportunity to do so. We can’t stop people from committing violent immoral acts in real life merely by announcing the institution of the law; we do so through that law’s intersection with punishment and reward systems, and social values – how heartening to learn that one of the YouTube video’s creators has been punished with a ban for feeding the suffragette to the alligators.
Games on the scale of Red Dead Redemption 2 – which took US$750 million in sales on its opening weekend and is in current play by millions of people – may deploy the evident skill of their team into providing contexts that encourage not only moral behaviour but social instruction.
Isolated, angry teenage boys (and the vaster numbers of their more dangerous adult counterparts) could certainly use a play-centric environment to enfranchise them in notions and skills of talking to women as people, not objects – and the rewards of pleasure and de-isolation therein.