Blast through Boxing Day

Video games are an ideal gift – especially the violent ones

Not long ago, Salman Rushdie took to Twitter to say, ‘Passed this billboard: “From the Makers of Doom… Rage!” What does it say about us that these are the names of games?’ The author of Fury had a point. Video games are now bigger business than movies, and the biggest business in video games is war: exploding aliens, terrorists being shot in the spine, guns, guns, guns. To those who don’t know their FPSs from their STDs, it looks like a bewildering miasma of regressive male adolescent nonsense.

Which, of course, it is. Most of these games have crude narratives and cruder voice-acting; if you look for the qualities in them that you’d seek in a film (emotional engagement, subtlety of character, women) you’ll be sair disappointed. But they are, on their own terms, things to marvel at. The best are triumphs of information architecture, game design, simulated physics and sound; with gameplay carefully balanced: miraculously well-designed and often beautiful imaginary spaces.

Almost all sports and games, at root, are simulations or sublimations of warfare. These ones, you could say, are just more simulated, and less sublimated. But the co-ordination and timing involved in playing them well are formidable (I know: I once played heads-up with a world-champion gamer and didn’t land a bullet on him). That’s to say nothing of the tactics involved when playing online in teams. The root appeal of these games is not the simulated blood. It matters not a whit whether you’re shooting an alien, a Nazi or a robot in a game or a moving paper target in a shooting contest: what matters is making the shot.

And contrary to what amateur behavioural psychologists such as Keith Vaz MP will tell you, it no more stands to reason that playing violent video games will make you violent than it stands to reason that eating carrots will turn you orange.