Well, looking at a shoddy Photoshop job is somewhat akin to having your eye sliced open, so maybe the Un Chien Andalou reference isn’t too far off.

The animation and 3D modeling in the game’s trailer doesn’t look that great, either. I was hoping for something sort of 1 step down from XCOM. That’s not what’s in there.

Marketing was confused by all the talk of moonshine.

 It’s standard copy for a lobbyist organization that protects their own interests by pandering to the supposed fears of their base, and happens to insult their intelligence in the process. Being involved in politics for a while now I’ve gotten similar letters, even from organizations I mostly agreed with, and come away only more cynical. Over time you find out they all use the same tactics no matter who they are.

 As someone who’s also worked for political campaigns, this definitely looks like your standard lobbyist “rally the troops” letter.  I largely agree with HobbesMkII’s viewpoint on this issue, that media depictions of violence solving problems and righting wrongs is deeply problematic and responsible to some tangential degree for our higher rates of gun violence.  This isn’t the time or place to have a debate about gun crime in America, but I would like to make this point: what does this letter really represent?  Not a political position, even though that’s what it says it is.  It’s the commodification of a political position, activism bought and paid for like oranges or a new 360 hard drive.  This man writing the message couldn’t give less of a damn whether video games cause violence or not; what he gives a damn about is his employers’ profit margins.  And here’s another question, one that Congress and concerned citizens alike should consider.  Why do these violent video games sell so well?  Why do generic Middle-Eastern destruction games like the aforementioned Heavy Fire fly off the shelves?  Because there was a market for this.  Because we have made soldiering and adventurism through firearms an ideal.  Because the crusading private, rifle in hand, is what we think exemplifies our republic.  Video games contribute to gun violence?  Maybe.  I think they might, in a small way.  But they’re easy targets for moral panic.  Support Our Troops ribbons, that’s a much harder target.

It seems like there’s an interesting conversation to be had about the relationship between sanctioned and unsanctioned violence within America’s “culture of violence” and how various media, including games, contribute to that.

Histrionic culture warriors point to games as a cause of violent crime (unsanctioned violence), and defenders (rightly) point out that violent crime has decreased over the lifespan of the artform. However, has anyone done an analysis on the statistics surrounding American military involvement around the world (sanctioned violence) over the same time frame? We know that various school shooters probably weren’t driven to kill by digital “murder simulators,” but we also know that American soldiers are trained to kill with very carefully designed digital murder simulators, that games are used as a legal minor-recruitment tool by the military, and that soldiers have described both mechanized and drone-based warfare as being “like a video game.”

It would also be interesting to see if the increased production of violent games corresponded not just with actual military intervention, but with social perception of that intervention. Are civilian citizens in the Call of Duty age any more likely to be jingoistic? (Not that the causality would necessarily go one way or the other with that stuff…)

Just because games don’t contribute to a culture of criminal violence doesn’t necessarily mean they aren’t contributing (with the rest of the media) to a culture of violence. Admittedly, I haven’t looked at the numbers*. But what surprises me a bit is that, to my knowledge, no one has. But sanctioned forms of violence seem to hold a kind of sacred place in our (and probably most) societies, and maybe it’s simply not politically advantageous to ask questions about how the arts might mitigate that “good,” “important” violence.

*More explicitly admittedly: I’m totally talking out of my ass.