There's nothing in it for you

In my last post I argued that the V.A.T.S. represents Fallout 3's most compelling argument for a life driven by violence and the exercise of power. It's important to have an argument in that vein, because the mass media, including video games, have a pronounced tendency to represent evil people as purely unbalanced or crazy. This is unfair to the mentally ill, to be sure, but it is also unfair to evil. The wicked life has attractions beyond sheer gibbering insanity, which is why so many perfectly rational people are heartless and cruel. The problem with Fallout 3 is that V.A.T.S. is its strongest argument for evil because it is essentially the only argument for evil.

Spoilers follow.

For a wasteland that has been scavenged by survivors for hundreds of years, the D.C. area in Fallout 3 is surprisingly rich in resources. Everywhere you look you can find guns, ammunition, medical supplies, and money just laying around as if D.C. got nuked in the middle of an NRA convention. Your supplies are likely to be tight just after your emergence from the vault, but unless you make stupendously bad choices you should be able to rapidly police up enough weapons and ammunition to get by and, eventually, dominate the wastes. This makes the game, perhaps, "too easy" but that's not the point. The real problem with this, from the standpoint of the character's place as a moral agent in the game world, is that the character is not engaged in a desperate struggle for survival. He has to shoot things that want to kill him, sure, but he is never in danger of starvation, dehydration, or running out of bullets or bottlecaps (the game's currency).

This becomes a problem in the moral calculus because the reward for maleficence in a world like that of Fallout is usually material. Killing a man means you can steal his resources, and getting them is in some way worth killing that other guy. If those resources are valuable, then this assessment of worth is cold-hearted and evil, but at least understandable. If their value is trivial, however, then you are treading dangerously into the territory of the madman. Killing a scavenger might net me a couple of bullets for my hunting rifle, but if I can find just as many laying around in the next abandoned office building or buy them for a trivial number of caps it hardly seems worth it. Besides, that wastelander can't repair my gun if he's dead.

Even mercenary ambitions seem to be thwarted by the game's relative abundance of goods. In the late game a player who has devoted even a modest effort towards exploration should have a tremendous abundance of caps, enough to buy almost anything one might want. Unfortunately, there's nothing much to buy at that point. In the face of such an enormous surplus of money, it hardly seems worthwhile to demand payment for favors. Sure, you'll get more caps, but there's nothing to do with them.

Fallout 3 gives you the option to be evil, but it doesn't do a very good job (outside of V.A.T.S.) of giving you reasons. The resources you can gain through theft or murder have so little value that killing implies that you view human life as having almost none. The caps you gain from behaving as a mercenary rather than a generous protector can't buy you anything you need or even want. Evil isn't an easier route to your goals, even though the capital wastes don't have any law and order to hunt you down.

This isn't to say that the evil character has no place in the game. What Fallout 3 lacks is a compelling narrative of evil. The main character emerges from a sheltered existence with a loving father and enters a vast, dark wasteland. The ultraviolence of V.A.T.S. may be an attraction towards the dark road, but that's not enough to build my character's story.

The game's own characters can't construct a compelling narrative of evil either. Soon after escaping the vault, the character encounters the sinister Mr. Burke, who wants you to detonate a bomb in the middle of a settlement. Burke's dialogue is laughable, the sort of thing a 12-year-old would say if he were trying to be a suave villain. If you take him up on his offer you can eventually probe his reasons further, leading you to the revelation that the town will be blown up because Mr. Burke's employer one day mentioned offhand that he thought it unsightly, even though the place can barely be seen from his balcony. Detonating the bomb doesn't gain anybody anything; it's just wanton destruction. This is worse than cartoonish, it's practically mindless.

If you choose to go ahead and detonate the bomb, you are treated to the sight of a nuclear explosion. Awestruck, Burke mutters that he thinks it is beautiful, and as you watch the lush animation, you can, just for a second, agree with him. That's as close as Fallout 3 comes to giving you a reason. Is that really compelling enough for Burke?

Is it compelling enough for you?

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Power's joy and sorrow

I do not enjoy Fallout 3's Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System, because I know what it does. I understand the goal of its slow-motion, dramatic camera angles, and sound distortion. The fountains of blood and gore, arms and legs and heads flying off from precision bullet strikes, speak to the worst excesses of action movies and gladiatorial combat. Death becomes entertainment for the hooting savage; the moral weight of murder disappears in the antigravity of bizarre ragdoll physics. In short, V.A.T.S. makes killing awesome.

But killing is not awesome, not ever, because each time it happens somebody dies. I know this, and so I do not like V.A.T.S. — on occasion I could go so far as to say I find it revolting. Nonetheless, I appreciate the system. Because of its staging, V.A.T.S. is more than a method of fusing real-time and turn-based combat — it is an integral part of the moral arguments of Fallout 3.

In Fallout 3, as with many other "Western" role-playing games, the player is an agent of moral choice in a world defined by the developers. In order to succeed, such a game must provide an engrossing context, compelling choices, and legitimate (not necessarily positive) narratives for the spectrum of available moral attitudes. It is not enough simply to have options. A game of this kind must have reasons, and a world worth making decisions in. In this regard, Fallout 3 largely succeeds.

Among other things, Fallout 3 is about war. The player character emerges from a sheltered Vault into the blasted wasteland of the D.C. ruins in search of his (or her) father. The world above ground has been shattered by a nuclear war; most of the buildings are burned-out shells or crumbling hulks of rubble. In the concrete jungle of D.C. proper, the debris has grown so thick that the only reliable way to move around town is through the old metro tunnels, and even those have mostly collapsed.

The intact buildings you do find are often tombs. Tiny skeletons lie on ruined beds, clutching worn teddy bears; their parents lie dead in the next bedroom, or in a bloodstained bathtub. Security robots blindly patrol the hallways of crumbling factories and office buildings, oblivious to the fact that their creators have long ago passed on, and there is nothing left to protect. Even most of the vaults are rotting sepulchers, their inhabitants long ago fallen victim to Vault-Tec's insane experiments.

The people who inhabit this world mostly live in shacks cobbled together from the metal hulks of the old world. They live off the barely-edible meat of mutated animals and the imperishable foodstuffs of the pre-war era. Some of them live off each other, some employ slaves. Their will to live is admirable, but the means by which they enforce that will are often less so. This is the Hobbesian state of nature in its full articulation, a small-scale re-enactment of the international chaos and resource wars that gave rise to the nuclear holocaust centuries before.

These features create a compelling context, true, but they also give the "good" character something to think about. None of it is pleasant, but it is war. Fallout 3 captures the lawlessness of the resource wars already occurring in places such as the Congo. There, children are even now being enslaved to mine valuable ores. In Afghanistan and other places, they are pressed into the service of armies and forced to fight battles they hardly understand. In these places the forces of order and government always seem very distant, even if their propaganda isn't. Fallout 3 is especially effective because it puts one of the world's great power centers on display as a shattered, irradiated shell, but the destruction of homelands and the ruin of societies are the universal products of war.

If that were all of it, man would never fight.

But that isn't all. There is the desperate struggle for resources, yes, that makes men fight. But a man can fight for what he needs without being evil. Without being good, perhaps, but fighting for his daily bread, if he must, does not make a man a monster. It is power that does that.

V.A.T.S. is about power, about the character's tremendous capacity to destroy. The bloody explosions and painful contortions of his enemies speak to the part of us that cheers when the gangsters get shot, when Arnie mows through a crowd of hapless soldiers. It is not a part of us that loves justice, but rather a part that loves strength. It is a part that loves the ability to mete out punishment, warranted or not. V.A.T.S. represents the seduction of power, and thus the draw of evil. Only a sick and twisted madman could love what war has wrought in the ruins of D.C., but anyone seeing V.A.T.S. could, just for a second, think that killing is awesome.

V.A.T.S., for all that I dislike watching it, represents one of the great strengths of Fallout 3, and may be its best articulation of the argument for war. V.A.T.S. presents killing as an empowering pleasure. The system is a constant seduction towards the joyous exercise of power, just as the elements of the game world are a constant reminder of the sorrow that comes from that exercise. And if the over-the-top gore and ragdoll physics turn you off, they give you something to think about nonetheless. Because even if you don't like V.A.T.S., somebody does, and that attraction plays a significant role in turning a good world into a wasteland.

If you are curious where I got the screenshot, I'm sorry to inform you that it is an actual photograph of Beirut taken in 2006. War never changes.

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The Heidi race

Last Sunday, with more than 30 laps remaining in NASCAR's Phoenix race, ABC cut away to America's Funniest Home Videos, shifting the race to ESPN2. Many fans of the stock car racing series were up in arms, comparing the move to the infamous "Heidi game" of 1968. The comparison is inapt: despite some exciting wrecks, Jimmy Johnson continued to lead and win the race. He continued to lead the championship too, and therein lies NASCAR's real problem. It's not just that ratings are declining and the individual races don't make compelling television; the championship doesn't make compelling television either.

It's popular to villify the superfluous and artificial "Chase" playoff format, but that's not really the problem. This championship would be a snoozer under the old points system, too. Nonetheless, the goals of the Chase were to make the championship more exciting and increase interest in the sport for the end of the season. In these regards it has failed repeatedly (though not always). Ongoing efforts to make things work better have resulted in constant tinkering with the format, emphasizing its silly, artificial, ad hoc nature.

Despite its structural problems, the failure of the Chase system owes just as much to the man who is almost certainly going to win his third straight championship this weekend: Jimmie Johnson. The Chase format rewards winning, which Johnson can do, but it also rewards error-free racing. The short, ten-race span of the Chase means that there just isn't enough time for a driver to recover from two bad races, or even one bad race if it's a real disaster. Winning, and not making serious mistakes, are hallmarks of Johnson's racing style. He and pit crew chief Chad Knaus tinker around a bit early in the season, then put together flawless packages and flawless racing for the end of the year. That doesn't mean Johnson is boring — his late-race dash through the pack at Atlanta to maintain his points lead was scintillating — but drama is almost impossible to sustain in the face of Johnson's bland superiority.

What Johnson lacks is a clearly discernable weakness. He's not overly aggressive, and doesn't seem to have any problems with his temper. He's intelligent, mature, and affable — but he's the sort of person you'd spend a pleasant evening with and not particularly remember afterwards. He leaves name-calling, fighting, and spinning out competitors to the Stewarts, Harvicks, and Busches of the world. Would NASCAR be shedding as many viewers if one of those men were as far ahead as Johnson is now? Perhaps not. Their aggressiveness and occasional foolhardiness endears them to their fans and inspires hatred in their competitor's adherents. There's no such handle with Johnson — it's almost as tough to hate him as it is to love him.

NASCAR's struggle in the ratings isn't just because of the Chase, and it isn't just because of Johnson (or any other driver, for that matter). There are a variety of factors contributing to the decline, not least of them the economic climate. The races and the season are both too long. The choice to spread the season across practically every channel on the dial sometimes makes it difficult to find the race even when you know what time it will be on, and weakens the relationship with the broadcast partners. The characteristics of the new car, especially the significant advantage conferred by clean air and the commensurate increase in the importance of track position, have made pit performance disproportionately important. Although the new car can be (and has been) driven effectively through traffic, many crew chiefs are having a difficult time getting it there.

But Johnson and Knaus have figured out the car, the pits, and the Chase. Johnson's strength of focus and will is ideally suited to stringing together the chain of strong finishes, including wins, that's necessary to take the title in this format. Had it been Tony Stewart, Dale Junior, or even Jeff Gordon who solved the Chase then perhaps this level of dominance would not have been as damaging to NASCAR. But NASCAR is stuck with Johnson, and as long as it emphasizes the championship over the individual races then it will have to accept the risk that an unpopular or uninteresting champion will cause people to tune out, including their broadcast partners.

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Video games and violence: grasping at causality

The latest evidence in the debate over the effects of video game violence has arrived in the November edition of the journal Pediatrics. Japanese and American psychologists, including well-known media violence researchers Craig Anderson and Douglas Gentile, report that violent video games constitute a causal risk factor for physical aggression. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the gaming internets have already expressed their disagreement with these results via angry blog postings based on secondary reporting (calmer coverage can be found at Gamasutra). A more professional critique has also been offered, in the form of a post-publication peer review by Texas A&M International University Professor Christopher Ferguson. The paper tries to sell itself as a significant piece of new proof, which it is not. Anderson et al. have found an interesting, if weak, correlation that they cannot prove to be causal, due to the limitations of the methods employed.

The study has two key advantages that, in principle, make it a unique addition to our knowledge about the effects of video game violence. Firstly, it attempts to correlate physical aggression (PA) in teens and kids with habitual exposure to video game violence (HVGV) 3-6 months earlier. While the use of a timecourse alone cannot prove causation, long-term correlations are thought to suggest a causal relationship more strongly than instantaneous correlations. Secondly, the study involves several age groups from two countries, the United States and Japan. Although more children play video games in Japan than in the US, the rate of violent crime in Japanese society is much lower than in the US. This has occasionally been held out as disproof of an HVGV-PA link, but all it really establishes is that other factors play a significant role. Therefore it would be interesting to determine whether cultural differences between the US and Japan alter the effect of HVGV on PA.

Three sets of children (two in Japan, one in the US) filled out questionnaires querying their gaming habits and physical aggression levels. Some months later, these same children were surveyed again to see whether their physical aggression levels had changed. The authors found that HVGV levels at the first time point had a weak correlation (r= 0.28) with PA at the second time point. This effect varied significantly over the individual datasets and was strongest in the youngest age group. However, the r value did not exceed 0.5 for any of these datasets.

In layman's terms, one could see these results as evidence that HVGV predicts between 8% and 16% of the level of physical aggression, depending on the age group and nationality. I caution my readers that this interpretation is an oversimplification that depends on certain assumptions about the data to have any validity. Because no statistics of the underlying matrices are provided I cannot substantiate those assumptions, so this should not be taken as a definitive description of the study's findings. Statistics (even averages) imply a model, and should not be trusted if it cannot be proved that the model is appropriate.

These results are interesting and indicate that, although the magnitude of the effect may differ between societies, there is nonetheless a universal positive correlation between HVGV and subsequent physical aggression. Despite the elaborate discussion of youth violence in the paper, this does not directly indicate a linkage to criminal behavior. Moreover, this correlation is difficult to interpret due to the study's numerous flaws.

There are good reasons to wonder whether the interpretation of the questionnaires produced a valid measure of HVGV at all, the assignment of violence level by genre being particularly suspect. A more significant problem may be that HVGV and PA were assessed by different means in every single group. Each group used different delays between surveys, and each involved differently-aged children. This doesn't necessarily mean that conclusions drawn by aggregating the three are wrong, and the authors contend that agreement across the varying methodologies indicates robustness. However, the differences in method and subjects multiply the potential sources of error considerably. Since the derived correlations are so weak, this is a significant concern. In addition, because the populations differ substantially in respects other than nationality, it is impossible to accurately assess the effect of culture on the relationship between HVGV and PA. Doubtless future longitudinal studies will apply more uniform methods.

This brings me to another weakness of the study. Scientists will occasionally joke that the best possible set of correlational data is the one that contains only two points, the reason being that you are assured of being able to draw a perfect, straight line through all your data. In practice, however, we know that having limited numbers of data points makes our interpretations much more likely to be wrong. A "longitudinal" study involving two questionnaires given a couple of months apart hardly provides firm footing for a long-term correlation or a causal relationship. The authors acknowledge that the study is limited in this regard, but argue that the short wait would most likely depress correlations from their true value. Still, a longer timecourse with more measurement points would be highly desirable.

The authors make no attempt to account for any confounding factors other than gender. They do not seem to have taken data on family situation, peer influence, parental involvement, or school performance, although all of these factors are known to correlate to greater or lesser degrees with both PA and video game habits. If we only wish to establish that there is a correlation between HVGV and PA that's not a huge problem. However, Anderson et al. clearly mean to establish video games as a causal factor for aggression. In the absence of controls for confounding factors, that is impossible.

Curiously, the authors also do not seem to have measured HVGV at the later time point. One objection to existing research linking HVGV to real-world violence has been that the observed correlations exist because people predisposed to violence choose to enjoy violent media. Testing the hypothesis that PA at the initial timepoint predicts HVGV at the second timepoint seems like an obvious thing to do, if only to squelch this objection. This seems to me particularly worthwhile, because the predictive power of HVGV for later aggression appears to be less than the instantaneous correlation between HVGV and aggression, significantly so for the older group. In light of these facts, the choice not to assess HVGV at the later time seems extremely odd.

Despite these flaws, this research is a step in the right direction. We need longitudinal studies, carefully controlled for confounding factors, over a range of ages and nationalities to parse out the true effects of video games on aggressive behavior in teens and adults. I do not find the present study terribly convincing, and I particularly dislike the more sensationalistic high points of its discussion section. Nonetheless, I hope that the authors will take criticisms like those of Dr. Ferguson into account as they design studies that will more rigorously investigate the causal relationship between HVGV and PA.

Only a particularly obstinate person would deny that there is a correlation between the intake of violent media, including video games, and aggressive behavior. They may inspire aggressive behavior, or serve as an outlet for existing aggression; either way, the correlation ought not be ignored. However, video games are just one, and doubtless not the most important one, of a constellation of potential factors affecting child behavior. Without a genuine analysis of the complicated causal relationships among these it is impossible to provide good advice to parents, doctors, and psychologists. The present study does not fill that gap in our understanding; it is doomed by its single-minded focus on video games and failure to account for confounding factors. While it is of value to know that the correlation between violent video games and aggression transcends national and cultural boundaries, it would be of greater value to know whether excessive playing of violent video games is a cause of aggressive behavior, a result of pre-existing aggression, or both. That is a question this research does not adequately, much less conclusively, address.

C. A. Anderson, A. Sakamoto, D. A. Gentile, N. Ihori, A. Shibuya, S. Yukawa, M. Naito, K. Kobayashi (2008). Longitudinal Effects of Violent Video Games on Aggression in Japan and the United States PEDIATRICS, 122 (5) DOI: 10.1542/peds.2008-1425

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