The Bleeding Effect

In the popular press, it is all the rage right now to try to claim that violent games create violent people.  Sweet, innocent adolescents, they will claim, are suddenly, overnight and without warning, transformed into gun-toting, brass-knuckle-using thugs after five minutes of Halo: Reach.  An hour of WWE Smackdown will send little Johnny scampering to the store, where he will load up on weight gain products and subsequently beat the hell out of his classmates for no reason other than that he played that game.  And all of those trenchcoat-wearing social outcasts who brought Uzies to their schools and used them with extreme prejudice surely had Xboxes hidden away with the latest Grand Theft Auto in the disk drive, still warm from its latest use.  Every single teen in juvenile prison must have played State of Emergency since they could fart.

 

There are so many things wrong with these claims as to make them almost comical.  Why the media or the politicians or whomever are so obsessed with pinning teen violence on videogames is beyond me.  After all, who buys those games for their kids?  Did violent children not exist before the advent of the Nintendo?  And who lets a violent child grow up without ever teaching him more peaceful ways of resolving conflicts?  Playing Dynasty Warriors 6 no more makes me a violent person than it does make me a Three Kingdoms general.  I play violent games all the time, but I was taught the difference between fantasy and reality by my responsible parents, and I have an easy-going attitude to begin with.

 

That being said, I have encountered two unusual and rather specific instances in which playing a game really has impacted my poor little psyche.

 

The first comes from Stuntman: Ignition, a patently un-violent game (at least in the "stabby-stabby blow your brains out" way) in which you drive stunt vehicles around movie sets for faux action films.  Brilliant game, but it has one design flaw.  I hesitate to call it a flaw because it does make it a more challenging game, but I will call it a flaw nonetheless.  You score points by succeeding with stunts, like driving close to an explosion, pulling a 180 turn, driving between two trucks without touching either, etc.  Every stunt you do adds 1 to your score multiplier, and there is a way to string together the entire level so that you have an ungodly multiplier by the end and get a five-star rating: you do "little" stunts between the big ones, like popping wheelies on motorcycles or driving really closely by parked cars, so that your multiplier stays alive (it goes away after just a few seconds) and increases.  This means that you will actually drive out of your way in order to steer close to oncoming traffic, pedestrians, park tables, trees, whatever will count as a "close call" and increase your score.  I got pretty good at this, but unfortunately, it began to transfer into real life.  I remember driving into my apartment parking lot and actually steering to the side just so that I would be driving closer to the parked cars.  I realized what was going on immediately and had to stop playing for a few days.  I call this the Bleeding Effect.

Christmas sale at Wal-Mart!  Outta my way!

I've dubbed it such because of the second instance, which took place just last night.  Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood was just released, and as I am a big fan of the series, it naturally sits in my gaming library.  In the Assassin's Creed series, a man named Desmond is hooked into a Matrix-like dentist's chair and relives memories stored in his DNA of his ancestors, like those of a man named Altair from the crusades in 1191.  As he experiences those memories, Desmond slowly acquires his ancestors' assassin talents, something which Desmond's colleagues call The Bleeding Effect. 

 

This latest entry, Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, is special because it has a multiplayer component, which I tried for the first time last night.  You and seven other humans are thrown into Renaissance Italy as various characters who look exactly like the rest of the people in the crowd - guard captains, smugglers, doctors, executioners, etc.  Each player is given another player to assassinate, meaning that while you are hunting down one player, someone else is hunting you.  This means that you have to find your target and watch your back at the same time, because at any moment, some random barber may come up behind you and suddenly fancy himself Sweeny Todd.  In my second match, I stalked my target into a square where we both saw one player kill another.  Then my target went up and killed the killer.  I took the opportunity to kill my target while he wiped the blood off his blade, and right after I stabbed him, some jerk came up and killed me!  We all had a good laugh about this (at least, I did), but after I turned off the game, I realized something slightly alarming.  I still felt the anxiety of knowing that a fellow assassin was trailing me and may strike at any moment.  I felt paranoia, even though the only two things behind me were my Christmas tree and a sleeping cat (who, to be fair, could very well attack me at any moment).

I'll show YOU Protestant Reformation!

If psychologists really want to study gamers, then they should look into this.  A violent kid is going to play violent games, but then, so will mild-mannered cornballs like me.  Rage issues are certainly nothing new, but for some reason the media keeps trying to pin the blame on the gaming industry without taking a second glance at the child's home life, whether he's being bullied at school, if he's insecure, whatever.  The media craves the easy explanation.  "If you do x, then y will happen."  But if you've ever been around a human before, you know that we are never so simple.  Why Stuntman: Ignition and Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood have impacted my sensitive little brain while the hundreds of other games that I have played haven't made the slightest dent I have absolutely no idea, but at least these two haven't instilled in me a strange desire to kill people while driving away from a raging volcano.