It's All Part of the Plan

“You know what I've noticed? Nobody panics when things go "according to plan." Even if the plan is horrifying! If, tomorrow, I tell the press that, like, a gang banger will get shot, or a truckload of soldiers will be blown up, nobody panics, because it's all "part of the plan". But when I say that one little old mayor will die, well then everyone loses their minds!”
  The Joker

 Games evoke wonder which is what any good piece of art should do but I personally have always seen games as a form of catharsis, a way to unwind, take out all the stresses of life on someone that isn’t real, and if I had the figures to back it up I’d hasten to add video games have probably stopped more killing sprees than they’ve ever started, I mean I haven’t killed anyone… yet. There are uninformed people all over the world claiming video games create killers, but is it games or society that is criminogenic?

Evidence points to the later since murder was around a long time before games but there are still people that like to blame games for a deeper problem. Marx argued that capitalism created crime because it encouraged people to want more than they needed and then crime became a natural evolution of that goal. People want more than they need so they steal, people kill because they want a taste of the power society takes away from them and because of this it justifies employing police to control us and protect us from those people the system has created to scare us, and it’s all part of the plan.

  “A philosopher produces ideas, a poet poems, a clergyman sermons, a professor compendia and so on. A criminal produces crimes. If we take a closer look at the connection between this latter branch of production and society as a whole, we shall rid ourselves of many prejudices. The criminal produces not only crimes but also criminal law, and with this also the professor who gives lectures on criminal law and in addition to this the inevitable compendium in which this same professor throws his lectures onto the general market as “commodities”.”

Marx (Theories of Surplus Value 1861)

 Maybe one day a more realistic murder game will be created to prevent serial killers killing real people, like putting heroin addicts on methadone. I mean look at it logically if you were a serial killer and could kill a fake person and it would feel the same, smell the same be the same as killing a real person without all the pesky police investigations and trials and none of the messy clean up, you’d choose that over real murder any day.
 That is to say we assume serial killers think logically which it’s safe to say the vast majority are not but some of them are perfectly logical functioning members of society. For some reason that seems to shock us more, like it wasn't part of the plan.
 It makes sense if they were abused or they live in a cave and eat babies because we can classify them as ‘other’. I don’t do that so that explains why I’m normal and they’re not. I can distance myself from them, if they have a job and a family and collect stamps suddenly it becomes weird, turns everything on its head, every normal action becomes fantastic because it’s almost like they’re like you, the bottom line is of course they’re no different from you.

  "You know, madness is a lot like gravity...all you need is a little push." --The Joker

 People like to think that there’s a massive gap between sanity and insanity, murderer and ‘normal person’ but really it just boils down to choice and circumstance. We choose to deal with our problems or we lock them away and allow them to fester or redirect them, blame them on someone/something else. The idea of being controlled by an urge to kill is an excuse, it’s like saying you’re possessed by the devil.
 I suppose what I’m trying to say is that video games don’t influence violence in society, they are in fact influenced by a violent society.

Video games could have the power to rid the world of violence but in a sort of ghost busters ghost vault way, just imprisoning violence in games. I think getting rid of violence is impossible but instead of adding to it like some opinionated mothers might think video games could in fact channel it like in Max Payne when the two hitmen settle their differences with a kung fu video game.

 Violence will always exist until we’re all mediated by our machine overlords. Therefore would people given the choice, rather their violence take place in games or on the street outside their window?   Its part of being human, it’s that part of us that thinks fight club is a good idea, that part of us that walked out of Kickass and thought “I could do that”. Whether people like to admit it or try to pray it away, we all have little lizard brains telling us that you’d be much better off if everyone was dead and you had all their stuff.

 Now whether that’s just a capitalist slippery slope rationalisation or just a survival instinct is beside the point, people love violence, they live on it they feed it, they tacitly consent to it in regard to war and the death sentence, contact sports and torture, it permeates every square inch of our society, it’s the same thing that keeps us safe and makes us scared at the same time.
All legal systems boil down to a threat of violence, every rule we have, even school and religion hang the sword of Damocles over our heads if we transgress their important rules. Punishment and suffering and the threat of violence is so ingrained in our society I don’t see a time when we will ever be rid of it or even if living in a world without violence would be a good, because it seems punishment and fear of pain is what holds a society together.

  “To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.” 
- Friedrich Nietzsche 

 The fact of the matter is we like to think we live in a civilised society, but it’s just more civilised than the dark ages. The world we live in is a vicious, corrupt little rat trap where all the rats are eating each other  and it surprises people when a rat crawls out a monster, like that wasn’t part of the plan. Society pits us against each other and makes money and success out to be the ultimate goal that can never be fulfilled because you can never have enough of either and then is surprised when people value money and power over human life.