Videogames would be less controversial if they were more metaphorical
Manveer Heir, a videogame developer who graduated from Virginia Tech, has expressed a great deal of fondness and pride for the community he was a part of. When something really horrible happens to a place you have a great deal of fondness for, I think it’s only human to want to be able to do something about it.
Heir decided he wanted to create a videogame — not necessarily about the shootings themselves, but about the grieving process the community went through in the aftermath. He wanted to use his alma mater as the backdrop for a game about how to work through grief.
Queue the haters
Naturally, his announcement that he was interested in such a project didn’t get him a lot of positive feedback. On Manveer’s own blog post, and on a post about Manveer at Kotaku, a lot of commenters leveled a lot of criticism against the project.
Some said it sounded like a boring game. Some said the game would encourage players to not deal with grief, because watching an avatar self-destruct on screen would be more entertaining. Some even wondered if Manveer merely wanted to score five minutes of fame by exploiting the controversy that happens when you mix violent videogames with school shootings.
Sifting through constructive criticism
Now, Manveer admitted he hadn’t fleshed the idea of his game out enough just yet. It’s a challenging task to get right, and he admitted to that. However, I agree with some of the more constructive critics about his approach to the game design. If you make a game that merely depicts grief, it’s kind of boring, and would work better as a movie. If you want to make a game that simulates grief, it’s easy to end up with more of a puzzle that engages a gamer’s logical reasoning skills. Either way, you aren’t making the gamer feel anything.
But I can’t blame the guy. His heart’s in a good place: He wants to use his talent to accomplish something good.
Videogames should deal with these matters metaphorically
I think that, if something like Virginia Tech inspires you to impart some sort of meaningful message to someone, you need to encode the message in a metaphor. In fact, I think videogames are, at least for now, a medium more apt for metaphors than television & film.
Keep in mind that your computer desktop is a metaphor. Clicking on folders. Opening files. It’s all a metaphor someone imagined to make the computer make more intuitive. Almost all visual human interaction with computers is metaphorical. It’s at the foundation of videogames as a medium. Instead of eschewing that, I think game developers need to embrace it.
I think Jason Roher is on the right track. He’s not all the way there, but he’s at least walking in the right direction. If videogames want to become a “mature” medium, they should deal with controversial matters the same way a “mature” medium would, and I believe that’s with metaphor.