Violence causes video games.
I deleted a long-winded post about my hand-wringing about the relationship between the video game industry and United States gun culture. If you’ve known me for a long time you’ve seen me write that post on various different social media platforms over and over, my feelings have not changed, and I don’t think I know anybody who fundamentally disagrees.
Instead I’ll admit I spent an afternoon reading about the history of what eventually became the 7.62x51mm NATO and 5.56x45mm NATO ammunition standards (if you have never served in the military and are already familiar with those sequences of numbers, you are likely a brain poisoned gamer like me). I have to say, as ideologically disagreeable as it is to me, I appreciate all the work my fellow civilian game developers have poured into making military weapons feel stylish and empowering, because the design and manufacture of the very same real life arms they celebrate is just as boring, frustrating, anticlimactic, and brutally pragmatic as the bureaucracy of war itself.
Here’s a summary of what I learned, in terms an eager sixteen year old gamer at a recruiting office would understand.
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World War II: Big bullets. High recoil. Arms manufacturers lie to the Pentagon about how good they are. Too heavy to carry lots of them. Single shots tear people to shreds. Automatic fire misses. Soldiers load individual bullets, aim carefully, and die a lot.
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Cold War: Big bullets too clumsy from close up in jungles and cities where all the war is happening. Soldiers with rifles killed in ambushes by randos with pistols and SMGs. Smaller bullets. High recoil. Lower stopping power. Arms manufacturers lie to the Pentagon about how good they are. Single bullets kill if aimed right. Automatic fire misses a little less. Magazines are too heavy and have too few shots. Soldiers duct tape them together, still run out of ammo, and die a lot.
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Present: Little bullets, for war in jungles and cities. Low recoil. Low stopping power. Arms manufacturers lie to the Pentagon about how good they are. Soldiers have to aim perfectly to kill anybody, so they usually just spray a lot instead to get the enemy to fuck off. Automatic fire is accurate. Magazines carry more bullets, reducing the benefit of lower weight. Soldiers are bad at killing each other but they are taught to shoot a lot to protect themselves so they slaughter a fuckton of civilians.
The trend, in video game terms, is damage down, rate of fire up. “Stopping power” and “lethality” of a round are for civilian penis enlargement, the military knows that shit is not what actually wins gunfights. Less boom headshot pow woo, more pew pew pew suppressing fire, you just murdered some rando’s whole family instead of the enemy. You get shot, chances are you don’t die gloriously like in WWII, you sit on a street corner after the war haunted by your demons, missing organs and begging for change.
Conversely, I've noticed a pattern: Hollywood and video games prefer bigger, more powerful guns with greater single shot lethality, because of the power fantasy behind large and loud weapons and the emphasis on the spectacle of violence. (Consider the popularity of the Desert Eagle pistol in video games, widely regarded by real-life gun people to be an impractical novelty due to its short range and extremely heavy weight.)
A modern infantry rifle generally emphasizes light weight, accuracy, cost, and mobility over raw stopping power, since someone has to actually carry the damned thing and taxpayers have to pay for tens of thousands of them at scale, and it does not matter how much more lethal your soldiers’ rifles are than the enemy’s if they cannot easily be aimed down a winding tunnel, or fit through a doorway at close quarters. (Apparently the US Army learned this lesson the hard way in Korea and Vietnam.) Serious armies train soldiers, not badasses. When it needs more firepower, a modern military has bigger weapons that don’t generally rely on a single individual.
If you've ever talked to a young gamer--and I admit I had this mindset myself as a teenager--when they see a M4 carbine or an M16 rifle, they think of a Rambo-style action hero. They think, this is a gun so much better than any gun a civilian is allowed to own, and so much better than the guns militaries in other countries use, that the US keeps winning wars with it. This is the pinnacle of the brightest minds of the best equipped weapons engineers for the greatest military in the world, to which the Pentagon has spared no taxpayer expense. This gun can outshoot anybody else's gun, if I have this gun I can win a gunfight against so many other people with less good guns. Americans believe this about their own military's guns, other people in other empires believe this about their own military's guns, they get into genitalia measuring contests on the Internet about it.
It's all horseshit. Complete horseshit. It's people taking Pentagon pitches from arms manufacturers at face value. An assault rifle is designed to do exactly the thing the military did in the last war it fought, at the lowest possible cost and as light as possible, and literally nothing else.
And if someone did make the gun people pretend an AR-15 pattern rifle is, a true power fantasy killing machine designed for one person to outshoot an entire SWAT team, the gun and its ammo would be so heavy they would make their user a sitting duck. It would be....a machinegun. (Which, for good reason, a modern military seldom has one person fire alone, even the more portable LMGs like the M249. And also, a not very big secret I've been told by war veterans: though they often do, most machineguns aren't meant to actually hit anything. They just create a rain of flying lead few people are suicidal enough to run through.)
So I’m thinking: Isn’t it natural that these interests should diverge? Gun culture in the US long predates video games and isn't going away anytime soon, but the current incarnation of it is relatively recent, and makes little sense. It didn't have to be this way. Maybe the Counter-Strike / Call of Duty / Rainbow Six allure of “wow, real guns!” was a mistake. And not just because we the developers of pop culture collectively created the mythology that shooting people with an M4 carbine makes you a badass instead of the bearer of a grave moral responsibility, with all of the inevitable tragic real-world consequences.
Maybe it’s time to lean into plasma rifles and railguns again. Weapons of myth that would never be practical in real life, like those gigantic swords people made centuries ago because they were drunk and they were Scotsmen.
No one has ever shot up a school with a plasma rifle.