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Trigger Happy
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Metal Gear Solid is an anti-war wargame that features a
plot about treacherous goings-on in DARPA itself—
the very defense agency that commissioned a version of
Battlezone for its tank gunners all those years ago.
Metal Gear Solid is also remarkable for its imaginative
emphasis on stealth, and at the game’s end the player is
actually awarded a higher grading the fewer guards he
or she has had to kill. Carmageddon, by contrast, which
has the player driving around city streets mowing down
pedestrians in showers of gore, is a very dull game.
And in each of these cases, the aesthetic judgement is
also an ethical one.
All this is not to say that we can’t still want
destructive fun, to blow things asunder in beautiful
showers of light. But videogames have irrevocably lost
their innocence. Gone, thankfully, are the days of the
early 1980s when a game like Custer’s Revenge could
be released for the Atari VCS console. The player
controlled a pixellated, tumescent Custer, and the aim
was to dodge arrows and rape an Indian woman by
repeatedly pressing the fire button.
A relative maturity of the type which Metal Gear
Solid displays is becoming more pervasive, evident in
watered-down form even in very simple high-speed
arcade shooting games such as Silent Scope or Time