Most gamers like an element of drug use in their games. Whether its drunk driving in Grand Theft Auto or simply sending a bunch of space marines to their deaths all hopped up on Stimpacks, drug use ads escapism to a medium built on escapism.
The article begins (as all good gaming culture criticism does) by wantonly misrepresenting a beloved franchise.
BioShock‘s EVE is a particularly clever example of this—by centralizing its Randian dystopia around the use of magical psychoactive drugs called Plasmids, the developers behind the game not only grant the player character fun superpowers, such as shooting lightning out of his hands, they also justify murdering the inhabitants of said dystopia with these abilities. After all, they’re just Splicers, just drug addicts, the game seems to say. It’s not like they’re people.
The author fails to mention that the “Splicers” you justifiably murder have been driven insane and deformed by the drug and will kill anyone on sight. You’re basically fighting zombies, except instead of some virus turning them into mindless killing machines, it was a drug.
Bioshock’s creator Ken Levine took umbrage with the author’s representation of his game. “Just read an article in Vice saying BioShock is problematic because it says killing splicers is okay because they were drug users,” he said on Facebook. “I’d disagree, but I can’t be sure, ‘cuz I was super stoned when I wrote the damn thing.”
A game developer interviewed by Vice for the story said, “I think that people are able to distinguish between Plasmids and heroin, because Plasmids don’t exist.”
The central issue the Vice piece takes with drugs in games is that you are mostly able to take them without consequence. “It takes a hero with the maturity and guile of Duke Nukem to pop a steroid every now and then for the sake of superhuman strength,” the author writes. “Needless to say, the issue of Duke Nukem’s latent ‘roid rage’ has yet to become a plot element in the franchise that bears his name.”
But the whole point of many video games is doing stupid shit without any consequences. Just because you can die in a game with no repercussions doesn’t mean we need to cause a moral panic over teens trying it themselves because they did it in Super Mario Bros. a few hundred times.
The author wants more games like the indie game LISA where the protagonist will have frequent bouts of withdrawal, reducing him to a useless pansy. While these types of games are great and add diversity in the way drugs are represented, it doesn’t mean you have to knock down other games that use drugs to add to the thrill seeking.
Nowhere in the article does it mention that television and film routinely misrepresent drug use and no one seems to care. It is not games’ responsibility to teach people the dangers of drugs. Leave that to the parents, and let us kill zombie drug addicts in peace.
[Source:-Heatstreet]
