Battlefield: Hardline, or how I learned to start worrying about violence in video games
Battlefield: Hardline is a prime example of why we need something other than violence to create conflict in video games.
The game, if you don’t know, pits a highly armed police force against a highly armed criminal gang in a playground-style game of cops & robbers.
To advertise this game, they’ve employed the hashtags #BetheLaw and #BreaktheLaw
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past few months, you’ll know that police brutatilty and the over-militarisation of the police have become key talking points in the US, and a sore spot for many.
In using these hashtags and drawing an ‘us or them’ line in the sand, EA are indirectly saying that anyone who dies by the hand of a police officer broke the law.
This is the problem with using violence as a mechanic in video games: it turns serious issues into fodder for fun. If the game were to take a frank and real approach in the mititaristic activities of the police, then I’d be all on board. If it were to treat police brutality and militarisation with an approach similar to Spec Ops: The Line, or This War of Mine, then I’d be in the queue on day one.
But no, it revels in how the police can kill with impunity and turns the misfortunes and desperation of the poor into a target.
Video games and violence have a long history, almost as long as video game’s history itself. Anytime it is mentioned that violence is maybe not always the answer to creating conflict in games, they are accused of wanting to censor and dilute gaming down.
The reality is the opposite.
By so heavly relying on violence to spur the player on, games have pigeon-holed themselves into a fixed purview, never taking any risks or challenging the status quo.
Those who want things to stay the same are, arguably, more pro-censorship than those who want things to change. We want to see more things: they want to see less.
Video games do not exist in a vacuum, and they must be taken as they fit in with the world we live in. You don’t write a song about how cool rape is just after a huge sexual assault scandal, so why would you make a game about how fun it is to kill people as police when a whole nation is struggling to come to terms with how police use their power.
