Metonymy, or Why the Violent Video Game Discussion Is Ridiculous

I used to believe that the path from thought to language traveled only in one direction. It seemed to me that spoken and written words were a poor approximation of the mind's inner workings, a crude limitation of this dreadfully physical plane of existence. Of course, now that I'm older and wiser (or at least just older), I look back on such naively dualist arguments with chagrin. Our minds and bodies, our thoughts and actions—who we are and what we do—these things are deeply intertwined. It's not only the case that how we think affects what we say, but also that what we say affects how we think.

There's a well-worn rhetorical device known as "metonymy". In general, the term refers to the use of a word or phrase as a surrogate for a related concept, like calling a businessman a "suit". Its most frequent use by far, though, is when we refer to some collective entity using a simpler, related word, like referring to the American film industry as "Hollywood" or the executive branch of the United States government as "The White House". Like any part of language, metonymy is a mechanism for conveying meaning and processing the world around us. However, when using certain figures of speech—especially very common ones—we need to be conscious of how they subtly change our minds, lest they subvert the clarity of our thought. And while I don't believe that using the term "Hollywood" places us in danger of confusing a $10 billion industry with 25 square miles of movie sets in southern California, I do believe it places us in danger of forgetting that "Hollywood" isn't actually a real thing, but rather sort of a metaphor. The film industry doesn't think as one mind, and it doesn't act as a single entity.

The link between violence and video games has been debated pretty much as long as we've had both violence and video games, though it's periodically reinvigorated by current events. The number of ludicrous arguments I've heard and read about the subject is astounding, and seems to be bounded only by the number of idiots in the world with a microphone or Internet access. Usually these arguments are a cocktail of ignorance and deliberate misinformation, like claiming that the point of Bioshock is to murder "defenseless, cowering girls" or passing off obscure, poorly-made, intentionally provocative Flash games as mainstream media. However, inane ramblings like these aren't what bother me the most about this discussion. What bothers me the most is something much more subtle, yet fundamental: the fact that folks on all sides of the debate keep talking about "violent video games" and "the video game industry" as though these are coherent, well defined concepts. It's as though these terms metonymns for some broader concept, except that the broader concept has never been made clear to anyone, least of all me.

When I read the words "violent video game" in the news, what does it mean? Is it a photo-realistic first-person shooter, like Call of Duty or Battlefield? What about less realistic games like Halo or Gears of War? Does this nebulous category only include games with violence against humans, or does it include crimes against robots, aliens, and/or mushrooms? What about something like the Binding of Isaac, a game with a charmingly adorable art style and whose disturbing level of violence is largely due to the fact that it draws its inspiration from the brutality of the Old Testament? Similarly, who are we trying to blame for selling this filth to our children? Publishers like Activision or Ubisoft? The developers of AAA games? Indie devs? What about the designer who makes a violent game as a vehicle for social commentary, or the government contractor who develops a serious violent game for the military?

As a researcher myself, I fully support pursuing a greater understanding of the psychological and sociological effects that our ever-evolving media have on our cognitive development, our relationships with one another, and our society as a whole. (Since we're handing out research funding anyway, let's also give more money to cancer research and NASA.) There's some great questions to be answered, like how does imagery of physical violence affect our brains and bodies, and how does interactivity and the agency of the user change these effects? Is there a link between simulating violent acts and aggression, and between aggression and violent acts in practice? Why is obliterating one of my friends in Halo with a rocket launcher so much fun? As we ask these questions, though, we must remember that one of the first and most important lessons of science is attention to detail... and if we don't even fully understand the words we're using to talk about these concepts, then we're a very long way from getting any answers.

Review: The Cave (XBLA)

Though it's a clever and enjoyable enough way to spend a few hours, The Cave is unlikely to impress anyone who knows how great Ron Gilbert's games can really be.

In 1987, the debut works of two great artists were released: Guns N' Roses' Appetite for Destruction and Ron Gilbert's Maniac Mansion. Each was a landmark contribution it its respective field, a herald of great changes yet to come. While their contemporaries were concerning themselves with trivialities like stomping adorable Japanese mushrooms and pouring some sugar on things, Ron Gilbert and Guns N' Roses were visionaries alike, breaking new ground whilst addressing raw and edgy concepts like heroin addiction and sentient disembodied alien tentacles.

During the subsequent five years or so, Guns N' Roses would release legendary rock epics like "November Rain" and "Civil War", while Ron Gilbert would create The Secret of Monkey Island and Day of the Tentacle, which are essentially the point-n-click adventure game equivalents of legendary rock epics. After that, the members of GnR and Gilbert would do what all great artists seem to do these days: hang around for another two decades occasionally producing works that will never hold a candle to their previous masterpieces, but that I—like all the other nostalgia addicts out there—buy anyways.

Gilbert's newest work, The Cave, is a downloadable title available on PC, OS X, the PS3 Network and Xbox LIVE Marketplace. A puzzle adventure game vaguely reminiscent of his original Maniac Mansion, The Cave lets you choose three out of seven playable characters with whom to explore a surreal, hostile environment, solving puzzles with found items while unlocking the secrets of a mysterious world. (For some reason there's also a platforming component, presumably to meet some sort of genre diversity quota imposed by our liberal activist government.) The cast is a predictably diverse set of zany characters, such as a a time-traveling museum worker and a pair of possessed twin children. Each has their own special ability that alters the way you solve puzzles in "The Cave" (such as the ability to bypass locked doors or to hold one's breath), and each has a dark motivation for pursuing the wealth and power hidden in its depths.

Welcome to "The Cave".

Despite having been underwhelmed by Gilbert's recent Deathspank games, I approached The Cave with uncharacteristic amount of optimism, in part because it was a collaboration with one of my favorite studios, Tim Schafer's Double Fine Productions. Unfortunately, I've found in my life that such incidents of optimism rarely go unpunished, and this time was no exception. Even though Gilbert's Maniac Mansion pioneered the multi-character puzzle adventure, the past 25 years have seen amazing innovations on the original concept (see the classic SNES game The Lost Vikings, or last year's PC title Resonance), and The Cave feels a bit behind the times by comparison. Most of the features that set it apart from similar games feel like concessions instead of improvements, such as the fact that your characters can only carry one item at a time, or that the platforming elements are as tedious as they are unnecessary.

I'm certainly not asking Gilbert to retread old ground, but The Cave could go much further in building on the essence of what made games like Monkey Island great. For me, the magic of these games was that moment when the moving parts of a puzzle clicked into place, when your brain twisted in just the right way and you could suddenly see the perverse logic that governed these fantastical, comical worlds. There's times when The Cave dabbles in these mind-bending realms—for instance, when a guard slips because you placed a "wet floor" sign in front of him—but for the most part, the puzzles are of the fairly straightforward "lock-and-key" variety. Even the multi-character component is only delivered by half-measures, as most areas are either generic enough to be traversed nearly identically regardless of your team, or they're so particular to a single character that the other two are irrelevant.

Fun fact: advertising revenues from grog companies have funded nearly all of Ron Gilbert's games.

In the end, though, I found the biggest barrier to enjoying The Cave wasn't the mediocre gameplay, but rather the setting itself. I've always had a limited affection for places like Alice's Wonderland, fantasy settings where literally anything can happen... because if anything can happen, then essentially nothing can happen. In such lands of sheer absurdity, nothing is of consequence, nothing is surprising, and this utter lack of terra firma means there's no foundation upon which to build a compelling narrative. In other words, Gilbert's particular brand of charm shines much better in a place where the rules are ludicrous—like the Edison family mansion or Melee Island—than in a place with no rules at all.