Trigger Happy
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
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