New Review Posted: Destroy All Humans

[Daniel Weissenberger]

I review Destroy All Humans, and find that it offends my principles:

"I've never been one to object to violent acts in video games. Gouging out eyes with shards of glass? Acceptable pastime. Hooking lengths of chain to people's limbs? No problem. Sundering three torsos with a single swipe of a battleaxe? Fun for the whole family. The only thing that's ever bothered me was the context in which these actions were placed. I can slaughter people all day long, just as long as I feel that, within the game's reality, those people deserved to die.

An obsessive need to finish things I start led me to complete Project: Overkill, the Playstation game about slaughtering an entire planet full of sentient life to make way for a corporate terraforming effort. But I felt bad about myself for days afterwards. I recognize the difference between reality and fantasy, and I don't believe that exposure to videogame violence has any real negative effects, yet I can't seem to enjoy anything that seems gratuitously cruel, which explains why I didn't enjoy Destroy All Humans as much as the average gamer probably would have."

My opinions continue here. And before you ask, yes, watching me play Grand Theft Auto is basically the most boring thing imaginable, unless you're thrilled by strict adherence to traffic laws.

[Spokkersan]

What do you think about video games where you kill aliens?

In Super R-Type you killed aliens in space and some of those dudes were just chilling and hanging out and you killed them for no reason.

So why wouldn't they come back and do the same to us?

[Asz]

You make some pretty solid points, and managed to include pretty much every reason why I gave up on the game after a few hours. Its just not fun. Running around the locations is impossible without being shot at every block. The whole DNA thing is also extremely boring. The humor isn't actually amusing for me on any level either, I hardly cracked a sinlge smirk during the few hours I played.

[legendarypegasu]

I heard that there are a few B-movies unlockable in the game. Any truth to this, and what movies do you unlock?

[Daniel Weissenberger]

I don't know if I unlocked all of them, but I was able to unlock Plan 9 from Outer Space.

Spokker - It depends - If, in the context of the game, there's a good reason to be killing Aliens (they're invading my planet, they're trying to eat me...), I don't mind it at all. Now, were there a game where the human I was playing as went to unsupecting alien planets and tortured their unarmed inhabitants, I'd probably like that game about as little as I enjoyed DAH. As for R-Type, I think everything there was a little too abstract to judge what the aliens' motivation was.

[Spokkersan]

Do you support games that allow you to be evil? In Black and White you can torture your pet for no reason. In Fable you can kill everyone in a town for no reason. Do you like games like those?

[Daniel Weissenberger]

I don't have a problem with evil being an option in a game - I've just never enjoyed exercising that option. If I'm allowed to decide how my character behaves, he's probably going to behave pretty well.

[Jerm]

That was a great review Danny, and I can see where you're coming from, but I found the whole violence thing so obviously tongue-in-cheek that it didn't bother me at all. It was the lack of fun that actually bothered me

[Spokkersan]

If the planet was in another dimension where Earth was a world filled with child molesters would the game have gotten a higher score?

[Daniel Weissenberger]

Would it have been a less tedious and poorly-designed game about killing child molesters?

Because if not, it would have gotten the same rating, but it would have lacked the paragraphs about me being offended by the subject matter.

And I might have written something about how happy I was that the video game industry was finally taking a stand against child molestation (since video games themselves are one of the greatest tools of child molesters).

[Daniel Weissenberger]

Brad offers his Second Opinion on Destroy All Humans, and in the process, mischaracterizes my comments:

"It's not often that we see game reviews split down the middle, but in the case of Destroy All Humans! , my opinion is the opposite of Dan's in many ways. For starters, there's no way that this game is the most gratuitously violent game in recent history; that title clearly goes to BloodRayne 2. Little ol' Crypto can't hold a candle to the kind of heartlessly wholesale slaughter that a half-vampire pinup model can pull off."

His comments can be found here. And for the record, my message was not that bloodshed offended me, but the game's awful morality--as I recall, Bloodrayne mostly restricted herself to killing Nazis, which I believe even Germans refer to as the most moral act imaginable.

[miscellaneous]

Gort klaatu barada nikto.

[miscellaneous]

An interesting if problematic review Danny.

The problem is that you appear to be taking the high moral ground or think that your objection to the game is based on moral considerations.

Instead, it is an instance of moral cowardice and and a retreat behind hypocricy. It's a human, all too human, response to the mass murder of your own kind. It raises some interesting and unacknowledged questions about the nature of context and its relation to the player. Without getting all philosophical, the player is already part of the context, or brings his own context to bear on other con/texts.

My suggestion is that you try to address the contradictions inherent in your response to violence - the justifications and lackof - across games. What is it about a game that makes violence morally un/justified, and so one game more 'deserving' than another of play?

Given the context of your own review, a more considered or critical response bekons - ideally in an editorial that calls into question the morality - and contradictions - of your own response.

[Daniel Weissenberger]

The moral questions raised don't necessarilly make a game more or less worth playing - it's up to the individual to decide whether they find something morally troubling within a game or not, it didn't affect the score at all. Something's really got to offend me before it makes a game 'worse' rather than merely 'troubling'.

It would be hypocritical were I to object solely because humans were being mass-murdered. Even when playing a game, I consider any murder an immoral act, and require some sort of elaborate justification if I'm to accept the violence being portrayed as entertaiment. Do I think that makes me better than other people? Not really - there is a list of things that I do think makes me better than other people, though, although it's a little too long to print here

So, to answer your question without a lot of philosophising, what makes the violence in a game morally justified or un is the motive behind it and the relative morality of the parties involved.

Self defense is a morally neutral action, killing to save someone else is moral or im- depending on the relative morality of the person being saved, killing someone is immoral, but can be made moral based on just what kind of person is being killed.

Ergo (wish I had access to the little dot triangle), James Cash killing hunters in Manhunt is morally justified, because the neutral act of self-preservation is elevated by the fact that the Hunters are, from all presented evidence, murderous psychopaths. The wholesale slaughter of ordinary citizens by Crypto in Destroy all Humans is immoral because, while sexually repressed and ignorant, no evidence is given that they've done anything worth being killed for. And Crypto's motive, a naked war of agression, is an immoral one. Crypto also loses points for actively enjoying the murders he commits. Meanwhile, the game Condemned is almost totally morally neutral, because the central motive for all the murders comitted, self defense, is a neutral acts, and all the killer hoboes are under the influence of a foriegn agent, and not in control of their faculties, removing any moral culpability for their murderous actions. Obviously the times that the main character goes into dreamtime to battle the theoretical construct representative of serial murder is a moral action.

Under this theory, it's possible that someone could commit a moral act even when doing something patently immoral. Even breaking into someone's house and slitting their throat while they slept so you can steal their jewelry could be considered moral, if the person you kill were Bilstein (who, presumably, would be having a nightmare at the time). This is the whole premise behind the Hitman series - it's okay that he does all these awful things, because he does them to unbelievably, cartoonishly bad people.

So, as you can see, there really aren't any contradicitons. Just an elaborate system of questions that that allow me to decide who is deserving of continued existence.

[miscellaneous]

All I see is eloborate - ie, uncritical - rationalisations for your 'moral' positions. In other words, your a relativist when it suits your purposes - or when a game can convince you to relativise (contextualise) moral considerations.

Are you sure your a critic, and not just a glorified or self serving fanboy?