Social Realism in Gaming

Alex Galloway quotes Bruno Reichlin when describing a kind of realism applicable to games:

“A surgical examination of matters of society, an almost documentary attention to the everyday, an adherence in thought and language to the social origins and personalities of the characters, a more-or-less direct criticism of current society and morals.”

To reiterate:

• social analysis
• documenting everyday
• character development (and background)
• critique of current culture

– If you have ever played The Sims, you would most likely agree with me that this is a realistic game. In this game, you first create your own sim. The customization when building your character is very useful. You can decide the hair style, horoscope sign, clothes, strengths and weaknesses, facial features, turn ons and turn offs, and even your ambition in your sim’s life! You choose your own fate by playing out the life style of your character. Playing this game can be tedious at times if you decided to live a realistic life. It is just like living a real life. Balancing a job, trying to raise your skills in order to get promoted and earn more, taking care of your families needs, (if you decide to have one), all while trying to fulfill your own sim’s needs. Sim’s needs are those of a real person. He needs to eat, sleep, enjoy himself, socialize with other sims, etc. Failing to keep up with your sim’s needs results in a different failure depending on the need you neglected. You could get demoted, loose friends, have an accident if you don’t get to the bathroom on time, and even death! This game’s structure is how today’s society really is and how we act. If you have no job, you get no money, which leads to no food, no entertainment, and your sim will amount to nothing (Unless you have the money cheat). In order to succeed, you need money and you need to improve your skills, just like the real world, and it will benefit you.

– Call of Duty is a game the seems realistic, but without a doubt it is pure fantasy. The campaign seems real enough to believe this is how any actual war plays out. However, there is much more to war than chasing down a red dot on your map and terminating your rivals. While in the game play, you are in a first person view, only seeing your weapon. This gives you the vibe that you are this soldier. The graphics in this game are so up to date that you could easily confuse yourself in believing that this is real world you’re playing in. The customization of the character in this game is not as complex as in The Sims but you can choose your face paint, weapons, and different gear, depending on which perks you give your character. Perks are different options you can unlock as you gain experience in the game that help you whiling playing. For example, one of the perks is called “hacker”. Having this perk allows you to spot out claymores and other players motion sensors, reviling their location. Realistically, this could not happen, along with a few more perks that are very beneficial but no human being would be capable of preforming these different techniques. Playing online is also very unrealistic. You are separated in two, six player teams and blatantly kill the other team without a cause in a small, refined area. If you are a regular player, you are slowly being corrupted with the false information it teaches you about war. With such high quality graphics, it’s so easy to get sucked into this game, which makes it worse, continually witnessing soldiers die without a cause. Watching this enough will warp your mind into somewhat believing that killing people for no reason is somewhat okay. This is eventually grow on you and you won’t even blink an eye from watching a person being blown up because you are so use to seeing this happen. This game promotes chaotic killing all while demonstrating a war, feeding lies to the player to believe this is what war is all about. Call of Duty is a fantasy game, with realistic qualities, and also incredibly addicting.