Computer games possess a level of interactivity that movies do not. Even when sat in the front row of your local flea pit, or multiplex for the city dwellers amongst us, with the screen filling your field of vision entirely, you are not the one initiating the events unfolding in front of you. The recent film Minority Report portrayed a future in which potential murderers were arrested and sentenced before they ever commit the crime. One of the subtler upshots of this was a thriving virtual reality entertainment industry, one aspect of which made money from selling fantasy experiences to individuals who wished to kill someone they knew. Satisfaction guaranteed of course, except for the annoying triviality of the person you wished dead still being alive. The leap between current game quality graphics and this kind of future fantasy land is extreme but not unachievable by any means. A more realistic middle ground, and one that will probably happen within the next few years, is virtual reality game environments which provide all the sensory input required to make a scenario real, but lack the personal and some what unnerving element of real people transposed onto the characters.

When a game becomes so real that you can see, hear, feel, perhaps even smell the "person" in front of you as you gun them down, does it become immoral? After all, there still would be no consequences to deal with after pulling the trigger. However, when the act is that "real", does it cast assumptions on the character of the game player? Is it right to live out that kind of urge, albeit in a virtual way? Is willingness to pull the trigger and watch a death wrong, when no one actually dies?

Currently computer games remove the player from the blood and gore that result from real world occurrences of physical violence, even though they are depicted on the screen. The whole experience is very antiseptic, despite blood and bits of people flying around and characters remaining in view lying on the ground bleeding to death, because it's still quite obviously, just computer generated pictures and not real footage. Most people have never stood in the middle of a battlefield as war is waged around them. Neither have I but I don't need to in order to state quite categorically that I wouldn't want to. The beginning of Saving Private Ryan, depicting the D-Day landings in Normandy, is a sequence of images well known and burnt into public consciousness. Scenes such as that are enacted across the globe, in darkened bedrooms and in office cubicles thousands of times a day without a second thought. One day, computer graphics will be as good as that footage. One day, you will be able to stand in the middle of that battle field, joystick in one hand, beer can in another. It would take a stronger person than I to play though a level like that more than once.

Hard to stomach? Almost certainly. Distasteful or disrespectful? Quite possibly. Morally right or morally wrong? I don't know that I could play a game like that which to me would be an indication that I believe it to be wrong. Another issue to think about is the subject matter on which the game is based and just how much bloodshed there is. Until faced with such a situation and the choice of whether to play or to decline the offer I really have no idea. Peer pressure and curiosity alone will likely be enough to coax people into "playing" once.

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