Shoot First, Feel Bad Later.(morality complex of video games and Ubisoft's Far Cry 2)

Byline: Christopher Werth

To freshen up their blockbuster shooter games, videogame makers have begun to add a thin layer of moral complexity.

Videogames get a bad rap. Parents' groups condemn them as a raucous cocktail of guns, murder, sex and prostitution--reminiscent of the drubbing comic books received in the 1940s. Sen. Hillary Clinton, now soon to be U.S. secretary of state, once listed them as part of a SARS-like "silent epidemic" infecting an entire generation of impressionable youngsters. "We are conducting an experiment," Clinton said in 2005, "and we have no idea what the outcomes are going to be." Now that the market is awash in violent videogames, the industry may be belatedly getting a social conscience. For the past several years a small coterie of passionate game developers have been incorporating social issues, politics and moral choices into gameplay. Lately, big-name game developers have picked up these themes and begun to incorporate them into the blockbusters that make up the bulk of the U.S. industry's $9.5 billion a year in sales.

Ubisoft--better known for shoot-'em-up games such as Blazing Angels and a series of Tom Clancy-based thrillers-- recently launched a new version of its bestselling Far Cry series of first-person shooters that takes the game in a more altruistic direction. It follows on the heels of Activision's Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, which in 2007 recast the long-running series from the relatively safe environs of World War II--where right and wrong are always fairly straightforward--to the middle of two hypothetical wars in the Middle East and Russia (a not-implausible future). And BlackSite: Area 51, partly set in Iraq (but with aliens), took on an almost "Daily Show"-style cynicism, with references to Abu Ghraib and the abuse of prisoners, and game levels with names like Last Throes, borrowed directly from the Bush administration.

The big commercial game developers have long steered clear of politics, and a vocal contingent of the online gaming community is sure to let them know whenever they stray. Since the late 1980s, videogames have been about better and better graphics, not realistic human behavior and emotions. As Ian Bogost of the Georgia Institute of Technology notes, even many of the blockbusters with the most advanced 3-D graphics still essentially employ the concepts established by Atari in the 1970s--"move stuff around on the screen and run into other stuff." And where videogames have touched on moral choices, they've been more likely to show up in fantasy worlds than in the setting of real international conflicts. As gamers get older and more numerous, Ubisoft and others are now betting that more of them are ready for some human complexity.

Ubisoft's Far Cry 2 strips out the science-fiction aspect of the first game ...