The Evolutionary Roots of Violent Video Games

Call of Duty

My house has a fair number of male teenagers, which means that there is a lot of shooting going on. The boys range in age from 13 to 19, so at any time video game battles are underway against aliens ( Starcraft), wizards ( World of Warcraft), mutated monsters ( Bioshock), or soldiers ( Call of Duty). For a few years, I found this appalling, as I felt that my nice young men were in training camp to become serial killers. Mass murder seemed to be the order of the day in these games. No one ever came out of the basement saying that they had to stop because there were just too many things to shoot. But recently, I have relaxed about these games, as I think I have realized what makes them so popular, and why they aren’t going to go away.

The rise of first person shooter games didn’t seem inevitable back in the 1980s when video games started appearing in arcades and on primitive computers. There was nothing violent about Pong, and the arcade games featured only cartoon style violence, seen from God’s point of view. Pac Man’s voracious appetite didn’t seem dangerous in any way, unless you were a dot. Asteroids was certainly a shooting game where spaceships and asteroids were the enemy, but we all know there are never any real people in spaceships, so that was okay. The low quality graphics made it all seem about as dangerous as chess.

When CD-ROMs first appeared as the next gaming platform, there was  great buzz about how now we could make games educational, and the kids would eat them up. That worked a bit for the little kid crowd, but it became clear pretty quickly that  teenagers thought games were for fun, not for learning. Fair enough, most adults don’t go to the movies or even television to learn anything. But why should so many of the current video games involve shooting the crap out of anything that moves?

Having watched my boys play, it has slowly dawned on me that the thrill of these games doesn’t come from the shooting per se. If it did, most games would feature a really big gun where you just stood and slaughtered anything that came your way. I admit that some of the battles in Starcraft and World of Warcraft look like that, but in reality, they are part of a larger story where you need to collect resources and plan ambushes and traps before you get to the firefight. Indeed, most of these games are a blend of shooting battles with a lot of hunting for resources- wands, potions, health credits, ammunition, whatever you need to stay alive and get stronger. Many games involve extensive searches for resources, with lots of puzzles to solve along the way. This structure has become so common, I don’t think the kids realize that games don’t have to feature journeys through landscapes to collect things before you get to battle. It just seems like the natural way to play a game.

It is that inevitability that is the clue to what is really going on here. About a year ago, while I was trying to get one of the kids to get off his game and come to dinner ( “In a minute, Dad!”), the penny finally dropped. The kids didn’t spend their spare time on these games because they liked killing people/wizards/aliens. They did it because they love hunting and gathering. They weren’t just shooting these targets, they were searching them out, hiding from them, setting traps, then shooting them, hoping they would not get killed in return. Unwittingly, these 21st century kids using quantum physics powered computers had tapped into the most ancient lifestyle of all: they had become hunter gatherers.

The parallels are striking. According to anthropologists, before the agricultural revolution 10,000 years ago, everyone survived by hunting and gathering. Most food was gathered, not hunted. Nuts, berries, fruit, whatever was in season, was gathered during the day. Based on cave paintings and other evidence, men did most of the hunting. But they needed resources and cunning to succeed. Rocks that could be sharpened needed to be made into points for spears and later arrows. Our ancestors were stronger than we are, but still no match for a one-on-one battle with most of their big prey like mastodons or wildebeest. So, they needed to find ways to ambush them, hurt them without getting hurt, then follow them, sometimes for days, as the victim escaped, bleeding. Our edge as a species was not that we were fast or strong, but that we were smart, and we could trot for long periods of time, allowing us to eventually catch up to the deer that we had wounded. Our species, Homo Sapiens, appeared two hundred thousand years ago, but our predecessors like Homo Erectus had praticed this lifestyle for almost two million years. So it is a fair statement to say that hunting and gathering is literally in our blood, buried in our psyches. Our bodies and minds are built for this kind of living - farming is a recent add on. If an asteroid ever slams into Earth and sends us all back into the Stone Age, we’ll be ready, this is what we evolved to do.

Seen against our ancient past, the wild success of hunting and gathering video games is not all that surprising. It is actually a fascinating case study of what happens when technology provides the human psyche a blank slate to play with. Will we elect to use computer technology to educate ourselves, or to save the world from its problems? Apparently not. Given complete freedom, our teenagers, most of whom have never hunted a real animal in their lives, will choose to spend all of their free time living like a cave man. Using the most sophisticated computer processors ever invented. These games are unwittingly tapping into our core psyche, and are laughing all the way to bank. The choice of targets has changed, since the kids are shooting aliens, wizards and monsters, not animals. But, as Barbara Ehrenreich pointed out in her fascinating book Blood Rites, our drive to describe all our enemies as monsters ( think Saddam Hussein, Hitler), probably tracks back to our Stone Age past, when there really were monsters in the dark, ready to eat us. Today we don’t fear wolves or tigers since we have conquered them, so we focus our fears on fantasy monsters.

So, now when I see the boys playing these shooting video games, I don’t worry that they will grow up to become Hannibal Lecter or Jeffrey Dahmer. I also don’t worry that they will ever go out to battle aliens - not unless the invasion starts in our basement.

Stephen Milton is a freelance documentary film maker in Toronto.

www.milton2.tv.