Philips Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy - Manual (Page 391)

Trigger Happy
393
were incinerated from afar; hospitals were bombed.
Relying on pixels rather than eyes is perilous, because
computers can malfunction, and pixels can lie.
Moreover, if the modern pilot has been trained on
souped-up videogame systems, we should not be
surprised if, when he is performing exactly the same
actions in exactly the same computerized context but in
a real war zone, he fails utterly to realize that his
actions now have a very real moral content. Behind the
clean glowing lines of his computerized head-up
display is an ugly mess of fire and blood. But he’s just
playing a game.
This constitutes a lethal failure of imagination. And
it is in this way that I do think videogames must have a
type of moral responsibility. Of course, we cannot
blame videogames for the deaths of Serbian civilians,
yet videogame-seeded technologies have contributed to
the potentially alienating culture of simulation that
allowed them to be killed so easily, so cleanly. I think
the duty of videogames, therefore, is an imaginative
one—an aesthetic one.
The situation at present is not thoroughly black.
The future is in the balance. Some videogames, for
instance, have woken up to the favors they have
exchanged with war technology, and are blushing.