Violence and suffering: a game of consequences

In our engagement with the small screen, we don’t mind learning – but we don’t like being lectured to. From its opening moments, the one-off feature-length drama Stolen (BBC1 Sunday) was keen to insist that, though not based on a true story, it was concerned with real tragedy. Before the opening credits, a written prologue explained that every day children are trafficked into the UK and put to work “unpaid, unprotected, unseen”. And those viewers still watching by the end were rewarded with a Unicef statistic and quotation from Nelson Mandela.

Memo from the Dark Side, the 434th episode of Law and Order and the first in a new series (Thursdays Sky 1), also came bookended with messages, but kept things simple: “The following story is fictional and does not depict any actual person or event.” Then, 40 minutes on, for the forgetful or those who tuned in late, it stated: “The preceding story is fictional. No actual person or event was depicted.”

Proclaiming, disclaiming: this pretty well sums up the programmes’ respective attitudes to the real suffering on which they touched. The protagonist of Stolen was a detective specialising in immigration (Damian Lewis) but the only characters who mattered were the trafficked children. In Memo from the Dark Side, events at Abu Ghraib formed the backdrop to the New York district attorney’s latest case. But entertainment is a powerful tool of enlightenment. And while Stolen, by dividing its attention between three unrelated victims of trafficking, lacked tautness and tension, Law and Order, by conducting business as usual, proved that a dramatic approach is as capable of provoking thought and feeling as a traditionally didactic one.

Memo from the Dark Side, for all its crudity and dependence on convention, questions assumptions about respectability and responsibility in television. It also recalled a memorable episode of the Law and Order spin-off, Special Victims Unit, that actually took such themes as its subject. Game concerned a murder that re-enacted images from a video game – a murder which, it turned out, had been committed by a couple who claimed, in defence, to be incapable of distinguishing fantasy and reality.

This is how one strand of the Law and Order empire used video games as a plot point, but it also represents the prevailing view about video games’ effect on society. The idea that video games are both dangerous and unserious, that they erode their users’ moral sense and grasp on reality, is well established. It is convenient for governments, the media and lawmakers to blame acts of violence on a form of entertainment that can be censored, especially when the real causes may be difficult to isolate and impossible to control. But Steven Poole, in his study of video games, Trigger Happy, argues convincingly that although games may influence the style of a crime, they cannot be held responsible for implanting murderous desires.

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The two-hour discussion between Julian Assange and the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek (Saturday, view at www.democracynow.org), mainly about corruption and cruelty, was a first-rate piece of online entertainment. In the chair, Amy Goodman kicked things off by talking about the Baghdad airstrike video (released by WikiLeaks) in which US soldiers are shown shooting Iraqi civilians from a helicopter – as Assange put it on a previous occasion, “acting like they’re playing video games”. (The video can be found on YouTube.) Assange didn’t mean that the soldiers had been influenced or corrupted by video games, merely that they were acting as if their behaviour didn’t have real-world consequences.

Games offer experiments in experience; this is the source of their in-built value. Speaking of the Grand Theft Auto series, often criticised for its portrayal of violent crime, Zizek has said: “In order to do something in reality, you play it virtually.” The NYPD said something similar to GTA’s publisher: “We’d rather they did it in your game than on the street.”

Back in the mid-1990s, the social philosopher Gillian Rose put this argument in terms of a plea for play, in her autobiography Love’s Work (republished this week, NYRB Classics). She wrote that the “decision to stop small children” from playing “pugnacious video games” evinces a loss of trust in play’s ability to teach the difference between fantasy and reality. Of course, forms of play may be dangerously adopted by those who lack a sense of this difference. The disturbed twin-villains in the final episode of the just-about-watchable police drama Luther (BBC1, Tuesday) were engaged in a game of bitter fraternal one-upmanship. Each committed their crimes according to a point system; dice were thrown; there was talk of scores and levels. But games provide an outlet for this kind of behaviour, not a spur.

It is tempting, when confronted with a programme as furrow-browed yet uninvolving as Stolen, to celebrate the educative potential of a dynamic and immersive form such as the video game. Video games – even, or especially, violent ones such as GTA – are capable of a more powerful evocation of human cruelty than Law and Order in a good week, or Assange and Zizek on good form. It helps that what video games have to teach us about morality and reality is intrinsic to imagination and role-play, not something that most gamemakers – unlike some programme makers – feel obliged to shove down our throats.

small.screen@ft.com