I have a rubber bracelet in a jewelry box in my spare bathroom. It’s a cheap trinket from last year’s E3, black with red letters on the side. I got it at a demo event for Evolve, a first person shooter that came out last year. The booth attendants were handing them out to organize the waiting line into two opposing groups, the Hunters and the Monsters. The game, an asymmetrical team shooter, is set on an alien planet, where a group of Hunters seek to colonize the new environment following the destruction of their own. In the process they encounter aggressive alien life forms, creatures who violently object to their presence and destroy their settlements as they consume local flora in order to evolve. Referred to as Monsters, they’re the game’s antagonists, vilified not by the context of their perspective, but by their hostile response to a new threat in their environment. There, in the weak lighting and thick carpets of the booth, my fellow gamers and I divided ourselves according to our preferred play style, donning our labeled bracelets appropriately—Hunters on one side, Monsters on the other.
Unlike most convention swag, I haven’t thrown the bracelet away, mostly for kitsch value. There’s something deliciously rebellious about wearing the word Monster on your wrist. Something about it reminded me of my punk days in high school, my patches and buttons and pins adorning my jean vest like thorns on a rose. Not ready to part with it, I threw it into a dusty corner near the sink, where it often glares at me while I wash my hands.
I’ve read a lot of research, studies and various educational materials on the psychology of game design, spent countless hours writing about the unique relationship between personal identity and virtual avatar, the effects of participatory entertainment on that relationship, and how it affects social perception of our hobby. Underneath the webbed layers of intellectual jargon and philosophical theories lies the simplified, obvious observations that have plagued gamers for years: violence in fiction abounds, but the only medium that asks us to participate is videogames. And that’s why non-gamers criticize us. It’s why sometimes they’re afraid of us. They know we are acting on anti-social impulses that cooperative society asks us to repress.
Of course, their fear relies on a faulty line of thinking facilitating the assumption that attacking a person or idea in a videogame is the same as doing so in real life. And that’s a byproduct of careless or lazy game design, wherein the virtual avatars acting as a stand-in for a person becomes a stand-in for an idea or belief system. Cultural, philosophical or physical differences are weaponized as reason for conflict. What is used as a shortcut to enable the player’s ability to quickly identify targets becomes accidental propaganda, asking us to accept that these avatars are our enemies, simply because the developers told us they were. We have to trust, blindly, that the perspective of the developers who orchestrate our narrative experiences are in fact trustworthy.