SERVER CLUSTER 544021. Following the deaths last weekend of more than 30 million soldiers in the popular multiplayer video game Battlefield 3, a group of concerned video game characters is lobbying major global military powers to implement stricter regulation of real world violence. The group believes that “excessive, gratuitous, and mostly pointless violence all over the place†is responsible for alarming increases in video game-based violence over the last decade.
Originally marketed as an “ultra-realistic†conflict resolution simulator, the latest Battlefield game has quickly turned into a free-for-all bloodbath as players recruit soldiers from a list and send them to their deaths with reckless abandon.
“Which is hardly surprising considering what’s going on in Afghanistan and Iraq and elsewhere,†said Pvt Judy Benjamin, an engineer with 3rd Battalion. “I mean, as role models go, I don’t think the real world is doing a very good job at all. Impressionable young gamers are growing up in an environment where unrestrained violence solves everything, and they’re bringing that toxic mindset into video games.â€
Benjamin has lost more than 2 billion comrades since the game launched in November last year, “some of them barely nineteenâ€.
Describing the mass casualties as “completely avoidableâ€, Benjamin said that morale among the troops was at an all-time low.
“It’s actually entirely possible to win the game without firing a single shot, because most of the points are scored by simply holding control points on a map,†she explained. “But you try explaining that to kids brainwashed by lurid videos on Sky News and Wikileaks. It’s just totally depressing.â€
She admitted that she lives in constant fear for her life. “I’m low-ranking, so I don’t even have decent weapons or any body armour. I’ve basically got a blow-torch and a shitty sub-machine gun,†she said. “A sniper with even the default SV98 could kill me at 300 metres.â€
The tragic deaths in Battlefield 3 are just the latest in a series of controversies for the real world, going back all the way to the 1970s when ethnic cleansing by the Khmer Rouge of Chinese, Vietnamese, and Thai immigrants in Cambodia was linked to the brutal xenophobic genocide of extraterrestrials in Space Invaders.
“I think what we’re seeing is the increasing inability of gamers to distinguish between reality and fantasy,†said Benjamin. “And every single day, millions of innocent video game characters are paying the ultimate price for that.â€
Something refreshing for once.