Persuasive Games: The Right to Bore Arms - Ian Bogost

At E3 2006, the U.S. Army hosted a spectacle of military excess outside the L.A. Convention Center’s South Hall, in promotion of the new Special Forces edition of their popular title America’s Army. As part of this spectacle, they offered passersby the opportunity to pose holding a large assault rifle next to a camouflaged special forces operative and a Hum-V. In a nimble perversion of the tourist trap, the Army even offered complimentary Polaroid photos of potential players (and recruits) posed for glorious combat. The offer was hard to resist. Even my colleague Noah Wardrip-Fruin—who is a Quaker and thus not normally inclined toward fantasies of military power—couldn’t pass up the chance to get a snapshot with the big gun.

Just like many of the now-bygone E3 spectacles, this performance benefited more than just the Army. It served the industry as a whole, drawing general attention to videogames through the paradigm of America’s Army. Here gun porn and booth soldiers took the place of soft porn and booth babes, but to the same effect: promote and reinforce the roles players want to occupy.

Reflecting on the experience, Noah recently echoed sentiments we’ve heard before from designers like Brenda Laurel: “Most games,” he mused, “offer variations on the fantasy of being a “gun/sword/spell-toting tough guy.”1 The special forces soldier, after all, is a role common to videogames in general, not just those produced by the Army. If videogames place us in other people’s shoes, those shoes are very often combat boots.

One of the promises of serious games is that they might give players access to different sorts of fantasies. The almost unthinkable success of the United Nation World Food Programme’s game Food Force speaks to this promise; Food Force is a game about being a humanitarian. Yet few serious games take on a slightly more specific challenge: are there valid, even positive fantasies that also involve gun-toting? Put differently, can games offer positive messages about carrying and using firearms?

One might point to the wealth of games, both in number and in dollars invested, that strip fantasy from military action. Games like Full Spectrum Warrior, some claim, offer detailed depictions of military service that deemphasize the discharge of weapons in favor of more “realistic” combat scenarios. No matter the case, these games still rely fundamentally on the soldiering tough-guy fantasy, even if they present a soldiering tough-guy following the chain of command.

Instead, I want to suggest another candidate for novel gun fantasy, and perhaps a surprising one. I’m talking about a new PlayStation 2 game that bears the name and endorsement of the National Rifle Association.

NRA Gun Club is a newly-released first-person target shooter game. It contains over a hundred firearms, all realistically modeled both in appearance and in operation, from discharge to reload. Players choose from around a dozen shooting challenges, from an indoor target range to an outdoor skeet field to a carnival shooting gallery.

As one might expect, the game adopts the conventions of the first-person shooter genre. The player stands behind the firearm, or looks through a sight in some cases, taking aim at the center of a target. E3 previews of the game did not even seem to suggest considerable additional detail over traditional FPS gunplay, save the ability to hold one’s breath when sighting to achieve a more accurate shot. Following common convention, players can play a kind of sportsman’s “career” mode in which they become certified on a particular firearm in order to unlock new classes and new guns.

Many people—perhaps even avid players of brutal first-person shooters—may cringe at the very idea of an NRA licensed game. For some, the endorsement is reason enough to shun Gun Club. For others, the NRA name may raise bitter memories of Deer Hunter and its cousins, titles that still perform much better than more highly crafted games in the American marketplace. The attentive cynic might even note that the game’s publisher, Crave Entertainment, also happens to publish The Bible Game, a Bible trivia game for GBA and PS2 primarily intended for children. God and Guns, a tagline that sometimes doubles as a foreign policy.

I would challenge such skeptics to look beyond their preconceptions of the NRA and analyze this game on its own terms. For one part, it traces the organization’s increasingly sophisticated approach to videogame-based public communication. You see, this isn’t the first NRA endorsed videogame. Back in 2004, Interactive Sports Entertainment & Marketing created NRA Varmint Hunter, in which the player brandished firearms against infestations of groundhogs and prairie dogs. Marketing materials for the game assured “realistic animal behavior” modeling, thanks to a collaboration with the Varmint Hunters Association. The game’s splash screen depicted an unassuming prairie dog in the crosshairs of a long-range sight. The player even visited a bumpkinish general store to stock up on supplies.

Whatever preconceptions one might have about the NRA and its membership, Varmint Hunter’s developers clearly chose an unflattering characterization. With NRA Gun Club, the organization makes an important rhetorical turn away from this reputation as an adornment of hayseeds, hicks, and yokels. In fact, the fetishization of guns in videogames of the last fifteen years may make Gun Club one of the most effective serious games of recent note, as it offers a fantasy of gunplay that stands in stark contrast to that of most popular media.

Reviews of Varmint Hunter were, to use Gamespot’s official terminology, “abysmal.” One reviewer kind enough to score it “terrible” called it “very boring…and repetitive.”2 Another calls it “disastrous,” asking, “what can you say about a game that shoots rodents? … trash it.”3 One might attribute such a response to offense at the killing of innocent creatures, but a later comment reveals that the disaster is one of execution, not of conception: “… the (simulated) reload time is super slow…. I mean, if you really want to shoot a vermit [sic] as fast as possible, you won’t take 2 minutes to reload!!!!”

I don’t expect NRA Gun Club to score higher marks. Anyone who actually has shot at a firing range knows just how slow-paced and even boring the activity really is. Perhaps the only sport of greater boredom between gestures is golf, yet at least that time can be filled with gossip or business deals. Just as all golf videogames abstract the long stroll from ball to ball, all firearms games abstract the tedium of reloads and gun handling.

But firing guns for marksmanship is boring, slow, arduous work. Merely holding a real gun is anything but fun—in my experience it’s quite an anxious activity. The reality of a firearm’s power is an overwhelming sensation, and a reminder of the seriousness of such weapons. And yet, the representation of firearms in most videogames is exactly the opposite: it is one of celebration, of power fantasy, and of general inconsequence. I’m not referring to inconsequence in the act of shooting and killing, but of inconsequence in the mere act of holding a weapon capable of such feats.

By making firearms boring, slow, and arduous, NRA Gun Club might actually perform the rhetoric many people, including myself, have previously laughed-off as politicking and fabrication: the responsible handling of firearms. One might even go so far as to say that NRA Gun Club owes most of its rhetorical power to the commercial FPS. The very obsession with the fantasy of gunplay common to commercial videogames creates an empty space in which the fantasy of responsible gunhandling takes more coherent form than it might do in any other medium.

Of course, NRA Gun Club says nothing about the organization’s fervent support of hunting nor its often absurdist defense of second amendment rights. Whether or not violent media does or does not influence player behavior, the NRA and Crave Entertainment’s claim that Gun Club is a “nonviolent” game deals a fascinating counterpoint to the gunplay fantasy common to commercial games. Gunsport, it turns out, is a boring affair filled mostly with managing equipment and waiting. For those who find it pleasurable, the pleasure lies largely in the mastery of mechanism. When the destructive power of the weapon produces excitement, it is an excitement contextualized in reverence, even anxiety, accentuated by the relative rarity of actually firing a shot. And perhaps this is exactly the type of gun fantasy we really need.

Ian Bogost is Assistant Professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Founding Partner at Persuasive Games.