Sniper Elite V2's hyper-realistic, surgically accurate KillCam feature takes you inside your victim's body to see precisely how your bullet will end his life. Will gamers embrace the gore, or is the KillCam a step over the line?
Posted 05.10.2012 at 12:29 pm
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Sniper Elite V2 KillCam
Rebellion/505 Games
The creators of Sniper Elite V2, a third-person World War II shooter released this week, know that the success of a modern video game comes down to the details. They worked closely with historians to nail the feel of 1945 Berlin, all the way down to the pattern of the wallpaper inside a typical German home. The typeface on the Nazi propaganda littering the crumbling virtual urban streets is Antiqua, the preferred font of the Reich.
But the primary subject of research for the team was more, shall we say, internal: what happens when a sniper's bullet enters a human body? They consulted medical experts, ex-military snipers, photography of real-life gunshot victims and x-rays of bone fractures, gathering a mountain of data and funneling it through the incredibly powerful software and hardware used to create today's videogames. The final result: a realistic simulation, rendered on the fly, that they call the "KillCam," in which the camera follows a bullet as it leaves the sniper's gun, flies through the air, hits its mark, and invades the body--with all the bone-crushing, organ-bursting, blood-spewing destruction that entails.
I went to see Sniper Elite V2 demonstrated in a hotel suite in midtown Manhattan on a weekday morning. In the room were the same three people you see in almost every product briefing: a young PR girl with a notebook, for scribbling notes about me and my reactions, which is not as flattering as you'd think; a talky representative from the developer (this one was British, and named Tim Jones; he's the head of creative for the developer); and a stoic engineer-type, a stocky guy from the publisher who stood behind the couch and spoke very little but was outrageously, effortlessly good at the game. Before the demonstration, Jones asked if I wanted to play. I declined, theoretically so I could better observe and take notes, but mostly because I am lousy at shooting games. The stoic engineer took my place. He would be the sniper. Later, during the demonstration of co-op mode, Tim Jones would provide his ground-cover.
Jones and stoic engineer played that cooperative mode in a burned-out Berlin in 1945. The game is fairly cleverly designed, as far as shooters go; it's not a "shoot everyone in sight" sort of game--not a "run and gun," said Jones--but one much more about stealth and strategy. This level found the players tasked with destroying a cargo truck, which in turn required several sub-tasks to set up the final shoot-the-truck sequence. They'd have to draw enemies away from the truck, plant explosive charges, and set them off (by, not entirely realistically, shooting the glowing red fuel caps around the outside of the truck). While going through that checklist, Nazis would need to be dispatched. The stoic engineer would pick off long-range targets, and Tim Jones would set traps and place bombs.
You're killing people. And that's a messy business.I was going to ask the players to show me the KillCam, basically the entire reason I was there. The KillCam is triggered only when a particularly well-placed shot is fired, and I didn't want to watch these guys play videogames like I did in middle school when I was bad at Battletoads and hanging out in friends' basements. I didn't have to worry. Within a minute, I saw it. The target: a mirror image of the stoic engineer's own player, a Nazi sniper perched a few hundred yards away on the roof of an abandoned building, ducking behind a shard of concrete that once may have been a wall. The stoic engineer found his target, lowered the crosshairs expertly on the enemy--not directly on the enemy, but slightly above, because at this distance, the player has to adjust for the effects of gravity. (On expert levels, you also have to contend with wind, and the game features heart rate and breath-pattern meters--your shot will be more accurate if you shoot with a low heart rate and empty lungs.)
Immediately the game paused for the KillCam cutscene. Everyone stop what you're doing and watch this.
The bullet exploded out of the muzzle of the Gewehr rifle, emerging in a bright, jagged flash. The camera pulled back as it began its flight through the air, then quickly swung to the side. You could see the bullet rotate, see the waves, like dreamy smoke rings, left in its wake. The music muted slightly. Then, up ahead, I saw the mirror-image Nazi sniper, directly in the bullet's path. Time slowed down even more as the bullet approached its target. It's a perfect head-shot, an achievement. The stoic engineer will receive a small digital trophy for this, an award that will pop up in the corner of the screen. The camera rotated back behind the bullet to follow it as it got closer and closer to the enemy. Then it reached the enemy's face. Suddenly the Nazi's skin peeled back, like a Venetian blind rolling up, snapping backwards over his skull. I saw the bare, perfectly clean bone, the teeth, grinning and eerie, the spinal column beneath with its visible path of nerves. The bullet splattered through the cornea, shattered the bones of the eye-socket and cheek, broke through the blood vessels at the back of the eye, burst backwards through the brain cavity and punched a hole in the back of the skull, its course realistically altered by its journey. Blood and bone shot upwards, outwards, backwards. The entire cutscene took maybe eight seconds.
Sniper Elite V2 KillCam: Through the Shoulder: Rebellion/505 Games
"Nice shot," says the talky representative. "Thanks," mutters the stoic engineer. I'd see the KillCam several more times, would see "Vital Hit" bullets pierce vital organs in the chest cavity (heart, lungs, liver, kidney), break ribs, turn collarbones and pelvic bones into coarse fragments of bone, and, on one memorable occasion, would see a bullet strike a hand grenade the enemy wore on a belt. The grenade exploded, almost robbing us of the full force of the KillCam, the Nazi's body reduced to pulp and shrapnel in the blunt force of the grenade, negating any need for an x-ray image of his death. (The name of this type of shot, for some reason: a "potato masher.") Not as clean as the sniper round, but rarer. The talky representative was excited to explain to me what had happened. "Did you see that? He hit the grenade!"
"Wow," I said.
What struck me most about seeing these guys play the game was how businesslike they were. Partly that's because these guys are the creators of the game: they've played it, I'm sure, hundreds or thousands of times already. Nothing in the game surprises them. But there was no posturing, no "Fucking awesome, man!" when a Nazi met his grisly end, not even for my benefit. No high fives, no elbow nudges, no cheering, no grins. Instead, in between the talky representative's steady monologue about the intricacies of Sniper Elite V2's gameplay, which I mostly ignored, there was quiet cooperation. "Coming up the stairs on your left," said the stoic engineer, who could see the talky representative's avatar from his sky-high perch on the rooftops. "Cheers," said the talky representative, as he set a tight-wire explosive trap, which the Nazis would trip when they reached the top of the stairs. Upon their explosion, the stoic engineer and the talky representative didn't so much give a nod of approval. They moved away from the doorway, because the explosion, while effective, had given their position away. They weren't watching an action movie. They were working.
And that's part of the what makes Sniper Elite V2 so interesting. It is easily the most graphic, violent video game I've ever seen, but the violence is relatively realistic, not cartoony. The game has the dubious honor of humanizing Nazis more than any of the scores of WWII-era games, films, and books that came before it: these are not anonymous targets, dispatched from far away with the tug of the R-trigger: once you see testicles exploded, fingers severed, an artery slashed open by the force of your bullet, that you shot, from your own gun, you feel the effects of your actions in a way I didn't expect. The original idea might well have been to create the most extreme, violent period shooter ever made. Blood! Guts! X-rays! But the effect is the complete opposite. You're not yanking a cartoon ninja's spine out of his body with your bare hands, or stabbing a shrieking purple alien with a glowing light-sword. You're killing people. And that's a messy business.
For all its talk of realism--the publisher has billed the game as "the most brutally realistic military sharpshooter out there"--there are serious lapses in realism throughout the game. It's realistic until realism interferes with the fun of the game, at which point realism can be cheerfully abandoned. Having to monitor your heart rate, wind speed and direction, and the precise loss of altitude your bullet will experience due to gravity over distance? Those are realistic variables, and fun ones. But with rare exceptions, a shot to the torso will kill any target. An exploded kidney will drop a Nazi like a stone, just as dead as if he'd been shot through the frontal lobe. Shots to the wrists or knees will sometimes mean instant death, for some reason (although most times, a leg shot will topple the enemy, leaving him to scream for help from his comrades--whom you can then take down).
But the question of realism isn't an easy one to answer--as a player, you don't really have the option of trotting over to a Nazi you've just shot in the torso to see if the splinters of bone fragment from his ribcage have reacted in a realistic way to the effects of the cavitation caused by the bullet, or if the enemy is bleeding out from a shot to the femoral artery in an appropriate time frame. You get, at most, two seconds of the bullet entering the body, then it's time to move on to the next target.
Sniper Elite V2 KillCam: Gutshot: Rebellion/505 Games
You yourself are remarkably bulletproof--you can take several direct hits before having to duck behind cover and heal up, which you will, automatically. You'll score "two-in-ones" fairly often, in which you'll kill two enemies with a single bullet. In the real world, that shot is referred to as a "Quigley," a reference to a 1990 Tom Selleck movie. It's extremely rare.
The AI are smart enough to locate you due to sound, but hiding for a few seconds will send them back to their regular rounds, where they seem not to notice that they have to step over the bodies of their fellow soldiers who were shot by a hidden sniper moments before. "Oh well, back to the patrol!" It's not tremendously more complex than the stealth mechanics of Sly Cooper, which is a decade-old game about a cartoon master thief raccoon and his two friends, a turtle and a hippopotamus.
You still get extra points for hitting a vital organ.The motives for creating this element of the game are murky, by necessity. It would be sort of untoward and unnecessarily confrontational for Jones and the other representatives from Rebellion and 505 Games to be vocal about the awesomeness of shooting somebody in the kidney and watching it rupture. Jones said it would be false to claim that the "visceral 'wow' factor [...] wasn't a big factor in our decision to design and implement it that way." Sniping feels like a relatively mechanical way of killing someone--you're removed from the act itself, separated by distance and the glass of the scope, making adjustments for wind and gravity and angle in the same way you adjust the steering wheel to keep your car in its lane. "It does force players to reflect on the fate of their enemies in a way that many other games gloss over," he said.
He also referred to the KillCam, in a sort of action-movie, U.S.-Army-recruiting video way, as a "heroic death sequence" for the fallen enemy. That's just one of a whole mess of ways to approach the game--in your gut, you may think it's noble, or you may think it's brutal, or, as much of the chat on messageboards shows, you may think it's awesome.
The messageboards are full of comments like this: "It'd be cool if they'd allow for a replay kill-cam, with a rotatable/zoom-able camera with editing tools and the ability to upload your videos to [Xbox] Live/PSN for others to watch." Or excited folks who "just got [their] first nut-shot." For them, the KillCam is just a new gore-delivery system, the latest in a long line of mildly transgressive evolutions in gaming violence. Shooting games are a dime a dozen, and as much as Tim tried to insist to me that what really sets Sniper Elite V2 apart from the pack is its stealth mechanics, I know better. Stealth isn't new. Watching your bullet puncture a lung from the inside, that's new. The trailers lean heavily on the gore. And no matter how educational or perspective-altering the KillCams are, you still get extra points for hitting a vital organ.
Reviews so far are mixed, but all mention the KillCam. The GameSpot review calls the KillCam shots "gruesome and gratifying" and "delightfully gory," and says "they never get old." The Official Xbox Magazine review uses the phrase "buckets of red awesomesauce." GameInformer's Tim Turi self-identifies as a "gore hound," but even he notes that "some of these kills made my stomach twitch a bit."
Mine too.
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Gutsy game; I suppose some people may have a bone to pick about it. It looks festive to me. :)
.............................
Science sees no further than what it can sense, i.e. facts.
Religion sees beyond the senses, i.e. faith.
Open your mind and see!
definitely not the most violent game. there are games that are WAY more violent and realistic. its a really fun game and i will buy it for sure.
"religion is like a prison for the seekers of wisdom"
-Killah Priest
There's a huge disconnect between the tone of the game -- this brutally realistic, historically accurate World War 2 simulator -- and the way it shoehorns in video game elements into its depiction of violence. It wants to properly convey the disturbing aftermath of having shot someone in the kidney but then it immediately has "Vital Hit, 500 points" flashing across the screen which instantly creates a mixed message about what it's attempting to say. Is it trying to show you the horrifying ramifications of each shot you fire or is it just showing a replay of the cool kill which gave you a higher score? The game is so unclear in its intentions that you can never fully grasp how it wants you to feel about your actions and I personally find that far more unsettling than if the game had simply been an open celebration of the most gruesome kills possible.
It's very uncomfortable to play a game that wants you to ponder the atrocities of war you're committing while rewarding you for committing them at the same time.
I definitely agree with the argument that this probably isn't the most violent game out there...though it's definitely chock full of blood and gore. All fps games aside, reading this article made me remember back to the good ol' days of playing Sly Cooper. Now that was a game! I'd easily purchase another couple Sly Cooper games if they came out with them on the 360 or PS3.
Did the game realisticly portray the german soldiers as young boys ordered to fight to the death by Hitler. By this point in the war the "Hitler youth" had been pressed into service, so the germans your killing in the game were really around 14 years old.
Well "gamers" embraced dead space 2 and gears of war, why not Sniper Elite V2?
Sick, truly sick. People who like this stuff are the future real life killers of real people.
What's actually sick is armchair experts making outrageous claims about simulated violence in video games leading to real violence without any corroborating evidence whatsoever in the face of all the very real evidence against such a thing.
Thanks, Bob. You're why we can't have nice things.
@kubla khan:
My experience and point of view come from watching a brilliant 6 year old who suddenly became overaggressive after playing a violent video game and became quite peaceful after having the game taken away. Also, I have personally watched as soldiers who returned from Afghanistan sat for hours killing other soldiers and then went into rages after finally stopping.
What evidence do you have of your claim that simulated violence and real violence not being linked? I can find plenty of evidence for my view through Google searching for "video games and real life violence" as anyone can.
And how am I responsible for you not having nice things (to what are you referring)?
Game looks like a blast, but does it do the slow motion part every single shot? after a while it would get annoying i think. I would rather just see the way it would look in real life from a snipers view or from the rough distance you are when you shoot them.
ALSO
I do not believe that video games cause you to be violent unless you have had some kind of trauma in your life, or if you see alot of violence in real life, or if your parents haven't really taught you the difference between video games and real life.
only evidence i got is the fact that i have been playing these kinds of games since i was about 6 and have never even been in a fight.
so in my opinion it all depends on what you have seen in real life, whether or not a game will trigger some F'd up feelings of pent up anger.
"Fear, is but your mind holding you back"
ClayManBob,
I think you make good points in regards to children and people who do not have a understading of their own emotions.
I am an adult and I play a few violent games. It actually feels great emotionally, if I have a bad day work with annoying people and I take some anger emotions out in the game. I always know it is a game. I also jog everyday and use this as well to deal with excessive emotions. A lot of people in life have not been taught, learned how to 'manage their emotions'. Angry is an ok emotion, but we must learn how to deal with it and not be destructive.
.............................
Science sees no further than what it can sense, i.e. facts.
Religion sees beyond the senses, i.e. faith.
Open your mind and see!
from Northfield, Vt
@ClayManBob
The reason we disagree with you is that you talk in terms of definitive, yes or no, like you play violent video games, you become violent yes or no? While there maybe cases of players of violent video games becoming violent that is the exception not the rule, ie. explanation Robot, if every person that played violent video games became violent, we would have millions of violent people, as that is the number of games sold that are rated as violent content. While you may have singular cases of it, i am a case where this is not the case, i have played violent gory video games for most my life, have never assualted a person, nor killed a person. I can also attest this to many other friends in similar situations. I suggest you careful in talking in definitives as opposed to situational events.
lanredneck,
I did not say people who play games become violent. I did suggestion mentally as I play a game, it is an outlet to express stress or anger mentally in a harmless way...
One of those games I enjoy is Halo and I see those funny little soldier guys as my x wife. I get a lot of joy in blasting them gone, lol. No harm in real life from that…;)
.............................
Science sees no further than what it can sense, i.e. facts.
Religion sees beyond the senses, i.e. faith.
Open your mind and see!
Looks like a cool game. I'll definitely be purchasing it!!
Reminds me of people who like those movies where the teenagers go to the woods and get chopped up and eaten by hillbilly cannibals. Baffles the mind really. How someone could enjoy scenes of a bullet ripping through testicles and other body parts is a big mystery to me. A lot of normal people have to go to counseling just to deal with stuff like that when it happens in real life.
If I had to guess people that enjoy this stuff are missing something inside.
I must actually agree with Bob here, almost all video games have a degree of violence in them, and after playing every single one of them i feel a massive urge to recreate what I have just simulated. The other day in fact, after playing Mario Kart, I had to physically restrain myself from literally throwing banana skins at other vehicles while driving to work.
I was horrified by this and made myself sit down and consider whether playing these video games was worth the emotional toll on my mental health.
I have decided to restrain myself to playing simple puzzle games like Sudoku on my DS. Hopefully this won't have any adverse side-effects.
The difference of course being that: the mass of humanity does not throw banana skins at fellow commuters very often with the intent of causing them to skid off a race track while people kill other people several hundred times a day with depraved indifference throughout the world. So one is a little bit more fantasy than the other it seems.
Seeing how they are both fantasy escapism I am left wondering about why someone would want to escape into such a dark and morbid fantasy world. I don't see a single healthy thing in it and a fair bit of disturbing weirdness.
Please review actual facts before releasing mouth noise. Look at statistics on violent crime over the last 30 years. Then look at statistics on number of hours of video gaming, violent and otherwise. Try to understand what the inverse relationship means in the real world. Then restart mouth noise.
I think you are talking about US crime which is unique phenomenon not observed everywhere. The reverse is true in many other countries around the world. Video games are everywhere. Anders Breivik claimed he used CoD as a training tool to sharpen his aim and played online games 16 hours a day to prepare himself. Therefore, using your twisted logic we could then claim that video games directly led to a tripling of the homicide rate in Norway in 2011, a ludicrous claim.
Better predictors of violent crime have to do with a number of demographics including home life, education levels, age and other factors. In the US you may as well just blame the drop in crime to more people carrying guns on a regular basis; something has also increased dramatically in the last thirty years. Better yet how about the huge increase in incarceration rates to give the US the highest rates of incarceration in the world?
An assertion that points to violent video games (or anything else) as a monolithic cause for a decline (or increase) in crime rates in the US has no justification in fact whatsoever. It never surprises me how people will use just about any excuse to justify odd behavior.
More concerning than crime rates would be the darkness inside of someone to derive pleasure from enabling and causing graphic depiction of violence to appear as a feedback mechanism. I am curious if any of the people who play these types of games can provide a meaningful answer in context as to how and what type of pleasure they derive from graphic depictions of killing and maiming because I am not sure I understand and have a desire to.
Tic Tac Toe is a violent game, lol. At the end, I will destroy my opponent by drawing a line through O's. Those O's must die! ARG!!!!!
Or is it us humans just using our imagination in a harmless competition.
I believe it is the second part, and we should always be nice to those in the real world as often as possible.
.............................
Science sees no further than what it can sense, i.e. facts.
Religion sees beyond the senses, i.e. faith.
Open your mind and see!
O there goes your head...
And your kidneys...
O man I don't even want to know what that is
The best technics are past down by the survivors.
This Game looks awesome but there is no way my mom will let me buy it (she thinks MW2 is bad), but maybe i can take my dad to buy.
on 05/11/12 at 4:55 am ClayManBob Wrote:
"@kubla khan:
My experience and point of view come from watching a brilliant 6 year old who suddenly became overaggressive after playing a violent video game and became quite peaceful after having the game taken away. Also, I have personally watched as soldiers who returned from Afghanistan sat for hours killing other soldiers and then went into rages after finally stopping."
Unless you are a trained psychologist conducting experiments in a controlled environment with proper unbiased funding and oversight, your particular 'observations' have no bearing and are not evidence that "People who like this stuff are the future real life killers of real people...", according to your statement. Not only is there no evidence of such, there could not be, as the game hasn't even been released yet.
Your comment is like a global warming denier's statement that snow is evidence in his favor, and in this context (a discussion - on the internet - of violent video games leading to real-world violence - with gamers, of all people) holds the same consequences: it makes you look completely uninformed on the topic at hand and more than a little crazy. In other words, it makes you sound exactly like a republican.
ClayManBob Wrote: "What evidence do you have of your claim that simulated violence and real violence not being linked? I can find plenty of evidence for my view through Google searching for 'video games and real life violence' as anyone can."
No, Bob, you cannot. Google that exact phrase (as I did), or any other, and I assure you there will not appear any such 'evidence'. Just hearsay, speculation, twisted statistics and out-of-context and propogandized statements made to sow uncertainty and fear for political purposes and sensationalism. Fox news fear-mongering and fabricated right-wing talking points, but no actual 'evidence' at all.
ClayManBob Wrote: "And how am I responsible for you not having nice things (to what are you referring)?"
It's called a meme, Bob, kind of like the facepalm I'm doing right now. You see, memes are common images or phrases we use to avoid TL/DR, like this, because we can't go dumping too much stuff on the internet, like a truck, when it's just a series of tubes...
'You're why we can't have nice things' is a common internet meme. It refers to spreading FUD (that's another meme, Bob, it stands for 'fear, uncertainty and doubt' and is shorthand for propaganda), cognitive dissonance, scientific denial, the absence of logic, insanity and raw stupidity as the root causes of, well, why things suck.
The best example I can give you is American politics. When roughly half the country votes against it's own economic, political, social and legal self interests due to the spread of FUD, cognitive dissonance, scientific denial, the absence of logic, insanity and raw stupidity, it causes stalemates on capitol hill, the absence of progress and prevents an economic recovery while making the rich richer and the poor poorer and destroying the middle class.
These people are why we can't have nice things.
Will this game help to prevent PTSD by desensitizing a future generation of warriors to the violence of war prior to entering active combat?
its just natzies calm down people it dosent matter.. i agree 95% with kulba khan
Cause and effect, effect and cause. Proving causation is a difficult burden to take upon one's self.
America has more violent video games - America has more violent crime. Those are facts - not necessarly cause and effect. America also has more cheeseburgers and Disney pop singers, both of which could equally be associated with violent crime.
To prove causation would require more than association. Just because almost all violent crime is committed by males, that does not mean we should abolish the male gender. All bugs are insects, but not all insects are bugs.
Even if every violent offender is a violent videogame enthusiast, you have not proven a link. Rather, violent people might be more attracted to the games. You would have to show that the games increase the voilence in all of their players (not just the ones that go over the edge) - something that has not been done.
Finnaly, you have to make a moral judgement on the action itself. If you hold that all killing is immoral, then simulated killing would be as well. If, however, a soldier killing other solidiers in war is as moral as the causeation of the war, then simulating would have the same moral character for even the most immersive of players.
You personal experiences (either playing or watching others play the games) is a limited sample size and statistically insignifigant. Applying empiricism to observation requires a depth of experiences, not the conviction of any one experience (otherwise, we would be compelled to accept bigfoot and alien abductions).
Just gratuitous violence. Even real snipers don't see the skeletons of people they kill.
Per ClayManBob comment... (and in agreement) I am a father of 3 boys, 9,10, 13.
They are really into similar games, but this is over the line. It's unnecessary and irresponsible for me to expose them to this level of violence. FOR GOD'S sake, there is no conceivable reason that you can site that could convince me that seeing this is good for the soul of any human, let alone young people.
This is the play out of an evil desensitizing force that is similar to salt water's effect on the body. The more you drink the more you want to drink, but the more it deprives you of your life.
This is just the newest pinnacle of depraved, truly SICK depictions of death and dying.
Stop. Enough. This is truly sad, and horrifying. IF you can't see that ... perhaps you're already dead (inside).
And it's just GROSS!
I don't care if my son hates my guts for not letting him have this.. as long as I am alive and pay his bills. FORGET IT! He won't be playing this.
The "Potato Masher" reference is what soldiers called Kraut grenades, because of their appearance with a throwing handle.
Violent games are not making anyone violent. They merely give individuals ideas on how to express the violent tendancies that they already have.
I laugh at some of the comments here, especially 'ClayManBob' - now let's utilize all candor here, shall we? Albeit I'm trying not to be personal...yet the first thing I think of when viewing 'ClayManBob's' pic/profile...is not...'Gamer.' Nope, I see a whiff of Neo-Luddite and a parsimonious granola fixation. Indeed.
Simply based on other users objections, this is a game I'd purchase. Freedom to enjoy your leisure time really isn't freedom when we don't protect what others despise.
I read - it was back around 2000 or so - that a Japanese game developer had devised a way so that gamers would actually be zapped; feel pain, that is, when affected in one of their products. This touch of realism was so controversial in Japan and threatened to derail the entire concept. Evidently, it did because if integrated into a game like this? Wow... can you imagine?
In record, those of you discussing the reality or fictional case of violent videogames = killer should seriously consider watching the Videogames episode of the Penn and Teller episode of BullShit. It places the argument in a MythBuster's view and I found it very enlightening.
Second off, this game isn't all that violent. I think combining the clinical detachment from the atrocities of war and a game like feel really is a mixed message. The gameplay would be better executed with perhaps an invisible score with a detailed listing. Though, this same clinical detachment, like a scalpel, would also having game critics clamoring. I understand the point in having such a detail record of the conclusions of a "kill". From a citizen view, snipers always had the connotation of being cold, detached as it were, away from the battle, and being very critical in their shots. From determining range, wind direction, angle of fire, to bullet placement.
Will it get old? No. I experienced a similar phenomenon in the game Fallout 3. The V.A.T.S system combined with certain "perks" you acquire in game cause an intense slow down of a critical hit or bloody execution. One would think you'd get tired of seeing body parts blown in opposite directions, skulls torn from their base, and finding rib cages 50 yards away. Right?
You don't.
It's still an entertaining process for every kill I received. Now Fallout doesn't quite have the x-ray quality that this game has, but I still recall seeing bullet entry and exit wounds with the graphic display of blood splatter.
Does this game possibly change the outlook of it's players? Probably. I've seen my gamer friends in online matches go from silly, cheeto-tossing jokesters to having military precision when executing a mission on Call Of Duty or even Halo or Borderlands. It happens. Does that necessarily change people into murders, not really, though the argument that games change behavior temporarily is relatively accurate.
Will I buy this game? No. I much prefer the current "epic" RPG's.
I am not saying you should 'ban' this game. Have at it. If you want to screw yourself up and abandon all hope of being a well adjusted human... knock yourself out. I am just accountable to God for what I let my kids do to themselves. Like it or not, believe it or not.
Whatever.
As for me and my house - we'll not be playing this abomination of depraved violence.
@kubla khan and his ilk:
Your lawyer-wannabe excuses don't wash. It's easy to rationalize anything.
We all have dark, primitive instincts. Repressing them is what makes us civilized and humane. Games like this pander to and evoke those dark instincts.
What this kind of game "leads to" is beside the point. It is a sick game, and you are sick for defending it. If you ever reach adulthood -- a big If -- then you will understand this. Otherwise, you will remain a sociopath, like all gun/violence/death/S&M fetishists.
I don't believe any gamer who says these violent games don't damage their minds. I know many gamers(children and adults) who fiercely defend the violent games and claim they can go without them any time they want, but they can't! They wear the violent game T-shirts like a badge of honor and roam around with portable players. Think about what the game makers are really saying - "participating" in every manner of killing, torturing and even rape is fun therefore it is good; buy our games and make us rich. Unfortunately in the minds of the addicted gamers, the concept of "game" always registers as an innocuous toy. Russian roulette is a game too.
This is the kind of game where you CAN'T be an indifferent fence sitter. You're either going to love it exactly for what it portrays, or hate it for the same reason. Needless to say, I find this disturbing. Mostly for the fact of it's close scientific accuracy. Just how realistic does one REALLY need to be? At this point younger players will either go on to be career soldiers, or surgeons. What a bizarre way to inspire a career choice.
For all of you deciding whether your 12 year old should play this game, the y shouldn't it's easy. Look on the box: if it has an M for violence, gore and language, that should tip you off. Stick to mario. This is a simulation. I own it and appreciate it for it's accuracy, physically and historically and it's attention to detail. I have bought this game and play it, not because I am violent or sadistic, but because I have always liked boiling things down to science. It is less disturbing to me to see what is happening physically to a body than to blast and slash through hundreds of emotionless enemies who have no fear of death. If videogames cause SOME unstable people, and young people exposed too early, to be violent, that is the cause, a game that gives you no feeling that you are destroying a human life.
I don't notice the points values for kills, mainly because I am moderately bad. This game is similar to shows I have seen on the history channel retelling how some public figure was assassinated. It is detailed and gory, but in a scientific, somewhat professional manner. If it were glorifying nut shots or killing old women like grad theft auto, I wouldn't play it. I have never touched a GTA game for this reason. Give them credit for making a mature simulation that, when treated maturely, can be informative and, at the very least, give you respect for the weapons some of us use from time to time. This game has renewed my respect for my firearms and what they can do to the human body.
Healthy and responsible humans won't let such imagery into their children's hearts and minds.
nasty stuff not good for the culture.
however the potato masher is not a macabre reference.
it's the name for a german hand grenade and given because of it's similarity to the shape of a hand potato masher.
I think I'm going to agree with critical_mach on this one. I have not yet played this, but will likely enjoy it. Partially this is because I am fond of stealth/tactics based games, and have always enjoyed the feeling of having successfully outmaneuvered or outwitted my opponent. It is also partially because of the detached yet clinical view of how I have just ended my enemy's life; it's not so much "One down, oodles more to go," as an answering of why that enemy died in a scientifically accurate way (relatively speaking, anyway). Sure, chalk it up to perverse, morbid curiosity, but it definitely would give one an appreciation for what you can really do to your body with a firearm.
Actually, on a somewhat unrelated note, perhaps this would be something useable as an instructive tool on firearms safety courses, to add some emotional and cognitive weight to caution with a weapon beyond the classic "If you shoot yourself in the foot, it's going to hurt."
Overall, if you do not possess the capability to entirely disassociate a game from real life, you have no business playing video games. This is why games have ratings.
Ultimately, it's up to you. Take it or leave it, but please, don't rag about it.
On 05/17/12 at 2:43 pm lbjack wrote:
"@kubla khan and his ilk:"
Yes? My ilk and I are listening....
lbjack wrote: "Your lawyer-wannabe excuses don't wash."
Sorry, jack, for talking over your head, but that dawg won't hunt. Evidence and facts backed up by statistics and valid studies are not 'excuses' in the face of feelings and speculation based on rhetoric and right-wing propaganda. They are valid rebuttals, and if people such as yourself can eventually accept the existence of things like 'facts', then you can begin to accept the truth for what it is, instead of allowing fear-based reasoning and Fox News to reinforce what you want it to be.
lbjack wrote: "It's easy to rationalize anything."
Not for an educated, informed and logical person, it isn't. Is that what your posts, and those of your astroturfing henchmen, are about?
lbjack wrote: "We all have dark, primitive instincts."
Maybe you do, jack. You might want to talk to a professional about that before you hurt yourself or someone else.
lbjack wrote: "Repressing them is what makes us civilized and humane."
Um, no, having a conscience and needing to socialize and cooperate with others is what makes us civilized and humane. If you're repressing an urge to kill, seriously, dude, get some help.
lbjack wrote: "Games like this pander to and evoke those dark instincts."
I agree totally that someone such as yourself should definitely not play any video games. Or be allowed near any sharp objects. Or even shoelaces.
lbjack wrote: "What this kind of game 'leads to' is beside the point."
:facepalm: Then, why - the - hell... did you even make a comment at all if you didn't have a point?
lbjack wrote: "It is a sick game, and you are sick for defending it."
Awesome dude! I am so stoked you think it's sick. It also seems rather gnarly.
lbjack wrote: "If you ever reach adulthood -- a big If -- then you will understand this. Otherwise, you will remain a sociopath, like all gun/violence/death/S&M fetishists."
Kettle...black...bwahahahahaha
You can't even comprehend 'muh lawyer-talk' but you want to infantilize me? You'd have been better off going with the 'liberal elite with their facts and truth and science' thing you tea-party types are so fond of...
S&M fetishists are sociopaths, now? Holy crap, you've done it now. When those dominatrix's come in here and give you what-for, that's on you, man. I don't think they'll be as patient with your apparent learning disabilities as I have been.
Sociopath? You're the one with self-admitted 'dark primitive instincts'. Those of us who might like this game are the only cool, laid-back seeming people in here, while those opposed to it are, one and all, trying to make everyone else look depraved. Kinda funny, really.
What the hell are people like you doing on a 'science' website, anyway? Just denying it?
Apparently:
On 05/17/12 at 5:07 pm michael19157 wrote:
"I don't believe any gamer who says these violent games don't damage their minds."
Um, the 1950's called. They'd like their fear-mongering and long-disproven rhetoric about comic books, rock&roll, jazz music, sci-fi books and horror movies back.
kthnxbai
@ Kubla Khan
I agree with most of what you said; however, there was one minor flaw. You accused the people you were arguing with of being right wing and tea-party types. In my experience associating with fellow Americans who tend to be more conservative, as I do as well, we are more likely to defend right to bear arms, importance of a strong military and not being to hippy to kill in self defense when necessary. I would tend to think that someone who marks gun owners with sociopaths would be radical left wing. That's all, other than that, nice rebuttal.
@ critical_mach
Thanks, and you may be correct.
I usually find, however, that those most intolerant of people and activities they haven't experienced or can't comprehend the appeal of, tend to be very narrow-minded conservatives. They are typically unable to comprehend the idea that anyone who doesn't constrain their thinking to the same limited capacity of themselves must be wrong.
And specifically, lbjack wrote "gun/violence/death/S&M fetishists" which are an entirely new genre to me. I guess it takes all kinds. I myself am a gun-loving left-wing Christian Democrat with two advanced degrees, an 11-year successful marriage, no exes, and a cat, who's trying hard to quit smoking and lives in NC. Probably not too many of us around, either.
I think it's somewhat funny that "video game" is still so readily associated with "children". I wonder what kind of games I'll be into when I'm in my 70s and 80s...
I really think people should be more plastic in their reasoning. History has taught us that Earth isn't the center of the solar system, all people are indeed created equal, truly educating children about sex lowers teen birth rates and STDs, and milkshakes actually bring no boys to the yard (disappointing, I know).
Wake up. Just because an idea challenges something you believe doesn't make it wrong. Bear in mind, emotional responses to stimulus should not be held as evidence of its value or meaning. Gather data, review it, accept it. Stop trying fear monger and make others feel bad simply because you can't understand something.
Lastly, I wont be playing this, but kudos to the devs for trying something different.
Based on the blurb in the email alert, I was worried this was going to be yet another article whining about violence in video games. Somebody needs to fire the guy who wrote the blurb, because this is one of the better articles I've read on the subject: it analyzes the violence in the game from a purely dispassionate scientific perspective without letting Fox News-style rhetoric get in the way. Editors, Dan Nosowitz deserves a raise for approaching the subject from the standpoint of a responsible adult.
Oh and as for the moron up there who compared Sniper Elite V2 to Russian roulette, that is a logical fallacy called a "false analogy". You're comparing a computer game where no actual people are harmed to a one-in-six chance of actually blowing somebody's head off. If you don't like it, don't play. But don't force the 99% of us who know the difference to read your bull. Despite what Fox and the ultra-right-wing idiots of the world think (and let's face it: is there anyone who reads PopSci that actually CARES what they think?), some video games are for children, some are not. This is the latter, and was intended as such from day one. Video games are no different from movies in that respect. (Would you take your five-year-old to see Saw? I think not.)
Will I buy this game? Maybe, maybe not, but that's because my preferences generally run to RTSs and RPGs (with the occasional really good FPS like Halo). I enjoyed the Steam demo, partly because my playing style in Bethesda RPGs runs to swift, stealthy kills, and SEV2 encourages that.
@duroncrush: They portrayed the German troops as all adult instead of partially Hitler Youth. This is something called an "acceptable break from reality", and it should be fairly obvious why it is such.
@kubla khan: You're a man after my own heart. *thumbs up*
I personally don't believe that violent games make people violent. As for kids this game and many others that kids play specifically say on the box the minimum age the player should be. Parents are a big problem in that situation getting kids games that aren't appropriate for them. A 6 year old shouldn't be playing a violent game these games are designed for people that know a difference between games and reality. I don't know that I would personally play this game but I'm not going to assume something is wrong with those that do. Did more kids run out on the street and start dodging cars after Froger came out. Also for the using video games to sharpen your aim and all that stuff if you've never fired a gun in real life and just try to go off what you learned from games its not the same. In games your not having to deal with recoil and adrenaline and actually reloading a gun instead of pressing a button and a multitude of other things. A few hours on a range with an instructor would teach you more about using a real gun then you could ever learn from a game. I dont look busy because I did it right the first time
It's very sad that this got through the "Censorship Police" !
It's also very sad that this has become "Socially Acceptable" !
As a LONG time gamer, as well as someone who has played this title. I can say for a fact that Sniper Elite is not even close to the most violent game out there.
ManHunt as a quick example, was VASTLY more violent and graphic.
However, that being said, there have been MANY studies conducted on people, both young and old to see if "video games" or other "violent media" had a direct connection to agressive behavior in those people.
It has been proven time and time again, that there is no direct connection between playing violent games or watching violent media and someone becoming violent.
It however has been shown that already agressive people are attracted to violent media, not that it made them agressive or violent.
Blaming violent media would be like going to the opera, noticing that most people there are rich, and concluding that opera makes people rich. Classical opera, by the way, is chock full of lust, incest, murder, suicide, and more.
So quick, stop playing games and goto the opera...
A quick factoid: In an analysis of the risk factors of youth violence by the Surgeon General of the United States of America (check for yourself here www.surgeongeneral.gov, violent media is categorized as 'Small Effect Size."
In reality, there are 27 risk factors rated higher than exposure to violent media, like socioeconomic status, academic failure, poor parent-child relations, weak social ties and more, nothing even related to violent games and/or media.
Gaming in general, is the new competition to TV, each hour you spend playing games is one less that you spend sitting infront of the TV...and all those commercials during kids shows for new toys they come up and ask you to buy before the show is even over, well, sales are down.
So who gets the blame? The Games.
In the 50's the media wanted to blame Rock and Roll, the music was going to turn all the kids listening to it into satanic violent killers...and, well, we see how true that was now dont we.
And science fiction, well that was going to warp the minds of the youth and make future generations question things like religion and fact-based science...and, well, we now see all the flying cars and mutated people running around while we all worship the giant alien head from planet X...
Media is like politics, each form has a smear campaign they use to devalue or understate the others, its just a shame that so many people cant see past the lies for what the stuff really is.
Attention all of you teenage, game-addicted gore-lovers that think this kill cam is really cool...
1. Ask your mommy to buy you a BASKETBALL instead of Sniper Elite V2.
2. When the basketball magically appears in your home, grab it with both hands.
3. Walk outside of your house into the fresh air.
4. Walk to the nearest park or school playground.
5. Look for a tall metal pole with a hoop on it.
6. Bounce the ball against the ground with one hand without stopping as you move around.
7. Try to throw the ball through the hoop.
8. Repeat Steps 6 and 7 until you are exhausted.
9. Do this as often as possible.
10. Make a plan to a get a real job, move out of your parent's basement, talk to some girls face-to-face, and make the world a better place.