Boxing Day

It was Boxing Day. Having spent the previous day eating what must have been as much as a week’s worth of dinners, it was definitely time to relax. As we went round to the gathering of relatives, each nursing a rather full tum and politely turning down the host’s eager wishes to see if more feeding would make anyone actually explode, we sat down to catch up and recap over how life was pretty much the same since we’d all last seen each other.

Suddenly, an excited child bounded into the room, headed for his Mum. “Mum! Mum! You’ll never guess what I just did! It was all snowy, and I shot loadsa bad guys and then I was on a jet ski thing going through loads of trees and then there was this MASSIVE jump and I was like ‘WHOOOAAAA!!’. It was A-MAY-ZIN’!”

“That sounds great!” his Mum said, genuinely happy that the Christmas present of an Xbox 360 was delighting the wee man. “Now look who’s come to see you,” she said, looking across to the boy’s smiling Godmother.

“There he is!” the Godmother said. “Here – this is a joint birthday and Christmas present.” The child’s eyes lit up as he bounced onto the sofa next to her and grinned as the small package was handed to him. Ripping it open with expertise, honed to perfection over the previous 24 hours, the child called out “YES!!” as he held aloft his gift – Skylanders: Spyro’s Adventure.

After saying thanks, he rushed off to what had been turned into the ‘Games Room’, and, after a little while, I got up to follow, eager to see what he thought of the present (that actually I had picked out for him), and also quite curious to see what Skylanders was like, from a personal and professional point of view.

I entered the room and saw the Skylanders box sat untouched on a pool table in the middle of the room. From the corner of the room the screen had gone black and everything had gone quiet. As I stepped closer I heard a phrase come of out the TV speakers, something I hadn’t heard in a while, and something I certainly wasn’t expecting.

“Remember – no Russian.”

It dawned on me why the kid’s account of a daring snowmobile escape ending in a dramatic leap of faith stuck out. I stepped closer again toward the player and his game. After a second of wondering why no-one was shooting at him, he opened fire on the crowd, joining in with the characters stood beside him. I looked down and saw a fascinated smile, hopefully oblivious in some way as to what exactly he was doing.

“How old are you again?” I asked.

“Nine.” he replied.

I stood there, shocked. Since Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2’s release two years ago, in hindsight “No Russian” had proved to be a now somewhat forgotten, albeit divisive part of a huge game. I had always found it to be an interesting piece of interaction to include in a blockbuster game, if not for what it actually achieved, then certainly for adding to the discussion of ‘do games have to be fun to be meaningful experiences’. But was it suitable for a nine year-old boy? In my opinion: absolutely not.

I thought back to when I was nine, and the sort of games that caught my attention. Back in 1992, some of the biggest releases were Super Mario Kart, Super Mario Land 2, Ecco the Dolphin, Sonic the Hedgehog 2 and, making its arcade debut, Mortal Kombat.

Living in the seaside town of Hastings, I spent a fair amount of time in the arcades, and Mortal Kombat was just one game I spent pocket money on. I was never any good at it, but I was fascinated by the over the top violence and realistic (for its time) digitised actors literally ripping each other apart. Two years later and for my 11th birthday I asked for Mortal Kombat II, a 15-rated game. I loved it, spending hours upon hours learning and delivering brutal combos and gruesome fatalities and thinking nothing of it.

So why was it that, back in the present day, seeing this nine-year-old playing an 18-rated game, and this level in particular, made me feel so uneasy. Was it the use of real world iconography, making it a closer representation of reality than Mortal Kombat would ever be?

“DIE! DIE! DIIIIIIEEE!!!” he yelled, cackling with glee. He tore through the panicked crowd with his semi-automatic weapons, perhaps a little aware of the despair playing out on the screen in front of him, caused as much by his actions as by Infinity Ward’s design, knowing that he was gunning down non-combatants fleeing for their life. “Oh – are you trying to help him? Oops. You’re dead!”

I walked out of the room, unsure of what else to do. It wasn’t my place to say anything, as much as I felt compelled to.

I wonder what he thought of Skylanders.