I haven’t really ever considered that I would draw a line when it comes to a game or games. These things, I perhaps naively thought, were for extremists and Daily Mail reading parents. But not so long ago, I discovered to my surprise that I have one too. While others may baulk at the violence of Crackdown or gore of Resident Evil or the ultra violence in GTA, mine is based on a lone woman. Her name is Violette Szabo. The game is called Velvet Assassin – a stealth based action title in which the heroine’s life as a WW2 assassin is told and played in flashbacks as an ailing Violette lies ill in a hospital bed.
Ever since I first read about the game, it has bothered me. Violette was a real woman. She was captured, tortured, hideously abused, and then executed. She was 23. Why should I care about this being the subject of a game? When I first read of Violette’s true story as part of the blurb in a games magazine, it moved me to tears which quickly became disgust, shock, and then anger. Anger at her horrific suffering, at the evil that is done not just in the name of war, and then at whoever decided that this would be a good idea to spin into a game.
I shut the magazine, vowing never to play the game as a reflex decision, but like so much of the things that I fear or hate, it flitted between shadows in my head as I taunted my inner hate with more information about the game as it was slowly revealed. Nothing, no game has ever got under my skin quite like this one has. Nothing has ever presented me with the dilemma about drawing a line; about what I will and won’t play and why, but Velvet Assassin has. I don’t want to play it, I don’t want to support a game that has ‘sexed up’ the historic Violette, I don’t want to play a game based on the true life of this tragic young woman. In arguing with myself I can imagine the voices of others, arguing that I’m being unreasonable, or over sensitive, that it’s a game, and that what makes it different than other horrific games about war…after all, isn’t this just one of those? I say to the voices, with growing decisiveness, “go to hell”.
War is horrific but the much fought battles in gaming land, as in reality, are fought by the many and games when depicting these battles either conjure a sea of faceless/nameless soldiers to die and have a fictional character as their centre, however real the situation in which they are placed. Even when you have comrades in arms who die, perhaps in dramatically upsetting circumstances, they are still fictional, therefore, perhaps this is why they are more acceptable; more palatable.
War and it’s battles are a bigger picture, a large, bloody, violent conflict of many. Velvet Assassin, by nature of being a stealth title is small, intimate, and personal, and it focuses on one very real person. If we take the wider picture of war in a game setting again and this time apply the idea of Velvet Assassin, it is suddenly, for me at least, quite different and maybe then, even a general war game would become more unsettling…take a body of England’s – a real young soldier whose life you can paint a picture of through his poetry and letters home… he was real, he lived, and he died. Imagine his pain, his injuries and suffering, the terror, the sickness, his friends dying around him. Imagine the horrors of war that we have come to accept through the media so much so that we have become blasé, suddenly with a real-life centre – the colour is more vivid, the horror more so, and the unsettling nature of a game based on this life and death so much more real.
I think that is where Velvet Assassin gets me. It isn’t a faceless or fictional assassin on some mock game-stage of war. She lived, breathed, suffered, and ultimately died and try though I might (and I have, truly) I can’t find the idea of a game based on her short life anything but completely unsettling. I have never felt this moved or disturbed by a game and it bothers me, and it truly gets under my skin. For some people it will be a case of, ‘ffs, it’s just a game’. Well ffs, this is my line. I’ve never had one before and I’m trying to come to terms with it and figure it out. I never wanted or expected one and I am still struggling to understand it, to overcome it, and rub it out. Perhaps ultimately, though it is faint, shaky, and tentative, I should let it be, because it belongs there.
Perhaps we all have a line, just that few of us discover it? Does that make me lucky or unlucky, stupid, silly, or smart? I believed myself untouchable when it came to games, I’d play whatever – after all, they are just games. But with the haunting reminder that Violette’s life was very, disturbingly real – something that touches me on an emotional level, I realised in a shocking and sobering moment that I wasn’t beyond being affected and so my line melted into being, much to my horror.
Ultimately, perhaps the game itself presents me with a better shield to justify my avoidance of Velvet Assassin to those who may criticise my suddenly stopping where they would happily pass on by, and that is that the early reviews are very shaky, that there are bad checkpoints rather than manual saves – a true crime in a stealth title, and that it simply isn’t that great. That’s a relief. For a moment I thought that the game would be stunning and I would have to stand by my line on it’s own, still shocked at the existence of said line, and perhaps fight to justify it to a scornful majority. Luckily, the game has saved me, but the line however, stays. It’s real and it’s mine and it’s a sobering reminder that even an open, blasé, care-not gamer can be ‘got to’ in a very stealthy surprising moment.
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