Faaaaarrrrrrr Cry 3

Good day to you homogenous masses, behold my basically above board Far Cry 3 Review.

This swashbuckling FPS/RPG adventure comes to you courtesy of  Ubisoft Montreal in conjunction with Ubisoft Massive, Ubisoft Red Storm, Ubisoft reflections, and Ubisoft Shanghai and published by Ubisoft for Microsoft Windows, Xbox 360 and Playstation 3.

First impressions We've been bombarded for months with a plethora of mindboggling trailers, sort of giving you this ‘Beach meets Rambo’ the game feel and to be honest I was really excited and my expectations were through the roof. I kind of expected there to be this long set up intro where you travel to the island, look about a bit, meet some shady characters, then you get taken hostage.
 You know, give you some time to get to know the characters and the island itself but no, ten second intro video and bang, you’re in a cage. It was trying to be vaguely shocking but the only thing shocking is that they expect you to care about characters you've never even met. The person tied up next to you is supposed to be your brother, how am I supposed to know and like characters and care what happens to them if they’re just dangled in my face and thrown away as if they mattered? Seriously games designers know exactly nothing about setting up stories.

Stories to them are just a means to an end and that is why they will always be subpar as long as they play second fiddle to the game-play. It’s as if games designers don’t want a real audience just a studio audience that laughs and cries on cue. Not really impressed. It’s just a waste of a character and a waste of time. Why do I want to get his girlfriend back when I’ve never met her!? I mean literally never met her, just saw her for like 10 seconds in a video which didn’t even establish she was your girlfriend, now I should care about what happens to her? It’s literally like someone just wheeled someone into the room and said; “This is your girlfriend now, commence loving her in five, four...” This set up is just lazy. I mean the ‘save the princess’ plot is the oldest in the world but at least when Mario does it you know who the princess is, you’ve met her on a previous occasion, in this game you have a girlfriend she’s somewhere in the jungle go get’em tiger.

  As first impressions go this is the worst by far.

 It’s almost like Ubisoft see story as something to be gotten out of the way to make way for the ‘awesome action’, (commence grumpy old man gamer mode) I blame this COD generation, they have ruined the world of gaming, turned games into just another series of crappy movies made for mass consumption, neither good nor bad, just alright which is worse in my opinion. It’s created a generation of gamers who just don't care about anything but shooting at faceless foreigners.

  Rant Over

Far Cry is an open world FPS/RPG hybrid set on a tropical island crawling with pirates and animals that want to eat you. You play Jason Brody an all american boy kidnapped with his friends by pirates and forced to become a tribal warrior to kill the pirate leader Vaas and reclaim his friends before they're killed or sold into slavery.

  Ok I like how you play the sissy younger brother who says “eww” when he skins animals, rather than the hard-boiled soldier older brother, makes the action seem more believable and shows progression. So you start off as this privileged prissy college grad twenty something tossed into hell and end up as this hardened guerrilla fighter. I hate it when you start a game and go into a gun shop and there’s only one gun you can buy, seriously what’s the point, why don't you just give me the gun? I know it’s trying to introduce to the shopping mechanics but once you’ve seen one shop you’ve seen them all.

 Although now I mention that, the shop in this game is quite nice because there are like gun vending machines in each safe house so you don’t need to keep going back to one gun shop but it also eliminates the possibility of introducing eccentric gun dealer characters saying things like “Stranger, stranger, now that’s a weapon!” but to each his own. I do like the weapon customization, paint jobs for guns have always seemed pointless but in this game it adds a little something if only painting your gun camo actually made you harder to see but it doesn't it just looks cool.

 On the other hand you can get silencers for almost every gun except the shotguns and the flame-thrower  which is something they could improve on for next time, because I want to burn people alive quietly.

  Skin to Win

It may shock you to hear I absolutely loved this game, I wouldn’t say I was a massive fan of the series I played the first game and thought it was a little daft, the second game was a pretty decent way to kill an afternoon but it was nothing to write home about really, it was fun but you want a little more from a game than just fun and I really think this game has that little extra something.

 The last games alluded to a stealth system and neither of them really delivered, this game really delivers. The stealth system is amazing, which is quite a feat for an FPS. You can hide in bushes and hunt with a bow, stealth kill dropping from a ledge or emerging from water. The stealth system works really well, you can mark targets from a vantage point and look for the perfect way to strike, which in an open world game like this is immeasurably fun.

 I also like the way you start off only able to carry one gun at a time and then you hunt animals to craft more intricate holsters to carry more weapons and ammo. Hunting and skinning and crafting aren’t new, Assassins Creed 3 to name a recent game did that to death, but the RPG elements and the gun customization really sell it to me. It allows you to customize your own experience, you can run in flamethrower blazing or you can hide in the bushes with a bow, or a do a little of both. I forgot to mention I love the fact you can take guns off dead guys and keep them, it drives me crazy how in some FPS/RPGs you have to make a pact with Zeus to get a new gun or you can only buy them.

Whereas it’s more realistic just to kill a guy and take his then you save money which can be used customizing the hell out of it, also it gives you time to experience each gun individually rather than just saving up for the best one. The levelling system is fairly straight forward there are three skill trees and you kill pirates to unlock skill points, the only thing novel about the concept is that the skills are symbolised by 'magical' tattoos on your arm, the only downside of this levelling system is there is no replay value as this game is an FPS hybrid there are no classes, so you can gain all the skills in the game in one play through.

  Round up

Although the game stumbles at the first hurdle and completely fails to immerse you into the world. The game play pulls it right back from the brink, it’s intensely fun and the story and characters do redeem themselves somewhat and I feel a little heart of darkness peeking out of the shadows not to mention the soundtrack is pretty cool and adds that little extra something. Overall I thought the length of the game was good, I find games like this can overstay their welcome and others can just have ridiculously short campaigns and just pack them full of really tedious padding and fetch quests. I’m not saying this game ticked all the boxes for me but I certainly don’t regret buying it, I just hope the next instalment puts more emphasis on story and character development, rather than gun paint jobs.

  Pros; The game is by no other words absolutely beautiful, the visuals are stunning and are juxtaposed masterfully with the brutality of the animals and people that inhabit the island, which literally brings the island to life. Cons; The storyline is a bit hit and miss and the introduction is a joke, the characters fall a little flat and after all the hype around Vaas, I think he ends up sounding like a nutter at a bus stop talking to his shoes. I just think the game set out to make a point that it couldn't decide on.

Grand Theft Argument

There are some entities that cannot be actors. These include taxonic collectives such as ‘men’, ‘women’, ‘white people’, ‘black people’, etc; social classes; ‘society’ and ‘the state’;  and objects such as money, or written materials, natural disasters, diseases and so on.

-          Tim Owen (Social Theory and Human Biotechnology 2009)

A game is not a person; it doesn’t think, it doesn’t make choices, it doesn’t necessarily pose arguments.  Any arguments it might pose or are injected in by the designers are subjective and open to interpretation. It’s not an actor, it doesn’t vote, it doesn’t get drunk and convince you that public urination is a good idea, it doesn’t knock on your door and ask you very politely to believe a load of nonsense in an inoffensive tone which makes it more annoying because it makes it hard to get mad at them because they seem so nice and then you think ‘maybe I could be that happy and nice if I believed a load of rubbish’.

A lot of controversy was raised around Grand Theft Auto 4 because you could hire prostitutes and then kill them after the virtual sex and get your money back. Obviously if this happened in real life this would be a heinous crime but in a game it’s purely logical; you paid money for a ‘virtual’ service that didn’t really benefit you, the point of the game and being a criminal is money so why shouldn’t you kill to get your money back? It seems nonsensical to play a criminal and then find yourself repulsed when they commit a crime. Does the life of one virtual prostitute have more meaning than the virtual money in a video game? I don’t know about you but when I play GTA I don’t feel the need to follow the speed limit, because it’s a waste of time, so why should I obey any other laws in a virtual world centred around crime?

 The police in the game don't chase you if you drive on the pavement as long as you don’t run too many grannies over and even then you can just keep driving and even if you get caught you just get fined and get your guns taken away and if you die you go to hospital and have to pay a bill. This is something I’m doing in private, it doesn’t hurt anyone, if I want to run over virtual grannies in the comfort of my own home, that’s my business and if John Stuart Mill were alive he would agree with me.

    “The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it. Each is the proper guardian of his own health, whether bodily, or mental or spiritual. Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves, than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest.”  ― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859)

GTA isn’t bad, it’s the devil that doesn't make you do anything, you chose to buy the game, you chose to play it, you could have put down the controller at any time but you didn't  GTA didn't make you do anything it just gives the freedom to do everything, the game isn't necessarily immoral, it’s just amoral or misanthropic, simply put; it just doesn't give a shit. It doesn't make you kill prostitutes after ‘employing their services’ that idea was one born of the capitalist ideal of having something for nothing, which you brought into the game with you. Her virtual life meant less to you than the price of her service, which no one can fault you for because she wasn't real.

“Games don’t pose arguments, they present systems with which to interact”
 Chris Dahlen (video game critic)

 GTA isn't the bible, it isn’t telling you how to live, in fact its doing the opposite and that’s why it’s controversial, because it lets you do whatever you want. It only failed in my opinion because it tried to imitate real life by splicing other mediums into it. I don’t play games to watch tv, I watch tv to watch tv. It lost sight of the point of games to pastiche life rather than mimic life, because if we liked life that much we would just live it rather than play a game, so I think it got lost a little up its own arse and forgot that games are about fun and realism is just the canvas which we paint red.

Karma Police

“I am Andrew Ryan, and I'm here to ask you a question. Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow? 'No!' says the man in Washington, 'It belongs to the poor.' 'No!' says the man in the Vatican, 'It belongs to God.' 'No!' says the man in Moscow, 'It belongs to everyone.' I rejected those answers; instead, I chose something different. I chose the impossible. I chose... Rapture, a city where the artist would not fear the censor, where the scientist would not be bound by petty morality, Where the great would not be constrained by the small! And with the sweat of your brow, Rapture can become your city as well.” 

-Andrew Ryan  

  Games are the stuff of unimagined realities, we want reality but we also want the freedom to do everything in a game as in the real world but without having to be morally culpable for our actions. We want things to be different from the real world but have signs connecting the two. Games already are different, being caught by the police for murder doesn't have the same gravity in GTA as it does in the real world, there’s no trial, no prison and subsequently no rape. In games we want to see and do things we never thought possible, we want to experience things that are impossible and we don’t want to feel restrained by petty morality.

 It’s become a recent trend in games to inject some half baked ideas of morality or a moral consciousness into their games, mainly as a way to increase longevity; basically it’s just a cheeky way to get you to play the game twice to see the sickly sweet ‘good’ ending. The reality is there are no such things as moral choices in games because the game can be played again or reloaded to perform a ‘do over’. Sadly morality in games is often as messy in virtual worlds as it is the real, often I praised Mass Effect for having the bad speech options highlighted red and the good blue so I knew how to be evil, or good if I was feeling frivolous.

  One of many things Bioshock can be praised for is its stunning Manichaeism and ambivalence, there’s no moral grey area in cracking open little girls like coconuts and sucking out their plothole-filler juices. Although in a recording in the game it’s not described as killing them as it is taking a terminally ill patient off life support, but the alternative is saving the little girls and although you still receive some magical plot-filler-suspension-of-belief-juice you receive significantly less. So the moral struggle is very simple, it’s survival of the fittest, you save them at the risk of your own weakness or kill them ensuring your own survival. Although it’s essentially a clear moral choice where both choices can be rationalised, clear moral choices are in no way realistic, they don’t exist.

 Most of the time when you make moral choices in games, just like life it’s hard to establish which is which because morality isn't something that’s set in stone its fluid. What was moral one hundred years ago is not necessarily the case now, there was a time people thought human sacrifice was up there with giving blood. Not to mention that morality is entirely subjective, one man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist and all that. Often it’s hard to make out if games are teaching us right from wrong or if we’re teaching them, because the idea of ‘right and wrong’ is about as black and white as a clown’s underpants, games almost become a philosophical dialogue. The game takes the role of Socrates helping you develop your own ideas of morality. All in all it doesn't matter because the people who your choices affect aren't real anyway, so how can human morality translate into a virtual setting?

Hitman Drabsolution. This time it's personal! sort of.

‘Hmm well if half the effort that went into the menu went into the game should be up for a lovely murderous romp.’

Voila, witness my above average Hitman Absolution review, in which Hitman Absolved to murder lots of rednecks…. Huzzah!

Ok intro; can’t say I liked seeing 47 topless, he’s always been a merciless killing machine not really the pretty boy type, to see him sexualized was slightly stomach churning, and I get the distinct feeling that they're trying to crowbar feelings into is stern visage, well onto the game.

First impressions; love the look, lighting, not really a graphics whore but they were nice. The intro was a little square. I think we've reached an opus where some off camera voice just telling you how to play the game just doesn't cut the mustard. I think tutorials should be entirely immersive because they’re sort of your gateway into the game, Alice wasn't told to tap X to enter wonderland, tutorials are important they shouldn't be just tacked on, you should almost not notice them.

What I like about it so far is it seems a lot more plot heavy than the previous games. Whether you’re familiar with the previous games or not it stands to reason that a game about a hired assassin won’t entail much plot as the whole purpose of hiring an assassin is to have a professional who has no connection to the victim so there’s no link to the client. The odd thing about the previous games were that they still worked because they were laden with sub-narrative; every room told a story and then there was an overarching plot happening in the background building until the climactic ending. This game seems a little Hollywood for my tastes, I mean I hate to say it but it’s the basic Mario ‘Save the princess’ plot-line  (in the voice of Morgan Freeman) ‘a plot as old as time’ and the whole game is based around padding that out.

Although the plot is a bit hit and miss there are some really great new game-play features which are mostly ripped off of other games but who cares? 47 has this sort of vats, time stopping shoot everyone power now like fallout 3, but Splinter Cell Conviction already ripped that one off so it’s no big deal, why shouldn't 47 be able to walk into a room and shoot everyone without much input from me, maybe I should just sit this one out and catch up on my word based puzzles.

There’s also a new stealth system, long story short if you dress as a guard all guards are going to be suspicious of you so you have to avoid them, so the trick is to basically find the one person who is meant to be there but that nobody knows and you can wonder around freely. It makes a lot more sense than the previous games and I think it’s very clever… also they ripped off Assassins Creed lacing the game with hiding spots… but who cares?!

As side note, 47 has acquired the ability to hide a sniper rifle up his ass, I liked how in the previous games you couldn't hide two handed weapons unless you had a suitcase because it’s realistic and makes it more of a challenge to smuggle weapons into areas if you can hide a M60 in your pants it takes the sport out of the whole game. Also one thing I loved about the previous games was that there was always people frisking you (not that it’s a fetish of mine) or metal detectors or things like that so improvising or sneaking in weapons was really important. 

Whereas in this game they seem to let any Tom, Dick or Harry in with an AK under his arm. So although this game makes a big thing about improvised weapons, like using a brick or a bottle to kill someone it’s just sort of style over substance really since you can just use a gun or fiber-wire that 47 has all the time or his bare hands which he can do now. I mean I like the idea that you can kill them from the front with a screwdriver but there’s not much point to it.

The levels seem a little less well structured since this game isn’t about him carrying out a series of well orchestrated assassinations it’s just him basically killing anyone he fancies really. I often found myself reading the objective screen because I’d get half way through a mission with no idea why I was strangling and/or dropping things on all these people.

Don’t get me wrong I love Hitman, it’s one of my favourite games series, I've been waiting for this game for ages and I can’t say I was that blown away, I enjoyed it but it just didn't have the same clout as the other games, it was just missing something, it felt a little rushed, like I’m given all these nice set pieces to play with but I don’t get enough time to faff about with them. The systematic nature of the levels just drained the game of fun and to be honest I've always hated the scoring system on Hitman. I just think giving people targets like that destroy the natural flow of a game, to an extent it almost puts the game on rails, taking all the spontaneity away.

When you compare it to something like Max Payne where your jumping around firing two guns prematurely ejaculating bullets all over the place it almost makes murder boring, trying to make it as neat and economic as possible and when did the Hitman series become so xenophobic? In Contracts and Silent assassin 47 went all over the world, in the last game he spent most of his time in the south of America killing hillbillies then he went to Vegas and in this he just splits his time between Chicago and Dakota… killing hillbillies again. All games are set in America, I am seriously bored of America and I get the distinct feeling Hitman hates Americans, especially rednecks.

My only other little niggle is the addition of a cover system, it just destroys me to think that there are people playing this game as a cover shooter chest-high-wallfest and not as the methodical murderfest that it is. Also QTE?!.... in Hitman!? What were they thinking!?.... Nuns?

Games Vs Art

"Movies don't create psychos. Movies make psychos more creative!”

                                                                                 - Billy Loomis (Scream 1996)

 Although the columbine shooters may have based their rampage loosely on the Matrix by wearing black trench coats and the classic pc game Doom was found to be one they played frequently that doesn't mean if neither the Matrix nor Doom existed the shooting wouldn’t have happened. Films and games influence people but they don’t decide people’s actions. If not the matrix then another action movie, the idea of living in a dream world, tricked by a malevolent entity is by no means new, it originates from the sixteenth century French philosopher Rene Descartes and his ideas of the devil, but that is entirely beside the point.

"To try and fasten any responsibility on art as the cause of life seems to me to put the case the wrong way around. Art consists of reshaping life but it does not create life, nor cause life. Furthermore, to attribute powerful suggestive qualities to a film is at odds with the scientifically accepted view that, even after deep hypnosis, in a posthypnotic state, people cannot be made to do things which are at odds with their natures."  -Stanley Kubrick (1972)

This quote, from Kubrick is regarding the spree of copy cat violence that occurred upon the release and subsequent ban of A Clockwork Orange. Essentially what happened was criminals ‘themed’ crimes around the film or mimicked some of the crimes that happened in the film. Who knows maybe they dressed the same maybe they sang singing in the rain while beating a man and raping his wife, who cares? The point is this is purely aesthetic, you don’t watch a film one day and say ‘sod it’ and go live the life of a rapist gang member out of the blue, if you did do that it would have to have been something that you wanted to do all along. Games and films don’t manufacture behaviour they don’t alter people the only impact they have is on the aesthetic, so the film isn't the ‘why’ it’s just the ‘how’.

The only impact The Matrix had on the columbine killers was their choice of clothes, which seems like a moot point when the cause of their actions was their parents and their school ignoring the fact they were obviously being bullied not to mention the fact they were collecting guns. Not that I believe gun collecting precipitates shooting but what other uses to guns have? On the surface the ban is understandable but what it boils down to is purely aesthetic. Yes they may have copied the clothes and the words but when a killer kills we shouldn't focus on the clothes he wears or the books he reads to explain why. Those things are only the window dressing of a disturbed mind. Games and films and other media can’t actually implant murderous thoughts into people’s heads. Those are already there, films and games may if they do anything fan the flames, give them ideas but ideas are just ideas and to give up these ideas would be worse than just living with them.

 Would you really want to give up films like Clockwork Orange just to stop people copying them but then if not Clocking Orange then it’s the Matrix, ok that’s gone, what’s next? Just destroy all films and all books and all plays and erase all history to do with any violence just to destroy the slightest possibility that anyone might copy any of it. Do you think this would work? Of course not because people will still kill, as long as there are two men left on the earth one may still kill the other and he’ll say God told him to do it, if he hasn't read any good books recently or seen any good films.
The reason for this is because people just want something to blame anything but to have to come to terms with the fact that we’re no better than animals really and animals don’t need any other reason for killing other than having nothing better to do.

Happiness is a Warm Gun

    Games in all forms have since inception been viewed as intellectually degrading, which is irrational (Johann Huizinga - play anthropologist) games are central to the formation of culture, we learn everything vital to being a person as a child through play. An example of this is God of War. Throughout the game we’re taught a rather twisted version of ancient Greek mythology but it has a basis in ‘real’ mythology and since mythology isn’t really real anyway what does it matter if it’s altered or not? Play is essential to civilised society. It’s a social pleasure and it mediates social interaction, but what if games could mediate or incite crime like the facebook riots?

We don’t really want to kill real people in games, that’s why they look so computerised (people in games don’t look like people in the real world usually but they’re starting to) or wear masks or are just plain reprehensible (Inhumane actions result in a character becoming less human), we dehumanize them, separate them, they become the faceless ‘other’.

Still the subject fascinates us as most taboo subjects do and video games allow us a neutral non-judgemental environment to play with these ideas of murder, crime and revenge. In that respect gamers are more like sense explorers, than children playing. They are the philosophers of the 21^stcentury; they sample a variety of emotions and sensations that not everyone can or is willing to experience, everything from fear and loathing to love and lust as well as pure child-like wonder.

The obvious worry is that people will learn or develop violent behaviour from playing games. In reality a video game has no more power of an individual than a film or a book, it’s just information, holding a gun or a knife and a controller are so far removed it’s laughable. Obviously it’s beside the point, erections don’t rape people, people rape people.

“The fighting game, like fighting itself, will always be popular “(Poole 2000). Sadly people are savage in nature, every art form we have originates from that savagery before the television we had public executions and the coliseum and still the most popular forms of media are those that glorify violence, but what’s wrong with that? If mindless violence is not entertainment, then what is?

Although we've had light guns for a long time in arcades that emulate the look and feel of real guns, reason dictates that one day there may be a game that could in some way teach you something be it combat or cooking but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Knowledge is without agency, although it is said to be power knowledge has no will of its own it’s what is done with that power that is paramount and that is up to the individual.

That being said although the subject matter of most games may centre around murder, games are actually more like sport. In a game the goal is not actually to kill but to win, killing is just the means to an end it’s not an end in itself. So although in the game Hitman you are a professional assassin and the objectives of the game are to kill people the pleasure doesn’t come solely from the act of killing (admittedly some of it does) the joy of the game comes from the journey and the eventual conquering of the game, saving the world/princess/Holy Grail whatever it is.

 Killing is just a minor part of whole game, it can never be the main focus. If there was such a game just about killing you could put all the names of the people buying it on a register because the only people that would play it would be undoubtedly insane and it would probably never make it onto the shelves anyway. If you say video games are violent in the sense that they train someone to be more effective at killing or increase aggressive tendencies then martial arts, body building, fencing, shooting, paint balling etc. should also be suspect.

Even if video games did increase the ability to kill they don’t necessarily increase the drive to. The drive to kill is down to the person playing. Just because you play manhunt carve out a niche in virtual butchery doesn't necessarily mean you would turn those new found skills to actual murder, the two are not in the same ball park, they’re not even the same sport. The game Madworld is a good example actually because although it’s a game about a murder game show your actual objectives are not to kill but to win the game show and you have this overarching story where you’re a government agent sent into to stop the game show.

Another example of this is Manhunt a very controversial game by those lovely people at Rockstar who brought us Grand Theft Auto, that amoral classic. Manhunt is a game about making a snuff film but that’s the goal of your captor not your character, the characters goal is just to survive and get out of this maze of death and kill the director and stop the snuff film. So as a player you sort of a play a rival director following the snuff film directors orders for the time being so as to get closer to him and put a stop to him.

The bottom line is that actually it makes no difference because there is nothing to kill in the first place because it’s just a fantasy, the people aren't real, all the meaning and the consequence of their lives were imagined and taking their lives has no permanence because you can select ‘new game’ and do it all again.

Imurder

“Real, unreal what’s the difference? As long as you don’t get caught”

- Trickster (Brainscan 1994)

Brainscan was a brilliant nineties film starring Edward Furlong (Terminator 2 1991, American History X 1998) about what the Wii would be like in a perfect world and the reason the film really interested me was because it laid bare this vital truth about video games; they’re all about murder. A slight slippery slope of an argument coming up but please stay with me. We live in a time where people can socialise on-line they can visit casinos and virtual strip clubs, they can shop and take tours of places without ever having to meet with anyone condescending, so why can’t they kill?

On-line hunting is currently locked in legal battles with animal rights groups trying to have it banned all over the globe. For anyone who is not familiar with on-line hunting it's basically the commercialisation of remote control robotics that fire guns instead of make coffee. Similar to the ones used by the military to clear caves or go anywhere an american soldier might encounter ghosts, but you pay to shoot at animals rather than foreigners.Supposedly it’s targeting disabled people who can’t go hunting or just lazy people who can’t be bothered to put on a high visibility jacket and wellies. The possibilities are limitless, literally turning killing into a game, setting up this strange nexus between real and fantasy.

There are enough accidents that happen in real hunting imagine how many ‘accidents’ will happen when the person is just clicking a mouse and feels no real responsibility for the lives they’re taking because they feel so removed from the actual act as they’re not actually there. It's very much like Brainscan, it's basically a film about a video game where you commit a murder but it actually happens in real life. So that being said why not on-line murder for people that want all the thrill of being a serial killer without all the mess.

 It goes without saying that it wouldn't exactly be legal but since when has that stopped anything on the internet? Half the allure of the internet is that it’s basically the wild west of information, too big and too wild to be tamed by any law enforcement agencies but I think it’s fair to say it’s also a pretty scary place when you think about it. I still support that idea of real freedom even though it inevitably leads to deviance.

What I'm trying to say is; what if, like Brainscan, someone could make a real murder feel like a video game? People could in theory be tricked into murdering someone with an on-line game, and have no idea that real people were being killed as a result of their actions, it’s possible but wholly unlikely. On the other hand why couldn't a killer wait outside a house with webcam on his head and an earpiece in his ear to receive instructions from a paying customer how to commit a murder? The pretence would basically be that the killer was going to kill regardless and the customer would simply be paying to choose the method and tools used. Basically it would be up to the customer to suspend his disbelief to whether it was real or fantasy and would probably get the benefit of the doubt in a court of law. There could be a massive market for selling someone a murder fantasy that could be entirely staged but still leaving room for doubt. You may ask yourself ‘what’s the point?’ but you could say that about almost anything on the internet. What's the point of putting a cats face through a piece of bread? The fact is it doesn't have to make sense, it’s just supply and demand and there will always be demand for the taboo.

Video games are already used to train pilots and terrorists use them to map locations they plan to terrorize. It seems really strange when you think back to the Robin Williams film Toys (1992) of which the premise was that the military were making toys that could kill controlled by kids who thought they were playing video games and looking at today’s predator drones (the unmanned remote control bombers used by the US Military) and realising the only difference is they’re not controlled by kids, just under developed macho man children. Where do you draw the line when murder is legalised and a click of a mouse away?   The reason I love video games is that they’re honest, they operate on the principle that there’s a killer in everyone, they just allow the killer to come out and play.