How ought we to respond to fulminations against videogames by people who don’t play them? A great many, of course, may be safely ignored. But when an interesting writer decides to take a passing kick at games, it can be worth digging for the grain of truth in the stereotypical criticism. A case in point: recently, I was reading an article by the philosopher Zygmunt Bauman, published in the Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza last spring, which after a meditative beginning about language and exile suddenly targets videogames, along with TV and cinema – they all purvey, he argues, a kind of Manichean pornography. I quote at length to give the flavour of Bauman’s irresistible rhetoric:

Surely, compared with the refined artistry of cinema, television, Nintendo or Play Station, the everyday life in the barracks of the concentration camps or the communist bloc must seem like some abortive creations produced by provincial amateurs and manufacturers of cheap kitsch. These lucky beasts [the kids of today] have known almost from the day they were born that monstrous things are the creation of monsters and sordid things are created by scoundrels, and that monsters and scoundrels therefore have to be exterminated before they get a chance to exterminate us, and that, since those who are being exterminated are the spawn of the devil it must follow that those who subdue them are nothing but angels?

So as they sit at their computers with their faces ablush, trying to defeat the electronic monsters at their own wicked game, to respond to their trickery with their own, even more refined, tricks and mow them down in their multitudes before they start mowing down ours, it does not in the least offend their own high opinion of themselves. After all, these electronic monsters ambushed them out of pure cruelty whereas they, on their part, were only trying to save themselves and while they were at it, the rest of the world, from the brutes. Humanity is divided into executioners and their victims, and once the latter finally exterminate the last of the former, we can safely store brutality in one of the deposits of memory (or forgetting) and slam the door behind it.

Bauman goes on to describe what he calls the “survivor syndrome” that grows out of totalitarian history, in which the descendants of those who suffered appalling harms think in a way he characterises thus: “They are out to get me, to finish me off, and they are sure to succeed if I don’t get there first, if I don’t strike the first blow.” Such a syndrome “suggests that the point of life is survival,” Bauman writes, leading to our contemporary world of “preventative” atrocities.

Bauman’s rhetorical scheme might have been even more piquant, I thought, had he been aware of the generic term “survival horror”, and explored its parallels with “survivor syndrome”. Among ourselves, the description “survival horror” is mainly reserved for games about pedantic ammunition husbandry (and, secondarily, zombies), but it is actually a pretty good description of a far wider swathe of videogames. Any work that presents an entire world to be “pacified” (in the evergreen Vietnam-era euphemism), its inhabitants to be killed or at least “neutralized” before they kill you, could be structurally described as a game of survival horror, whether it be dressed up as a homage to urban athleticism (Mirror’s Edge), a fantasy of gloomy caverns and dripping neoprene (Tomb Raider), or the Bildungsroman of an antisocial hoodie-wearing teen stalker (Assassin’s Creed).

Some such games attempt to blur their intense you-against-the-world solipsism by providing comrades or allies, but these persons remain resources to be managed, not shoulders to cry on. Like guns, they are just tools, except in humanoid masks. The basic setup remains: kill this world, before it kills you. So, whether or not you agree with Bauman that “survivor syndrome” describes a real sociohistorical phenomenon, it can hardly be denied that it is an accurate label for the psychopathology of many videogames — even those that aren’t expressly predicated on mass killing. Of course, a certain self-centredness is mandated in a form whose premise is that an individual interacts with a designed universe. But it is surely past time that such interactions encompass more than the equivalent of blasting it with Agent Orange.

Zygmunt Bauman may not have spent many minutes playing videogames himself, but to dismiss him completely (by, say, talking about the kinds of sports games or art games that don’t fit his stereotype) would be to miss a point. The violence of his language is a provocation, but it is also a gift. Naturally, a well-engineered shooter can be a cathartic and palate-cleansing experience without tempting me to go postal in the bistro, yet Bauman is surely right to imply that, as it stands, too many videogames are mere “extermination” simulators. You might argue that this is an ethical failing; it is certainly an aesthetic one.