I have never met a person who can do what most video game heroes can do. Can you endlessly jog, climb, dive and jump whilst carrying multiple high-powered firearms, grenades, ammo for everything, take several direct shots from often experimental alien plasma weaponry and yet, somehow, maintain laser-like precision for half-mile sniper shots?
I can’t even run up the stairs and then type accurately on my phone.
Many video games make the hero explicitly transhuman, as in Deus Ex: Human Revolution, in which the character’s transhuman condition is not only essential for explaining his ability to cloak and receive transmissions directly into his mind, but is also a central plot point. Then there are the more obscure transhumans, like Halo‘s Master Chief, a result of the SPARTAN project, placing him in a class of genetically engineered super-soldier permanently inside cybernetic armor. However, Master Chief is still something of a robot, forever hidden behind his golden visor. It’s the ostensibly flesh-and-blood heroes who possess superhuman stamina and survival that contradict everything we know of a standard Homo sapiens. Even Commander Shepard of Mass Effect has psionic abilities due to her exposure to element zero and becomes more heavily cyberized as the series progresses, giving her spectacular abilities.
My two favorite examples are Half-Life‘s mute M.I.T. graduate, Gordon Freeman (pictured above with full load out), and classic noir anti-hero, Max Payne, whose eponymous game drove him through a 72 hour bender of blood and revenge. What struck me about these games is that they do not simply accept that the hero of a video game is superhuman because the game says so. No no no, here we see something of an admission that this is not quite reality and that this impossible human being whose shoes we are filling and barrel we are aiming is something more than we initially understand.
Read More: http://www.popbioethics.com/2011/09/the-most-realistic-video-game-heroes-are-transhuman/
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