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I want to preface this little piece with two statements. First, the desires and hopes expressed in this piece should in no way be considered to depict what I believe is feasible, or profitable, in gaming. These are merely an expression of my "perfect world" dreams. Second, lest no one be confused to the contrary, I love war games. Love them. FPSs are my bread and butter and Battlefield 1942 is my favorite game of all time.
That being said, I wanted to write about something in gaming that is always in the back of my mind as I plow through endless waves of Nazis/Mutants/Combine Soldiers/etc. etc. ad nauseum: Why We Fight. Or perhaps more specifically, our (as human beings, not as the character we have inhabited) personal motivations for fighting simulated wars.
My gripe with gaming is this: Videogames always thrust us into the battle without giving us a true contextual reason that elevates our own reason for fighting to something beyond what essentially boils down to "because we told you to." I'm not sure if I would call this "because we told you so" a mechanic, or an element of story, or what. To me, it doesn't really matter what category it falls into because the issue permeates all videogames in which combat is a major element.
At first glance, this claim may seem provocative and downright incorrect. However, I don't even really consider it to even be open to debate. Do this in your head: name for me one game in which you spend a considerable amount of time playing before the fighting starts. I'm not talking about wandering through a train station or running through an obstacle course, I'm talking some serious time spent playing as the character without combat. I don't think you can name one game, unless that game contains no fighting at all.
Consider then, why you are driven to guide a videogame character through a war. Usually it's because the story line tells you you must. Sure, they're Nazis, or Orcs, or they wear different hats than you do. Sometimes, the games are very specific. Your peace-loving country is about to be eradicated. Your loving wife and young child have been slaughtered. The Princess is in another castle! But really, what incentive do you as the (human) player have for fighting to prevent the horrible from occurring? Have you lived one second of your peaceful life in this country on the verge of annihilation? Where did you meet this wife you care so much about? Can you even tell me her name? Hell, the princess has never even put out once, not once. What affinity do you have for her?
You, as a player, have not been given a true, feel-it-in-your-gut reason to fight. You don't feel any personal rage or sense of duty. The emotions the videogame designer hopes you will feel are always a hard sell because whatever you're feeling comes to you second-hand. They blew up the big mill in the middle of my character's town? So what? My character seems pretty pissed about it, but what do I care? I have no memories associated with that mill. It's just a big dumb building to me.
And after the videogame war you fight is all over, that's it, you're done. What have you earned with your struggles through war? A look at a list of names and a chance to do it all again, only harder.
Is this why men fight wars?
What I am proposing is game which makes you feel the peace before you fight the war. The best example I can think of (fortunately I am not responsible for scheming up videogames) would be similar to some iteration of The Sims. Say what you will about that series, I was hooked when the first one came out. I built my success from the ground up. I lived in a large villa with a courtyard and a pool in the middle. This was what, eight years ago? I still remember my wife's name -- Jackie, and my son's name -- Butch (I still get a kick out of that name). But I cared about my virtual family. I as a human being obviously didn't 'love' my 'wife,' she was pixels. But I certainly felt affection towards my faux-family.
What, then, would have happened, if one day that house that I had worked so hard to build from the ground up was bombed? What if dear Jackie had been vaporized by a terrorist while she worked her job as a scientist? And what if the game had auto-saved there, so I couldn't get those things back? Would I have been upset? Of course I would have. And then say I get a telephone call the next day, or someone comes to the door, and says "Hey, your wife was killed and your house was blown up. This is because our neighboring country has declared war on us. Do you want to enlist?" You just spent dozens of game hours building up something that was instantly taken away from you. Do you want to enlist? Hell yes you want to enlist!
Now it's personal. You know why you're fighting. It's not because you were told to by some contrived story. It's because something you directly cared about was very unfairly taken away from you. Now you will remember that ever enemy body you pile high is because you personally were subjected to a great and galling loss at their hands.
And here's the important part: after the war is over, the game would not end. After the war is over, you have earned the right to go back and try to rebuild that life that was taken from you as best you can. You've earned the peace, and now you get to taste its direct results.
I guess basically what I'm asking for is a game that makes my motivation for fighting truly personal, or as personal as the simulated thing could be. And, I don't think that the above demands necessarily preclude a "fun" gaming experience.
tl;dr: I'm tired of videogames not giving me any personal incentive for fighting, and then not giving me any real reward for having earned a hard-fought peace.
A brief comment: Videogames are often compared to film, and often the "artistic" value of these formats is compared. I try to steer clear of this debate because I think that the two are too difference for comparison, and I often bog myself down in trying to adequately define art, which I'm not sure can be done. But I would argue that all art exists, at least in part, to explain various aspects of the human condition from the creator's point of view. And I think that a game, as described above, is not only theoretically possible, but that such a game would give videogames at least a partial leg up on films.
You can watch a movie like Saving Private Ryan, and say to yourself -- amongst many other points -- "Oh yeah, war is Hell." The director has asked you to put yourself in the shoes of these men, which is essentially what all videogames to this point have done. But videogames have the chance to take it a step further, they have a chance to make you say "Oh yeah, war is Hell, because I've experienced one (I cannot emphasize the smallness of this enough) tiny little piece of the loss that one experiences in a war." Videogames have a unique opportunity to put you just that much closer to experiencing a unique and perhaps otherwise unattainable aspect of human existence, and I feel like all too often they squander that opportunity. No doubt, the best is yet to come.
That was all pretty highfalutin, I apologize. Now if you'll just excuse me, I need to figure out how to get off of this high horse without hurting myself.
Contest:
6:00 PM on 10.18.2009
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Game designers are TRUE artists.
Not knowing why you are really fighting is a beautiful metaphor for the futility of war and the plight of those young naive boys that died in WWII/Nam/Iraq etc
@ BulletMagnet and Preacher:
See, I think sort of the problem is the supposition that the peace has to be boring, that it would almost be a punishment one would have to endure to get to the war. I haven't played the Darkness so I can't really comment on it, but it would seem like sitting on your couch would be a sort of punishment you must endure until you get to kill stuff and break things.
I guess what I'm envisioning is a game where the peace is actually more fun than the war. It's not that the war has to be boring or unpleasant - varying pacing in games is an extremely important aspect of keeping it fresh. But the idea would be something along the lines of forcing a desire within the player to end the war and get back to the peace.
As an example (Brief side note: It's sort of sad that when I try to think of games that don't involve fighting all I can think of is Maxis games. This is either a comment on my own tastes, or the gaming industry):
Say there is a Sim City type game. As you start the game, you're running a successful, peaceful city. This would serve as sort of a tutorial, but longer, as you would learn to manage and perhaps build your city. Then, out of the blue, your city is carpet bombed. You now have the option to declare war, hold a vote to declare war, or remain peaceful. If you remain peaceful there is a chance that you will not be bombed again. IF you go to war, the game becomes an RTS style game where you wage the war. When you finish the war, you return to your shattered city, only this time, instead of just running the city, you must build it up from the ashes.
The flaw to this plan, or course, is that the war is pre-ordained, it has to happen to get to the third stage. And since this is the case, every play through you had (except maybe the first, depending on how much you had read up on the game), you would be expecting an attack at some point, it would feel like the game was building to this point, it would not be such a shocking surprise.
I dunno, like I said above, I think it's theoretically feasible to make such a game, I just think it would require more inspiration and creativity than I possess.
I know people who can get attached to their online character with the least effort by the developer, just the fact that their character is online and persistant. Then there are the players who love to grief these people, I see it as nature's way of teaching them not to take a game too seriously.
If the player invests the resource of "time" into the game then his accomplishments in the game create a sense of attachment. If those accomplishments are under threat that creates tension. If those accomplishments are taken away that creates that emotional sense of loss. Of course what this whole argument just boils down to is making player punishment more severe, a old-school game design philosophy.
As I said, though, your overall idea is still intriguing.
@BulletMagnet - Yeah, I see what you're saying. I would disagree that games that are peaceful are inevitably more boring than violent ones though, although I would say that generally speaking this is the case. I guess I'm advocating for striking a balance wherein the violent and nonviolent are both fun, but the nonviolent happens to be more fun.
You raise an interesting point that I hadn't considered though, and that's the influence of the player's mood on the sort of game they play. I guess you could run into problems if, instead of the player picking action packed or laid back depending on their mood, the game designer is essentially dictating what sort of game will be experienced, instead of the player.
Thanks for the comments though guys, surprisingly intelligent, even for Destruction (which I consider to be a cut above standard issue gaming sites).
I think the main reason we don't see too many war/battle games take advantage of the "war is hell" aspect is because most of the gameplay is slicing and dicing your enemies, not making critical, moral and personal decisions that can alter gameplay.
Look at the most acclaimed war films, how they are remembered for their quality writing. I think games can accomplish that.
Haha and yes to the mmo thing. FFXI already has elements like that, especially with the way it handles exp. You get people doing the most retarded shit to keep from dying 'cos they don't want to lose exp that took forever for them to get.
I don't think you'd even necessarily need a whole background story part of a game to get people more invested in the fighting bits though. I think a lot could just be done by allowing the player to customize things a bit when a game starts up. Letting people pick a character and customizing them, choosing a home city/planet/etc, having some choice as to which npcs are in your party, those sort of things. At least then it's the city you chose that's getting blown up, or the npc that you handpicked to be in your party that just kicked the bucket.
1. Games without combat. There are many ames with out combat, for example: FIFA, Tony Hawks, or pretty much any other sports game for that matter.
2. In one of your posts, you want a game where you build up your city, then there is a war in RTS style. I think you should try one of the Anno games. I have never personally played one, but the reviews sound a lot like the type f game you describe.
What would you think about getting the character's motivation mid-game? i.e. you join up for the G.I. Bill, get fragged in a skirmish, taken to a war hospital and meet a nurse. You fall in love with her/him as you recover, but she gets killed in an IED blast. Have this all play out like the first fifteen minutes of Fallout 3 with the interactivity and such, and then afterwards when you're in the meat of the game again, every time you get dazed, you might see ghost images/sounds of her?
BIOSHOCK SPOILERS AHEAD!
The main character was thrust into the fight because he didn't have a choice. His actions were being dictated by someone else (Atlas/Fontaine/Ken Levine) in a way that he could not be given a context to the fighting. In any case, you're fighting because a third party told you to do so. Ken Levine & Co. crafted a critique about videogames while using the medium in a rather unique way.
I know Bioshock doesn't fulfill your wish to take the role of a pre-combat player, but the game is made in such a way where the lack of pre-combat context is appropriate.
If you didn't consider going through City 17 and seeing the suffering of the people under Combine rule at the beginning of Half-Life 2 motivation, then I don't believe you have the right to talk about it.
You begin the game in a peaceful village doing errands for the the citizens and than BOOM!, an evil army appears and everything is fucked.
I can't.
Because that game would be boring as fuck.
I think that's as long as "action" games will ever go. Same with action movies, except they can generally go a little longer (maybe twenty minutes).
I would fucking buy that game. Seriously, that is one of the most awesome ideas I've ever heard.
EA: Make it happen.
Interestingly enough, I've actually been toying around with an idea for a game that fits this description (not the HiddenAHB one). It's a game that has a fair amount of action, but for the first 5 or so hours, you really wouldn't be getting into any fights. I didn't make it like that by design, it just happened to work out like that. I think it would work because the first part of the game still has the adventurous and dangerous feel of the rest of the game, just without anyone getting cut or shot. And then even after the action starts, there is another point where it increases even more, to the point where it is more action than adventure, and there is actually a real reason to fight that most people would be sympathetic with. Too bad I don't plan to be a game designer John, as you would probably like this game.
Anyway, very interesting.
On topic, I think Lost Odyssey does an excellent job of justifying Caim's reasons for fighting, and you feel very much a part of him, because you're both in the same boat; I know the amnesia meme can be a bit tired, but it allows them to throw Caim into the middle of a war and not have to justify anything, yet. Caim doesn't know, and neither do you.
First, in regards to anyone who said something along the lines of the "I like just being able to... blow things up/not think too much about my games," etc. I totally agree with you. I was trying to emphasize this with my disclaimer that Battlefield 1942 is my favorite game of all time. It really is. Is there a game with any less storyline than the Battlefield series? I would just like to be able to switch it up from time to time.
@X V1: In regards to non-violent video games, doesn't the same problem still essentially exist? I'm not a huge sports games fan, so my knowledge here is limited, but wasn't there a sports franchise where you only played as one character and could accumulate wealth, a wardrobe, etc.? This is more in line with what I have in mind, but for it to be truly comparable, I think that it would have to be more than just accumulating items for items sake. Also, I think that sports games intrinsically suffer here because they're not really about a compelling narrative.
@lyfeforce: I think that what you suggest could totally work. I mean, to use an old stand in, that's basically what Saving Private Ryan does, starts out with a horrific and shocking moment, and then character development commences.
@MarlinClock: Do you really consider 20 minutes of wandering through a city enough time to really identify with the residents of that city? I don't want to sound like I'm hating on HL2, which is easily in my top five games of all time, but do those moments really give us insight into the mind of Gordon Freeman? Think of it this way, last you know you get on a train with the G Man, you wake up ten years later, don't ask a single question, and start doing everything your old friends tell you, most of which involves getting shot at. Really? You don't say, "what the fuck happened here?" Or "isn't anyone curious where I've been for ten fucking years?" I think that Half Life 2 more perfectly nailed setting mood better than any game I've ever played. But as far as character development, and getting into the mindset of Gordon Freeman, Half Life 2 could certainly be improved.
@Hidden AHB: To me, this idea is different from being inserted into your standard issue JRPG, because in those games you're thrust into relationships with neighbors/family/friends, but you don't build those relationships yourself. And it's my premise that in building those relationships you would develop far stronger motivation.
Meant to comment more, but this is already long as hell and I gotta go to bed. Maybe later on.
So you're looking for a game in which you can guide you people in prosperity and peace to give a true emphasis towards your actions when you fight.
So, ActRaiser then?
I think games are at their best when they are like that, and not some interactive simulacrum of a movie, but I agree that if we are to make games with characters, plots and stuff like that might as well make it compelling.
Since movies always come up, it's useful for everyone to remember that it took quite a while for the first masterpieces to appear - it was mostly gimmicky stuff and chasing scenes for the first 20 or 30 years of the medium save for a couple of pioneers
On a side note I'd be curious to know how many ingame girlfriends, wives, entire families had to die in order to set up the main character to go on a free for all killing spree.
Try Utawarerumono: you spend most of your time reading the story, and once in a while there's a T-rpg battle... the first one occurs after two hours of gameplay.
still i see your point