Just to get it out of the way, when I say “violence” I also mean “combat” — in other words, the solving of conflicts through brute force and physical harm.
Since the medium’s birth, videogames have been about killing. Spacewar concerned two spaceships attempting to blast each other out of the cosmos. Contra turns the player into a one-man army against a generic battalion of baddies. God of War, Rainbow Six, Knights of the Old Republic, and Grand Theft Auto, for all their differences in setting, tone, and gameplay, are still about fighting difficult battles and vanquishing all your enemies.
And, to be frank, I’m getting a little sick of it. The emphasis of combat and violence in videogames now feel almost anachronistic, considering the beautiful graphics and different levels of interactivity our games are now capable of. Game artists spend hours rendering the most gorgeous environments and character models the world has ever seen, only so those environments can serve as a slightly prettier arena in which the player blows things up.
After the jump, you’ll see (A) why there seems to be an unnecessarily strong emphasis on combat and violence in videogaming, (B) why this is a bad thing, and (C) what can be done about it. But not necessarily in that order.
Eight million ways to die
Stabbing, shooting, slicing, strangling, poisoning, chainsawing, curb-stomping, detonating. For the most part, we seem to have death covered. I indirectly touched on the subject a few months ago, but suffice it to say that we have games that turn death scenes into “Burnout with body parts” and games that take a great amount of pride in their ability to show violent deaths — for all intents and purposes, we seem to have violence, in most of its incarnations, covered.
I don’t mean to say that these games are bad because of their violent content, and I don’t even think that these games should have scaled back their violence — the “videogame gore” article is one for another day — but it stands to reason that if a considerable majority of videogames released on a yearly basis involve killing, maiming, and/or beating the living daylights out of everything in a ten mile radius, why not explore some other options?
The Japanese game market obviously provides many different sorts of gaming alternatives (were we talking about this in person, this is the point at which I’d point to a physical collection of Japanese DS games like Rub Rabbits and Brain Age), but these nonviolent titles usually function as little more than small, casual diversions. As it stands, the titles that get the most weight (and money) thrown behind them are those games that focus on hacking, slashing, and/or boom-headshotting.
Again, I like action games just as much as the next guy, but, at times, it’s tough to feel like the genre doesn’t repeat itself (“an exciting, realistic third person shooter…but this time, there’s a ‘cover’ button!”).
You can do anything…just don’t be a pussy
At the risk of possibly crossing into Leigh’s territory, videogaming’s almost single-minded focus on violence and combat is best exemplified in the modern RPG.
Just recently I started replaying the first Knights of the Old Republic, with the intention of creating a character wholly unlike one I used my first go-around. I beat the game with a light side warrior-Jedi a few years back, so, this time around, I wanted to see how it might be possible to get through the game as a morally grey scoundrel with skills much more suited to hacking, repair, and persuasion than balls-out combat.
After a few hours of getting my supporting party members to do my fighting for me and one or two instances where I actually used my “persuade” ability, I went into the lower depths of the planet Taris, where a very simple bit of conflict gave me a realization (and, subsequently, the desire to write this article).
Upon entering Taris’s Lower City, the player accidentally walks in on two dueling gangs. After one destroys the other, the victors turn their attention to the player and his party, instantly deciding to attack.
As five Black Vulkar gangsters rushed forward, something occurred to me: my reasons for fighting these thugs didn’t just boil down to a matter of my wanting to survive, so much as the game was actually forcing me to fight. Logically, my character should have been able to run away from the Vulkars, or sprint past them in an effort to survive the encounter — according to the circumstances of the fight and the buildup to it (the Vulkars are shown to be the stronger of the two gangs, and they literally force their aggression upon the player), the character’s only goal should be survival, at any cost. This can mean dueling the Vulkars until they are all dead, but it could just as easily mean running away/past them, or sneaking around them.
Now, of course, I could technically do these things: running past them might cost me half of my health bar, but it still remained a possibility. But something still felt wrong about this option, and it took me a moment to understand what it was — there’s no reward. In addition to the fact that running past the Vulkars is but a temporary solution (the Vulkars stay where they are — evidently, they’ve got nothing better to do than sit around and wait for the player to come back), there is no tangible reward simply for surviving the encounter. And by “reward,” I am referring to XP.
In a nonlinear, “go anywhere, do anything” sort of RPG, one would assume that all different types of conflict solutions would be supported by the game mechanics: every conflict has an obvious goal (in this case, survival), and the game mechanics reward the player for completion of this goal, no matter how the player chooses to solve the problem. The rewards may vary, of course, as there need to be different incentives for choosing different paths (going through the trouble of combat results in stealing items from your dead enemies, whereas simply running past them does not), but, hypothetically, each path should result in more or less the same XP reward so the player can level up their character as the plot progresses. The different problem-solving methods and their relative difficulty/inefficiency would obviously change as the game progresses (I don’t mean to suggest that players should be allowed to effortlessly run past every enemy and problem in the game and still level up — at some point, the character must do something, whether it be hacking, turning baddies into the police, sneaking, persuading or getting others do to their fighting for them), but all possibilities would be at least partially covered by the XP reward system.
Obviously, this is not the case. Since running past the Vulkars doesn’t net the player any XP, and since the Vulkars stay there until they are killed, the game essentially forces the player into a single course of action: kill. In many RPGs, killing is not a matter of choice or morality, but simply a necessity — apart from certain scripted instances where the player can talk, hack, or repair his way out of a situation, violence is the rule, not the exception, when it comes to problem-solving. While running or sneaking past enemies solves the immediate threats to life and limb, it doesn’t help the player level up, and is therefore almost never an acceptable course of action. Without levelling up, the player will be incapable of facing challenges later in the game. To survive, the character must fight, even if he or she doesn’t necessarily need to.
To borrow another example from KotOR, compare the hacking and repair systems to the combat mechanics. Where swords and blasters will never run out of ammo and therefore always represent a permanent method of gaining XP by killing enemies, hacking and repair require perishable items in order to function properly. Given the fact that computer spikes and repair parts are essentially used as hacking or repair ammunition, the game seems to suggest that these skills are secondary to the character’s main ability to fight. Unlike combat, hacking and repair take no skill or strategy – just a heap of items and a character with sufficient ability points. Instead of encouraging the player to try everything at his or her disposal to solve a problem, the skill-free, item-dependent implementation of hack and repair essentially tells the player, “these options are here, but you’ll probably still want to rely on your combat abilities.”
If it seems like I’m just picking on KotOR (it is Star Wars we’re talking about, after all) consider the Fallout games: these two titles may very well be the most nonlinear games ever made, yet both, in some way or another, require the player to engage in combat. In Fallout 2, the game inexplicably ends with a long, difficult boss fight between the player and a mutant soldier. There is absolutely no way to beat the game without defeating the soldier, and there is absolutely no way to defeat the soldier without having levelled up a character to the point of combat excellence (though, thankfully, the player can persuade a few nearby soldiers to help him win the fight). And despite the fact that the first Fallout game is aaaalmost possible to complete without firing a single shot or even meeting the main villain, the mutant base that must be explored and destroyed by the protagonist is pretty much impossible to survive without the ability to handle a rocket launcher and/or chaingun. I would love to be proven wrong on this (honestly), but the way the base is constructed, and the way the enemies are placed, makes the whole level literally impossible to sneak through.
I do not mean to suggest that all games should make sneaking, hacking, repair, or any other methods of nonviolent problem solving really easy, but rather to say that — at least in nonlinear RPGs, a genre where the focus is indeed on choosing how to do things — the player shouldn’t be constrained to only one (violent) course of action, whether directly or indirectly.
Feeling helpless can be awesome
Quick — name your favorite mission from the original Call of Duty. If you chose the very first Russian mission, where your character is given ammo but no gun and must run past Nazi machine gunners, your opinion is in the majority. If you chose another mission, pretend you didn’t, because that kind of crap is really damaging to my argument.
Essentially, the concept of being forced into a dangerous, violent situation with no real way to defend yourself represents an effective, suspenseful, exciting, often terrifying gameplay mechanic that isn’t used anywhere near as frequently as it should be. In a level like Stalingrad in the original Call of Duty, the player is thrust into the middle of a warzone. Nazis armed with MG42s blast away at the Russian soldiers below, and Russian sergeants linger behind their soldiers with the intent of shooting anyone (including the player) who might attempt to retreat. As the player gets in line to receive either a gun, something incredibly odd happens…he doesn’t get one. Instead, the soldier in front of him receives one, and the player is forced to complete the entire first section of the level without so much as a rifle.
In addition to making the player constantly feel on-edge, the idea of taking a weapon away from the player really makes the battle feel more real: rather than just sprinting from cover to cover and taking halfhearted potshots at the enemy, the player is forced to consider his surroundings, concentrate on the firing patterns of the enemies above and below, and time his movements in accordance with him. What would have otherwise been another boring “assault the Nazis” mission is now much scarier and more deliberate: the player, having been denied a weapon or any other means of defending himself, is forced to actually think. What results is, without a doubt, the most memorable level in the entirety of the Call of Duty series.
Of course, Call of Duty doesn’t necessarily have a monopoly on weaponless action sequences. Slightly more common (though still woefully underutilized) is the weaponless chase, a gameplay scene where the unarmed player must frantically flee from a group of armed, powerful persons and/or monsters. This type of scene is used to great effect in the independent horror/adventure title Penumbra: Overture, where the player has to (very, very quickly) throw switches, build small bridges of wooden boxes, and run through a collapsing cave as a giant wormlike monster pursues him. All things considered, the chase sequence is simple, straightforward, and scary as hell: big monster is chasing you, so you have to use quick thinking to outrun him.
And while the weaponless chase in Penumbra was pretty good, the one in Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth is nothing short of awe-inspiring. After spending two or three hours wandering around Innsmouth Village talking to the locals and investigating assorted locations, the player heads back to the hotel to sleep — and is rudely awakened a few hours later as the entire goddamned town storms the hotel in an effort to kill him. After waking up, the player is forced to run through adjacent rooms in the hotel as the insane villagers beat in doors and shoot through windows. Since the player has no weapons, his only method of protecting himself is by individually locking and barricading doors; however, since we’re literally talking about dozens of angry, bulky lunatics intent on killing, simply blocking doors doesn’t hold them for very long. As a result, the chase takes on an extremely fast pace, as the player must simultaneously decide where to go, when to lock or barricade doors, and how to most efficiently block his path — and all the while, the player’s sanity meter slowly depletes. While the player still has numerous strategic gameplay options open to him throughout the course of the chase, his lack of weaponry and the emphasis on flight, rather than confrontation, make the player feel helpless, terrified, and (as a result) totally exhilarated.
It’s tough to explain how incredibly tense and fun this scene is to someone who hasn’t played through Call of Cthulhu, but the chase itself is one of the most original and terrifying levels I’ve yet experienced in my 19 years of gaming — and it’s all due to the fact that the developers had the good references to deny the player a firearm. Is it any surprise that almost every single review for Call of Cthulhu points out that the game goes completely downhill once the player gets a gun and is forced to engage the townsfolk in direct combat? It shouldn’t be.
As gamers, we are so used to being the aggressors, so used to being fully-armed gods who conquer endless enemies across numerous levels, that we forget how it feels to be truly put on the defensive: when games like Penumbra, Call of Duty, or Call of Cthulhu force us into positions of helplessness, it’s like a breath of fresh air. Players are so often the masters of their virtual domains that when these games take away our guns and force us into deadly situations, the stakes are suddenly much higher. The game feels more honest, realistic, and — as a result — much more immersive. When a game like Call of Cthulhu acknowledges the fact that a man facing a small army of insane townspeople would have literally no choice but to run for his life, the chase gameplay that follows makes a hell of a lot more sense and feels a hell of a lot more real.
If nothing else, leaving the player unarmed results in action sequences that feel different. In a gaming climate of clones and sequels and rip-offs, how many titles can honestly say they accomplished that?
Violence as climax
There’s a reason that other forms of action-based entertainment seldom, if ever fill their stories completely to the brim with balls-to-the-wall excitement: it gets tiresome, and the “action” itself tends to lose its significance.
While Call of Cthulhu did indeed suffer once it turned into a full-blown FPS, there was admittedly a moment of extreme satisfaction right before the game truly nosedived: after several hours of sneaking past bad guys and staying to the shadows, the player finally gets into a police station and, after some quick puzzle solving, the player finally gets a gun. After hours and hours of feeling totally helpless, the player finally has the means to fight back against the bad guys.
The actual implementation of the gunfighting in CoC was, of course, absolutely abysmal (the guns were horribly inaccurate, and the human enemies took way too many shots to kill), but the point remains: a lack of violence or gunplay makes those eventual moments of action that much more effective and satisfying.
If developers won’t ignore violence entirely, they can at least provide a decent buildup to it: if anything, Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast taught us how to do this properly years ago. The player doesn’t get a lightsaber until about three hours into the game, and once he does, the sudden feeling of total power is indescribably satisfying. While I’d obviously like to see more games that can be completed without any combat whatsoever, those games that insist on providing a balls-out action experience would still do well to take a few pages from the books of Jedi Outcast and Call of Cthulhu.
The easy way out
In the genre of fiction, a character who uses violence as his exclusive method of problem-solving would probably be described as oafish, thuggish, or just plain dumb. In the world of videogames, we refer to these characters as “protagonists.”
We refer to our most beloved videogame heroes as “tough,” and “badass,” and a whole myriad of other adjectives dealing with physical strength. As it stands, there aren’t really any role models in the world of videogaming characters. No Atticus Finches no Doctor Whos — our favorite videogame characters are either totally nondescript (Mario, as much as I love him, doesn’t seem to have much personality) or brawn-over-brain types that would feel totally at home in the worst sorts of Michael Bay movies. Seldom outside of the adventure genre are we rewarded with heroes whose main strength is a mental one (though even in series like Sam and Max or Tex Murphy, a great deal of the humor revolves around the fact that the protagonists are somewhat stupid).
While the majority of those who would crucify game developers and place gamers in mental care are typically ill-informed jerks, they do have something of a point when it comes to the brutal, lowest-common-denominator nature of videogaming protagonists. When characters not only serve solely as walking, talking weapons of destruction, but sometimes seem to enjoy the violence they participate in, is it any surprise that videogaming is as demonized an art form as it is?
Not to mention that as a method of narrative problem solving, violence is a pretty simple: it requires very little thought, its consequences are immediately evident, and the solutions it presents are usually short-term in their ramifications. As it stands, videogaming’s over-reliance on violence makes storytelling a hell of a chore: if a player’s goal is simply to kill all the bad guys, the narrative that follows will probably have a hard time staying interesting and/or relevant. Every initial bad guy is just a step to get to another bad guy, and another, and so on and so forth until the final boss has been extinguished. This sort of plot leaves little room for intrigue, character development, or indeed any emotion other than the pure adrenaline rush that comes with large-scale violence. While the most creative of designers can find a way to make constant violence poignant or interesting (I can’t write a long article like this without mentioning Shadow of the Colossus at least once), the games that can effectively create a good narrative out of constant action-oriented gameplay are definitely few and far between.
“In a standard video game, it’s very easy to kill someone but virtually impossible to talk to them.”
The above quote, made originally by Jonathan Rauch but personally taken from this article by Warren Spector, goes a long way in describing the inherent limitations of videogame development technology.
When I complain that too many games focus solely on violence, I do not mean to place blame solely on the shoulders of the game developers: from a purely technical point of view, implementing anything other than relatively simple action is damned difficult. Spector’s article does a much better job of explaining the problem than I ever could, but the essential conundrum is this:
-As technology increases, game developers want to branch out and explore what videogaming can be.
-Videogaming technology is still nowhere near advanced enough to handle legitimate physical/conversational, AI or realistic, on-the-fly character animations — things that would be more or less necessary for games that require more than just a quick trigger finger. If a character is supposed to talk other characters out of doing something, a dynamic and extremely intelligent conversation engine must also exist in order for the task not to feel contrived and artificial.
-As AI technology stays more or less the same, graphics technology increases exponentially.
-As graphics technology gets better and better with each generation, gamers expect a comparable degree of depth to the actual gameplay, meaning AI.
-Since developers can only deliver on the former and not the latter, they must either try to “trick” the player (see: the “flanking” bad guys in F.E.A.R.) or create a game that does not require a level of player interaction beyond physical combat.
As it stands, violent, action-oriented games are easier for everyone involved: production teams know their way around the genre, audiences are more accepting of them, and distributors feel that a game with action sells a hell of a lot better than a game without it — ignoring, of course, the fact that two of the highest-selling games of all-time (Myst and The Sims) involve almost no violence whatsoever.
In the end, there’s no easy answer to the question of violence in videogames. Violent games can be entertaining and provocative and comparatively easy to create, but their redundancies and general lack of maturity contribute to gaming’s status as an art form in the earliest stages of its infancy.
As gaming grows older, it — and we — will have to put down the guns, the swords, the grenades and the molotovs and find a different way of telling a compelling story. When that day actually comes is anyone’s guess.
