Violence in Games, the non-politics thread

Today I came across this article enumerating various points about why we crave violence in video games (shooters, specifically).

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Shooter: Spec Ops: The Line and why we play violent shooter games
http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/8157257/line-explores-reasons-why-play-shooter-games

Overreacting to a blithe, shrugging presentation of the very definition of human evil, all in the name of "entertainment." I spent a couple days feeling ashamed of being a gamer, of playing or liking military games, of being interested in any of this disgusting bullshit at all.

Hopefully this can remain a non-political thread and focus on mechanics and developmental opportunities for the industry.

With all the talk going on about gun control and violence in the media I thought it might be interesting to brainstorm as gamers on how to evolve video games into some kind of post-violence era. Now, like musical genres (e.g. post-metal) this doesn't mean non-violent; but it means something that is somehow beyond or more sophisticated than what we have come to expect or know is the basis of video game violence.

In the opening point, he mentions how in the game one has a QTE section dedicated to torturing a guy, but then immediately thereafter the player makes a "moral choice" whether to kill the guy or knock him out; torture = must do but killing = optional? Elsewhere he talks about the feedback loop that effectively trains gamers to not care about the writing and story because they don't really fit well into extraordinary shooting-up-entire-cities type situations. He mentions that shotting people is essentially just another variation on solving a puzzle (blue key = blue door). There is discussion of the desire to engage in realistic moral situations that then fall apart into basic shooting galleries, or become ways of enacting power fantasies out of our base lizard-brains, or become death counters were another nameless NPC/enemy falling into dirt has no meaningful impact to the player, or visualizing the thrill of war that some soldiers report feeling in the heart of combat.

What ideas are out there on evolving the violent mechanics of shooter-style games into something more nuanced or meaningful or teachable? Would a video game that really tries to teach players that the enemy is us succeed? Can the intense philosophical backdrop in a game like Bioshock be delivered and made thoughtful for hordes of high schoolers upping their kill counts in 12-hour stretches over summer break? What would it take to convert the core "puzzle game" of competitive violence to something more productive to such a target demographic?

I am 100% fine with the concept of SO:TL cleverly skewering shooter mechanics and/or Hard Men Making Hard Choices storytelling, be it in TV, games, thriller novels, whatever. Past a certain point I eyeroll people making it into a "I can't believe I thoughtlessly enjoyed ultraviolence - this is a revelation" response to that sort of skewering, because, fucking really? It seems implausible unless someone's consumed very little of the ubiquitous aestheticized violence in pop culture for decades, or else just been oblivious to this issue previously. (Or are striking a silly rhetorical pose.)

I dunno if SO:TL will make some hypothetical 14-24 year old male who unironically loves military shooters have some moment of zen realization. (I don't know if unironic is the right word. "Straightforwardly, unconscious of any wider 'issues' relating to pleasure through violence?" I also have no idea what a pie chart of "conscious vs. unconscious people in the violent media consumer pool" would look like.) Between that ignorance and the fact that the whole conversation doesn't relate to me or anyone I probably talk about violent games/movies/media with (people already conscious of the aestheticization of violence being vaguely troubling/complicating/embarassing) I just don't really find the violence-in-X issue all that pressing. I'm more concerned with whether or not X sucks, which it'll tend to do if it uses violence in a way that seems gross to me.

I think violence is a pretty easy mechanic to put into a game. It's the easiest way, IMO, to develop conflict in a game (and that's usually what games revolve around). You need to save person x, and there are lots of people/creatures standing in your way. How can you best create tension and conflict in this situation? Well... fighting those enemies physically. There are a few games that make the conflict psychological, but they're few and far between and not always well done.

Sports games are usually non-violent RPGs, which is interesting. It's hard to think of them that way, however, as it doesn't usually feel like you're improving players much (it's a slow process), but all the stats are usually trying to model something along those lines.

We also have games like Amnesia and (I haven't played yet) Beyond Good and Evil, and those don't seem to sell extremely well, but it's worth thinking about the difficulty in coming up with interesting mechanics to avoid violence effectively.

And I think it's a question any good designer should ask him or herself: do I make the easy choice and make this about violence, or do I take the hard road and try to come up with a way to make the game about something else?

PS: Typing this post makes me realize I'm still feeling sick and thoughts NO COME GOOD AND RIGHT.

(In making my above post I don't mean to pooh-pooh discussion of an interesting topic, I've just read/heard the Spec Ops The Line as Checkmate argument one too many times. If someone did an anti-24 that skewered Jack Bauer as an entertainment concept that could be totally awesome. But I'd pretty soon lose patience with TV chatterers going "Oh, now we see there's a problem with 24 and the Jack Bauer type of storytelling, now that it has been cleverly deconstructed.")

Plus, the average greybrown-shooter is tired, and TBH I haven't played one single-player since BF2BC, but does its Gritty Harditude rise to the level of, say, Taken, to cite a recent movie that did well in spite of pushing the envelope vis a vis various types of Hard Men Doing Hard Things-exploitation storytelling?

Maybe the new shooters do - I yield to those who've actually played them - as a sort of process of inflation, but I'm not sure you can decouple the drip feed of slightly pornographic violence in wider mass culture from that in video games.

Also, the fact that you kill 5000 guys with your rifle seems like a red herring to me, given that you slaughter thousands of aliens in Galaga and hundreds/thousands of anonymous duders in enemy-killing-gameplay games like Mass Effect that almost no one cares to criticize as bloodbaths. It's understood (IMO) that the mass slaughter is sort of behind a mental lampshade of genre formality and ludicrous implausibility. I mean is machine-gunning dudes in Just Cause 2 supposed to inspire soul-searching on any level? Because I'm really not equipped for that level of moral vegetarianism.

As a bit of an analogy perhaps to Tom's XIII or just as another perspective to the violence in games I'll offer this Arma2 vid. It's 40 minutes but if you aren't familiar with this particular sub culture of gaming you should watch it all.

It is easy to laugh at the NRA for burying their collective heads in the sand. But aren't gamers doing the same thing? I am not necessarily saying video game violence causes real life violence. Even if it does not cause any real life violence at all, I still think it merits discussing why video games are so nasty and violent.

s/video games/sports, tv, music, movies, books, comics, children at play... and still just as valid

I'm all for more nuance and depth in games. We should remember though that since the early 1990s, as games become more realistically violent and as more people of all ages play them, the North American violent crime rate has been in steady decline. I know it's sad when some lunatic shoots up a building, especially when kids are involved, but the reality is that we are not becoming a more violent society.

In fact, one of the benefits of our aging demographics that get so much angst in the media is that violent crime rates will likely continue to drop, since we know that the core component of violent criminal activity in a society is large numbers of young males. Gaming appears to have nothing to do with it at all, except to provide a convenient target for grandstanding politicians looking for easy answers to complex problems.

I guess I am not convinced that is true. I believe the ratio of violent to non-violent content is different between these mediums.

Eh...? What's more violent, CoD4:MW (2007) or 300 (2006)? Shooters (and video games generally) tend to involve more hours of "killing" - ie, whack-a-mole-clicking - improbable thousands of enemies, but the aestheticization of violence - in the widest sense, the practice of making violence an experience of prettiness, or an experience of catharsis or titillation - has been going on steadily in film and (with regulatory caveats) television for years and years.

Yeah but there's tons of huge Hollywood movies that don't feature violence at the centre of the work. AFAIK there are almost no AAA games that aren't based mainly on violence. So while many movies are violent, practically all games are violent. I think that is an important difference.

Of course all AAA games are violent, so are all blockbuster movies; it's the only thing profitable enough to justify the spend. Below that there's plenty of options.

Which ones?

What about a movie like "Titanic"? It was a huge commercial success, and while there is some violence in it, it is not a movie about violence or killing. I just got back from Lincoln, and that again was a big-budget movie that was not about violence. Here's a list of the highest-grossing films ever, adjusted for inflation. Some of these movies are about violence, but most of them are not.

Did Journey have violence? The Sim City series and most of the Sim* stuff (SimTower, SimFarm, etc) doesn't appear to be particularly violent. How about a game like Osmos; does that qualify as violent? The Incredible Machine, SpaceChem, and similar games? The Oregon Trail (and other Trail games) had hunting, but not any sort of glorified violence or person-on-person violence.

(Note: If you claim that the Sim City genre isn't a AAA product, I will think you are very silly.)

The title of the movie is Titanic. It depicts the violent death of 1500 people as sensationalist and over the top drown-porn.

Lincoln is set during some of the bloodiest of modern warfare and includes such a scene.

You were playing it wrong.

I don't understand your point. Yes, Titanic and Lincoln have death in them. Neither of them is violent in the same way as something like Call of Duty is violent. It's cool if you don't like Titanic -- I don't love it either -- but it does kind of put the lie to the idea that a movie must be violent to be profitable. Unless you think any movie with death in it is "violent", which is not usually what is meant by violence.

That's a very good point. All of those are basically non-violent games that were and are hugely commercially successful. I didn't even think of them because they are so far from most of the games that we talk about on this forum.

I don't get how it's a strawman. Jason said "of course all AAA games are violent". I think that the Sim City series qualifies as a counterexample; are you saying that Sim City does not qualify as a AAA franchise, or that it's violent?

*shrug* I think we're just working from different definitions of AAA, then. Not particularly relevant to the discussion or reconcilable.

I think the nature of games comes back to the idea that success is easily measurable. It's interesting that there was a comparison made to sports games as a non-violent example of the past-time, as sports have long been considered a non-lethal (mostly) analogue of war.

When you bring it down to its basics all that we're looking for with games is the idea that you have succeeded. You have won over something or someone else. Doing so with guns is a pretty easy measure of that: you've gotten to the end of the level, everyone in your way has been passed (usually with their death.) This goes back to the ding-gratz part of WoW. You have a measure of the idea that you've improved. There is something there telling you you are now better. Have you shown a real improvement? What about the game where you get through the entire game simply by your own improved skill or thought. Playing a game where you have the same gun for the entire piece. Instead games present mini-games, you get a new gun that's used a bit differently and you have to master that against a boss who is susceptible to that gun when used correctly.

Really, violence is just something where success is easily measured. I would be tempted to go back to puzzle games and adventure games as a stage beyond simple-victory games. Games where each experience is different and separate to what went before it, especially with adventure games where each part is hand-crafted and each solution is individual. The next step beyond that are games like Eve Online and Minecraft, where there is no one victory. With Eve Online it's simply assertion of control mixed with mastery of mix of mini-games, while with Minecraft I think it's a step beyond again: creation of an environment.

It's possible that computers simply aren't able to give the feedback necessary to bring games out of simple victory mechanics, simply because they can't be programmed for all the possibilities that any action could result in. With adventure games I think it's more the case that you're playing through someone else's narrative and ideas, far more akin to a novel or film. With games like Minecraft it's what is often seen as "play" (which quite a few people have seen as the fundamental ingredient of a game.)

I think it's absolutely necessary for a game to give feedback. For an action to have a measurable and significant impact on what the player has done. Violence is simply the easiest to resolve of a player's actions: someone has been shot, the player has it easier. Overall I'm not too sure if the problem with violence in games is a problem for games or a problem for humanity. Are we looking at games to be gratification for the player in succeeding, or are we looking at games to be something else for the player. Will it come to a point where we sit children down and say, "Play that damn game! It's good for you, you should be playing games" in much the same way we do now for children reading.

I have friends at Blizzard, EA, and some video game developer in Maryland that all consider "AAA" a quality statement rather than budget / revenue statement. They referred, for example, to Braid as "a AAA Indie title".

Language is a funny thing, and not all words mean the same thing to everyone, nor do they have to.

My essential point was not that the games were AAA, but rather that they were popular, recognized games that were not violent. They don't have to be AAA, by your definition or mine, to meet that criterion.

Then you will need to define your violence. Titanic shows the ship breaking apart, people getting washed away, falling overboard and then crushed by smoke stack, all the while a gunfight takes place between then antagonist and protagonist. It's not a slasher movie, but then neither is Anno 2070 a Call of Duty.

Here's a list of this year's (because pointing to Sound of Music and Snow White might be out of the contemporary range of this discussion) top grossing movies. Ted is the first one I see that's adult oriented and (as far as I know, I haven't seen it yet) not centered on violence. It's worth noting that Ted was a breakout hit and not a movie that started with a blockbuster budget.

Can you idiots stop with the bitch fight over violence in games versus violence in films and talk about the idea of violence as conflict resolution, or even as a learning tool.

Who gives a fuck about which violence particular to which medium is the worst. Unless you want to get into tabloid/church going handwringing with a bit of "Think of the children." And instead concentrate on the higher issue.

I consider a movie or game violent if the central activity is people killing or hurting other people. A game or movie that has some incidental death is not violent. Otherwise you'd have to say the book "Love in the Time of Cholera" is a "violent" book because some people die in it.

Sure, most blockbuster movies are violent. But not all are violent, which is what Jason was claiming. Then you asked for examples of non-violent blockbusters, and I provided a few. I'm not going to try and argue that most blockbuster films are non-violent, just that it's easy to think of non-violent, big budget films that are commercially successful, while its hard to say the same of games.

So PvP only movies?

Where do you put Madden and Fifa? Non-violent? UFC? Super Mario Bros? What about WoW or another MMO were killing people isn't necessarily the central activity, but killing monsters is?

Hm, that's a pretty good point. Those aren't what I consider to be "AAA" games, but some of them are at least mostly non-violent. I don't play sports games or platformers, so they didn't really occur to me.

Shooters are called shooters because they involve a lot of shooting. If they don't involve shooting they won't be called shooters any more, so presumably we'll crave shooting in shooters until the end of time. If you include the entire FPS genre you get top sellers like Portal, and if you look at the wider industry you get The Sims. If you intend to only look at violent games then, surprise, you find only violent games.

Apart from Portal and similar titles by the same developers, there's an exceptionally limited pool of non-violent shooters. So leaving them out as the exception - which they are - isn't some sort of conspiratorial oversight if you wanted to look at the content of FPS genre and the violence it contains.

There are zero non-violent shooters, unless you're using shooter as a substitute for FPS, which I don't think is helpful because the S in FPS is about as relevant as the S in RTS.

You can only look at it one of two ways:

Why are shooters so violent? This is the gaming equivalent of asking why is boxing so violent. Or you can ask why do violent shooters sell so well in the market in general, in which case you can't just ignore games like The Sims and Portal.

I just lured a priest to be killed and eaten by a Daedric cult. Just another day in the world of Skyrim, where the choice to commit violent and/or evil acts is part of what makes the game interesting.

The fact that our nomenclature in the first person X games is heavily weighted towards the violent is perhaps more of an indication that we lack breadth in that area. A more relevant, and less internet pedantic, way of looking at it is, why are so many games shooters and why do we call games like Portal FPS's when the game isn't about shooting?

Violence in games isn't likely to go away, nor do I think most of us want it to go away. However, industry and consumers both need to start thinking about just why so very many games are not only centered around commiting acts of violence but treat it as the standard of conflict resolution. Most of all we need to stop going into obfuscating arguments where we pick nits as if our very existence depended on it. Apparently hoping that so long as people get sick of our shitty argument techniques we need not present anything even remotely productive.

Personally I'm hoping that the increase in apparent desire to actually create characters and stories that have a bit more depth than raah raah kill the orc/terrorist/nazi/demon/appropriatelydehumanizedhumanoid will create a more introspective branch of first person games. Maybe a greater focus on exploration, ambience and writing rather than explodomatics. Not to do away with violence but to scale it down from the utterly redicilous levels many action games keep it at today. I'd love a Call of Dutyesqe that took a leaf from Generation Kill rather than Michael Bay for instance.

Some genres are set of course, I've been playing a lot of Borderlands 2 lately and that's certainly a game I can't see separated from it's casual violence with any success. But that's fine isn't it? It's a B-movie in sentiment even though it likely had AAA production costs. I don't think these games need to go away but it would be nice to have a first person action game game on the other end of the spectrum, where killing a person was a choice you didn't take lightly.