An Introduction to Violence

Hello once again fellow Doomers,

Today I'm going to talk about violence in video gaming. I got some comments on last weeks article that suggested I should explore the topic of violence in popular games further and how these games use ethical window dressing to make that violence more palatable.

That seemed like a swell idea to me so here we are. Let's talk about violence.

Full Disclaimer: Most of the games I like playing are quite violent. However this does not mean that I think they are above criticism or that nothing good can come of the practice. Ideally criticism of violent games leads to a world where games use violence more thoughtfully instead of the current way violence in games is lazily employed for shock value or just because "that's what you do in the game".

First off I should mention that not all games are violent. Abstract puzzle games like Tetris are incredibly popular and also contain no violence to speak of, unless you consider clearing lines of puzzle pieces to be a violent act.

Abstract violence, maybe?

So when I talk about "violence in popular games" I'm really talking about violence in a subset of popular games, not all popular games. However, even something like Super Mario Bros., as seemingly innocuous as it might be, it is still built on a foundation of violence. Aside from running and jumping, the player's other main actions in those games are smashing bricks and killing enemies by jumping on them.

Death and destruction for the whole family!

Violent conflict, it seems, is an integral part of the video gaming landscape. The first popular video game, Space Invaders, was about blowing up invading alien spaceships. War and destruction are constant themes, even in family friendly kid games like Super Mario Bros.

I wish I could tell you how it got this way but it seems to be part of what they call "the human condition". We're just violent creatures, it seems, or least we have the capacity for violence not too far beneath the surface.

People used to gather in large stadiums to see other people and animals fight to the death. Today people gather in huge stadiums to see individuals or groups spar and compete under strictly enforced rules. Things only ever change a little bit, until they change completely.

So we're no strangers to violence even if none of us individually are predisposed towards violent thoughts or actions. Some of us know violence intimately. Those of us who have been to war, for instance, or known someone who was a victim of violence. My family is full of people from both ends of that terrible coin, victims and perpetrators alike, so don't mistake my casual style for flippancy.

That said, most normal people are repulsed by violence and graphic depictions of violence. As they ought to be, I think. But many of those same normal people still thrill at being able to experience simulated violence in some form and other, also normal, people are willing and able to provide such experiences.

I still remember when Wolfenstein 3D came out. It was the birth of something new and also something very violent. It was celebrated for technical wizardry that allowed players to explore quickly rendered 3D environments but really everyone just liked being able to run around and shoot things.

Then came Doom. Now you could not only watch the blood spurt from your enemies but if you shot them hard enough you could make them explode. First Person Shooters kept trying to one-up each other in this fashion until you had magazine advertisements for Soldier of Fortune hyping up the ability to shoot off individual limbs and body parts.

Now it's called "gibbing", as in turning your enemies into giblets.

Did any of the games of this period explore violence or violent themes in any kind of a thoughtful, meaningful sense? Not really, if you ask me. And I played a lot of them.

I remember Rockstar's Manhunt, which came out between Vice City and San Andreas. I think the hype around that was that it was trying to say something meaningful about the nature of violence in media and our love for it as consumers.

Manhunt was a game about an ex-con whose death was faked so he could be recruited by a sleazy underground video producer to kill gang members for snuff films. Gameplay was stealth-based in that you had to stick to the shadows and wait for your target to stop moving long enough for you sneak up behind him and suffocate him with a plastic bag or the like.

Tension was induced by making you hold the attack button and wait several seconds in order to perform the goriest execution for the producers many hidden cameras. Sometimes the guy you were trying to kill turned around and spotted you, forcing a fight which might draw other guys in. Usually you died when this happened and had to start over.

I think Manhunt may have been Rockstar, a company known for courting controversy to gain recognition, responding to critics of the violence in their Grand Theft Auto games by saying "Here, if you think GTA is too violent and exploitative check out what happens when we try and make a game that is REALLY violent and exploitative!".

Of course this was back when the main way to deflect criticism of GTA's violence was to point out how cartoonish the art style was and how this game wasn't really trying to reflect reality or anything like that.

Manhunt was Rockstar's way of saying "No, we really are trying to reflect reality. Here's a game about overt exploitation and murder for profit and entertainment. Go be entertained by it you terrible person you."

The game did well enough to spawn a sequel.

Call of Duty relies on sentimental notions of Honor and Sacrifice, of having to go to far away places and kill foreigners for God and Country, because it is necessary for Good to triumph over Evil. The enemy must sacrifice his life for it, but the soldier who kills him must sacrifice his soul.

These days if you want you can just watch a Pentagon livestream of real laser-guided missiles being dropped on real people in real far away places. Can't do that in a Call of Duty but in real life we can't push the buttons that send those missiles on their way. We can only watch from the outside, so I guess Call of Duty still has its place.

It sounds like I'm making this out to be some kind of huge problem to be solved but really I'm not. I'm just exploring this topic frankly and honestly. As human beings we do a lot of mental gymnastics to deflect criticism of ourselves or our way of life and to ignore obvious realities that are staring us in the face.

The reality is even so-called "cultured" and "civilized" peoples still apparently "need" violence in their lives. We need to be able to consume ourselves with sex and violence, sports and competition, because these things satisfy base urges and instincts.

Also because if we stay consumed with these things the elite overclasses of our societies can continue to operate unhindered, pulling the levers and steering the mechanisms of resource allocation and wealth distribution this way and that.

Or maybe it's just the capitalist system, which is designed to give us what we want, giving us more of what we want. Perhaps that was a meta-commentary from BioShock that I missed. In a hyper-capitalist society you get vending machines with guns and ammo in them because people want to be able to buy guns and ammo out of vending machines. Likewise with DNA-splicing drugs that enable you to shoot bees out of your arm.

I wouldn't really want that ability but maybe enough people would to justify making it so. Who knows?

And again, this is just a subset of popular video games. Remember that Minecraft is probably the hugest game out there at the moment, a hundred million players or something like that, and it's primarily about building stuff and digging into the ground and whatnot.

Minecraft is about creating, not destroying, though recent updates have added monsters and enemies and things like that for the player to fight if they want.

And even the First Person genre has expanded to include not just shooting people, but solving puzzles or simply exploring an environment. I call games like Portal First Person Puzzlers and a game like Dear Esther First Person Explorers. It seems like there's plenty of room for FPPs and FPEs to exist alongside FPSs.

GTA is still mostly a Murder Simulator that has other stuff in it too if you want but it's mainly about the Murderering.

If you squint just right it still looks like video gaming is totally saturated with sex and violence and all this other nasty business but the reality is that video games have grown and expanded beyond sex and violence and have been that way for a while now.

Sure, if Activision or whoever makes another Call of Duty it'll sell a billion copies but if I make a Call of Duty clone it'll sell probably nothing because I don't have $200 million to spend on marketing.

Really this is a commentary on the split between the Indie and the Triple A sectors of the video game industry. The Triple As have to put all kinds of horrible sexual and violent acts in their games because they want the dollars of the widest swath of people possible, and the widest swath of people includes a lot of immature people who just to be titillated by sex and death.

The Indie sector does not rely on a profit-motive. Well, most of them don't. Like I said last week, most of the indie folks are just people with a passion for playing and making video games. Since they're not under obligation to make a profit for some company they can explore any other number of subjects and themes that don't have to involve sex and violence.

This is how games like Portal and Dear Esther were able to be made in the first place. Those games were literally the product of talented people just screwing around, making things for the hell of it and seeing what came of it.

But in order for Triple A games to continue making more and more money, as they are obligated to do under a capitalist system such as the one we all live under today, they have to keep drawing in more and more people to buy the games each time. They do this by pandering to the lowest common denominator, scaring up controversy and pretending to be cultured and mature when they really aren't.

This has led, in the video gaming community at least, to a kind of "culture war" between people who would like for Triple As to be more like the Indie scene, and people who like the Triple As just the way they are.

The battle lines have been drawn and people, mostly women, who had the audacity to be critical of the Triple As have been harassed and threatened with death. Not exactly surprising when you take a good long look at the what most Triple As are about: Shooting, Stabbing, Sneaking, War and Death and making gobs of strawberry jam fly out of people-shaped objects, staining the walls of meticulously crafted digital environments.

I do not think that consuming violent media actually causes real life acts of violence. However as I've gotten older I've come around to the idea that violent media certainly does contribute to a culture of violence in which violence is seen as a natural or inevitable solution to conflict.

And, just to remind you, I really do enjoy slicing off heads in Dishonored and blowing things up in BioShock. I would not have created a space for True Doom Murder Junkies such as myself if I did not see the need or value of having such a space.

Now, I'm just as reactionary as anyone else but I try to temper it by taking time for self-reflection. The Triple As could do with a bit more of that, assuming Triple A developers are interested in advancing the games as an art form and not just trying to make more money than they did on the last game.

But that's a big assumption to make. Good thing we have the Indie sector to fall back to when we're tired of all the strawberry jam. Assuming indie developers are able to continue making their games. A lot of them have to make rent too, you know, another by-product of our capitalist system by the way.

So wrapping this up, I don't know what the answer is exactly. Maybe I should have started with a question. Is the problem that there's too much violence or is it that the violence that's there isn't doing anything useful or intelligent? Maybe it's both? I don't know.

Obviously I'm not the first person to grapple with this issue and I won't be the last. Hell, this probably won't the last time I come back to this subject. There's just too many angles from which to look at it, too many vectors to analyze and explore. Maybe this is just an introduction, of sorts.

Yeah, that's it. Consider this my introduction to the topic of analyzing violence in our media and culture. I'll come back to it as I come up with more to say.

Thanks for reading.