Nameless Voice on 8/11/2015 at 19:11

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One thing that I've noticed is that the vast majority of games involve killing people as one of their primary mechanics.

It's everywhere. Not just in games set during wars (such as RTS/FPS games), but in everything else. For example, RPGs have lots of quests, conversations, and dialogue, but still always resort to countless hordes of enemies to kill between and during those quests.
Every heroic protagonist still leaves a trail of hundreds or thousands of broken bodies across the game world.

In real life, people generally don't go around killing each other at all except in extreme circumstances, and outside of a war they don't usually kill large quantities of people. Plus, those who do tend to have psychological problems afterwards, and people who do kill others generally tend to get into a lot of trouble with societies and laws.

Meanwhile, games try to tell stories about heroic protagonists that are at odds with the massed slaughter in the gameplay. The Tomb Raider reboot from 2013 is a good example of that - it tells the story of a girl who is forced to kill some people to survive, but the whole thing kind of breaks down a bit when instead of having to kill a handful of people to survive, she's single-handedly murdered an entire island full of hundreds of cultists, until they started to fear her as some kind of walking death.
The sheer number of enemies can also damage the believeability of a game's setting - such as The Elder Scrolls series, where there is a larger population of bandits and other attack-on-sight undesirables than there is in all of the game's inhabited areas (and that's not even going into the huge pyramid of corpses that go into the people of Cyrodiil's entertainment in the arena.)

Why is killing so ever-present as a game mechanic?

Any article on writing or storytelling will tell you that every story needs to be driven by some kind of conflict, and kill-or-be-killed is a very obvious and simple type of conflict - something which allows the player to directly apply their skills against an opponent in the game to try to win, and a way of having something challenging with clear win and loss scenarios.
But games tend to use combat and killing not as a part of the story, but as gameplay filler - something for the player to do in between other things and to add length between the key points in the story, even in games where combat isn't the primary focus.

Of course, there are exceptions. A lot of those are abstract (Tetris) or sandbox/simulation (The Sims), however. Story-based games without wholesale killing are fairly rare - though of course there's the likes of Thief, Deus Ex, Dishonoured and a few others - which generally exchange murdering enemies with knocking them out (which in a way is very similar gameplay-wise) or sneaking past them.

Even in games that involve combat, non-lethal combat is very rare - compared to TV/films/literature, where people are often more likely to disarm, beat up or knock out an enemy than to kill them. I don't think I've ever seen a game where you could end combat by disarming the enemy and holding your sword to their throat / gun to their face and then having them surrender. (...and not just try to kill you again five seconds later. Seriously, people who beg you not to kill them then just stand up and attack you again are really stupid and far too common in games.)
Is a part of the problem that gamers have killing in their culture and that even in a game designed around more realistic interactions a lot of players will still want to kill everyone just because?

Now, I have nothing against a bit of violence and killing in my games, but I just find myself asking - why only this? Why can't we have something else too?


So, I guess, my question is: why are there so few games (especially first-person or third-person story-based games) without psychopathic killing? Is it just such a staple that any game without it can't have compelling gameplay? And, on the flip side of the coin, what other types of compelling gameplay can games have other than combat and killing (or stealth)?

Starker on 8/11/2015 at 20:24

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Because it is easy to do (systemise) and it sells well:

[video=youtube;wSBn77_h_6Q]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSBn77_h_6Q[/video]

henke on 8/11/2015 at 20:53

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Hmm yeah, maybe instead of killing being the go-to challenge in games it should be something else. Like walking on stilts or something. I don't know I'm just throwing out ideas here.

Starker on 8/11/2015 at 21:14

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Actually, killing a ton of mooks wouldn't really be out of character for Lara. She's a pulpy action hero who has killed countless people, after all, alongside with more exotic enemies like dragons and dinosaurs. The problem here is that they tried to marry this with a more serious and grounded narrative and it creates a very weird dissonance when they flip-flop back and forth between those two. Hopefully they have decided whether it's going to be one or the other in the sequel.




It's hard to tell what exactly is compelling to whom, but games trying to tell a story without a lot of action are for the most part going to be very niche or meet a lot of resistance from the more conservative segment of the gamer population who like the status quo and believe that games like Her Story, Gone Home, Proteus, Nintendogs, Animal Crossing, Journey, etc are not "real" games.

Nevertheless, the indie side has a lot to offer in way of alternatives. From text based IF games to more visual narrative-focused games to puzzle games to abstract games, this is where the real variety and innovation is in this matter.

Starker on 8/11/2015 at 21:35

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I played the games much later, as I started gaming in the early 90s and those games came out way before that, but from what older people have told me they were immensely popular and the stealth and adventure game elements in them were well liked. Supposedly even Wolf 3D had originally stealth elements in its early development like swapping uniforms and dragging bodies, but they were scrapped to keep the controls simple and the gameplay more streamlined.