Nameless Voice on 9/11/2015 at 00:33

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L.A. Noire is really the perfect example of what I'm talking about, and he describes it really well in that video. A game that introduced a lot of interesting new gameplay mechanics and ideas, but felt compelled to punctuate it with totally out-of-place massed gunfights just because you can't have a game without lots of killing.

The issue isn't games where violence is a main part of the game, but rather that games which aren't about violence feel compelled to include it anyway.




I'd argue that since it's a reboot, Lara's exact character in this version of the world isn't defined yet. It's not like it was even consistent between the other games (note, I've only played the original, bits of 2, and then the modern ones.)
But, frankly, my favourite Tomb Raider is Anniversary, partly because she only directly kills one person in that game, and clearly feels bad for doing so (it made me feel bad for doing so, too, especially since she shoots him first when he's not attacking). Sure, it also had a lot of violence directed at animals/monsters, which it would have been fine without, but I at least liked the way it dealt with human conflict (even if that was mostly by having it happen in cutscenes or just not having human enemies at all, but I feel that really improves the atmosphere anyway.)
Compare to the other games that came around it - Legend and Underworld - which had ridiculous amounts of violence that was completely unnecessary to the game (especially in Legend.)


The first linked video talked about how most games are very spacial, about movement and action - but I don't quite see why that has to be about killing people. Again, the Tomb Raider series manages to have a lot of gameplay which is all about movement, physical challenges and danger to the player, without actively having enemies trying to kill Lara (all the time.) Portal is another prime example.
Hostile environments are fairly simple mechanically and have the spacial navigation aspect, yet it's rare to see one without also having lots of enemies to kill along the way.

nicked on 9/11/2015 at 07:04

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Yep - this! It's the only Tomb Raider I really, really enjoyed, because the majority of the game was about (shock!) raiding tombs. They had a pretty much perfect formula, but every other game since has been about gunning down goons. I think the worst casualty is the atmosphere. Exploring an abandoned ruin that hasn't seen human eyes for thousands of years is cool. Running into some hired goons in the next room utterly breaks that (for a direct comparison, take the atmosphere of the Thief 1 mission The Lost City, and contrast to Thief 2's Kidnap - although in that case it's kinda ok because the goons stomping through the place ruining the atmosphere was kinda the point they were making).

I think it's why most of the games I really get into atmospherically are indie platformers about some lone dude solving puzzles. Because people don't go on killing sprees in real life, so literally any game with murder as a core gameplay mechanic has an inherent barrier to immersion built in.

That said, it's hard. Falling back on killing happens because it is the absolute easiest way to add challenge to a game, by a strong margin. I discovered this first-hand when trying to design Wheelbound (see my (https://nickdablin.wordpress.com/) website for more info). Designing levels and challenges for a character who can't fight back, only avoid, is 100 times harder to do. If you give the character a gun, then you can fill your level with enemies, and you've got maybe 10-20 minutes of gameplay out of each level.
If you remove the combat, then by default you've reduced your gameplay down to just 1 minute, or however long it takes to reach the level exit. To build that level of gameplay back up you need to implement things like puzzles, maze-like level design that encourages exploration, environmental barriers and hazards, all of which are situation-specific and inherently take longer to make than if you could just place some enemies in the way. So I'm not at all surprised that killing, or at least dealing with enemies, is the go-to challenge.

catbarf on 9/11/2015 at 14:58

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I couldn't agree more. I don't mind my media involving violence, but I do dislike that it seems to be the default option and considered the normal way to resolve interactions. Guns are dime a dozen and treated with all the gravity of toys. Violence loses all its impact when it's used so casually.

Coincidentally enough, I was having similar thoughts as Nameless Voice when I played through Metro 2033 again this weekend. I've read the book too, and the differences between the book and game as far as story goes are obvious but not thematically too different, and the protagonist Artyom goes through the same basic trials for most of the book. But where the book is a slow-paced exploration of its universe, the game shoehorns that exploration between giant gunfights. In the book you're playing as a naive young man who leaves his home station for the first time and, over the course of the book, kills one man and a handful of mutants. In the game you're playing as a naive young man who leaves his home station for the first time and, over the course of the game, single-handedly slaughters a substantial proportion of the Metro population. It was interesting to me to consider that the tones of the game and book are largely the same, the setting is the same, the stories are very close, and yet the difference in violence between the two is striking.

I think there are really two related but different issues I have with killing in games. One is that killing is the go-to choice for a gameplay loop, and games that don't need to be about killing prominently feature it anyways. The other is that in-universe, killing isn't given any weight, and you end up playing as ordinary joes slaughtering hundreds of people with no commentary from other characters. The game that really made me start thinking about these issues was Spec Ops: The Line (minor spoilers ahead), where you play a special forces soldier killing your way through hundreds of enemies like most any other modern shooter. Then at the end the game basically points out how ludicrous the whole setup was, how your failures could have been avoided if you'd just stopped and considered any option other than killing, and how once you step outside of game logic and start applying real-world logic to your actions, your protagonist is less a hero and more a bloodthirsty psychopath.

Just curious, how many of you guys have played Fahrenheit/Indigo Prophecy? It's not the best game and the story goes to la-la land in its third act, but I really liked the way gameplay was handled. A mix of third-person exploration, time-based challenges, and occasional cutscene Simon Says QTE sequences delivers an engaging (albeit weird) story without guns. And there's one scene that really vividly stands out for me when your character is confronted by two policemen who try to arrest him, and he fights back. Because the game hasn't been throwing violent situations at you left and right, a scene where your average joe protagonist takes on two cops hand-to-hand and wins has real impact. As, realistically, it should be.

Meanwhile, as a case study, take Payday 2. I've been playing this a lot with friends and it's interesting to me how the gameplay is structured. If you approach a heist stealthily, ordinary security guards patrolling the levels can be a nail-biting threat, and since guards start to get suspicious when their friends disappear just shooting them and bagging the corpses isn't a viable strategy. Despite the fact that the guards do very little damage and can be killed with ease, the mechanics of the stealth mode strongly discourage violence as a solution. Once you go loud, however, the security guards on the map last about five seconds, and then you face repeating waves of SWAT teams, FBI officers, and snipers magically appearing within mere seconds of the cops being called. The whole thing starts to get a little silly. I wonder if the basic heist gameplay could work if the players were more realistically vulnerable and the police response reduced proportionally, so the main threat comes from regular beat cops responding to the 911 call, and if you stay long enough for the SWAT teams to start showing up you're in real trouble.

This is all a little disjointed but what I'm getting at is that I think if games tried to be a little more restrained and realistic about violence, it would have a lot more impact and be more effective as a storytelling tool. Even for combat-focused games, instead of having me mow down easily-dispatched goons by the dozens, consider giving me a few enemies that are tough and smart and each represent a serious threat, as they would in real life. That's not to say that I want something like Doom or Serious Sam to try to be realistic, but while storytelling in gaming matures we're still seeing gameplay firmly rooted in that 90s pedigree, and the disconnect between mature, realistic stories and killing-by-the-hundreds gameplay in titles like Uncharted or Metro creates what I've seen termed 'ludonarrative dissonance'. I totally understand why games use violence as a means of conflict resolution, and it's undeniably fun, but I still think it could be handled better than it tends to be, and in a way that better fits the stories.

Thirith on 9/11/2015 at 16:05

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I'm wondering if it's even a primarily American thing, since guns play such a major part in the nation's foundational myths. Or is that looking at the past through present, NRA-ified eyes? Of course the European games I played as a kid also had lots of guns and killing in them, but so many of them were clearly based on Hollywood action movies, whether directly or indirectly.

Are shooters as predominant in Japanese gaming? I don't know the scene well enough to be able to tell.

heywood on 9/11/2015 at 18:17

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Well, the glorification of gun violence has been a Hollywood thing right from the beginning. And Hollywood started out catering to an American audience before reaching the rest of the world. So I think the public appetite for guns in entertainment media might have started in America, but it didn't stay there.