'Seeking connection': video game where players stopped shooting, started talking

https://www.theguardian.com/games/2026/apr/15/arc-raiders-players-stopped-shooting-started-talking

by andsoitis • 3 months ago

60 66 3 months ago

theguardian.com

fooker3• 3 months ago

It has always puzzled me a little bit that shooting is a core mechanic in a majority of video games.

Does this serve any purpose?

Maybe it makes joining the military not too unappealing for teenagers.

spockz• 3 months ago

Games of tag where you are “out” when hit, optionally with a mechanism for being revived are a staple game for young kids around here. Video games with shooting just seems like a logical extension of that into the virtual domain and with ranged “tag” of that.

Besides shooters there are many puzzle games as well.

nmeofthestate• 3 months ago

Shooting isn't the core mechanic in the majority of video games.

user3939382• 3 months ago

The most prolific violent video game is Minesweeper. The fidelity may be low but the little guy dies and mines are powerful weapons detonating all over in the game.

wvbdmp• 3 months ago

Indeed, as we all know the order is

1. Run

2. Think

3. Shoot

4. Live

Trasmatta2• 3 months ago

Exactly this. Anyone who thinks that must have almost no real exposure to video games. The diversity of gaming experiences is huge, and shooters represent only a small fraction of that.

fooker3• 3 months ago

I’m curious if you understand what majority means?

scotty79• 3 months ago

It's pointing and clicking. It's just one of the simplest things a game can make a player do. It's intuitive what sound roughly it should make and what visual effect to show up.

It's as if it was weird that most dancing has a lot of putting one foot in front of the other.

darkteflon• 3 months ago

I mean, the really good ones can be beautiful, terrifying, balletic displays of dominance, skill and tactical intelligence. There’s nothing in all of gaming quite like being hunted by a human being. It’s a real thrill.

rolandog• 3 months ago

Yeah, though I would argue that we as a society would be way better off if the same scrutiny that was applied a few years ago due to the "woke panic" were applied to modern day content about pro- you-name-it propaganda (military, othering, etc.).

Nowadays, you see that in the masterful omission of facts when news are reported (e.g. why aren't illegal trade embargoes mentioned when talking about poverty and instability in certain countries? Why are there no reactions when the thing they were confidently showing turned out to be false or GenAI?), or the way things are portrayed in videogames (why are enemies in military shooters almost always middle eastern? why don't you have to fight off racists, fascists, and corporate militia?), or the movies (why do we get shown mostly content where a single individual carries the sole responsibility of taking on the single villain?).

Sorry for the rant; games are indeed beautiful... There's some things I've been starting to pay attention to where you have to swallow or brush aside some propaganda so that you're allowed to play with your friends... And that makes me a bit upset.

sublinear• 3 months ago

Any simple input scheme mapped to a game of skilled hand-eye coordination usually holds up, even ancient arcade games.

Back when games were mostly 2D, a lot of action games got consolidated into platformers. Shooters just seem to be the equivalent genre in 3D.

astoor• 3 months ago

"It has always puzzled me a little bit that shooting is a core mechanic in a majority of video games. Does this serve any purpose?

My personal theory is that violent video games (and films and other media) are encouraged in highly militarised societies to desensitise their populations to violence - if you normalise it so it all seems like a game or other form of entertainment, you get a lot less internal opposition when you go about killing real people in other countries.

pawelduda2• 3 months ago

I just don't see a usual team behind a violent movie or game having a though process of "how can we make people want to go to war more". My theory is sort of the opposite - people enjoy such media because it's violence without hurting anyone in the real world, a fantasy.

trinsic2• 3 months ago

Hmm. This take is a bit much IMHO. I think it just like any sport. Competition. Combat tactics is a pretty diverse way to play competitively.

pawelduda2• 3 months ago

It's often just a part of a broader puzzle - you need to aim with precision, react quickly, properly chain your movements, be aware of your surroundings, know when to be offensive/defensive, apply your tools/skills to specific situation, manage your resources, etc. Shooting is just a subset of all that.

With that logic you could also dumb down chess to killing, because that's the core mechanic.

philipwhiuk• 3 months ago

It's not really that complex.

Humans have historically been better competition than AI. Writing AI that is evenly matched with a human so as presenting a challenge that is tough but not unwinnable is much harder than just playing against another person.

Maybe it makes joining the military not too unappealing for teenagers.

Someone should have told the US Army: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America%27s_Army

(Surprisingly for a government project it was pretty playable)

Tade02• 3 months ago

Writing AI that is evenly matched with a human so as presenting a challenge that is tough but not unwinnable is much harder than just playing against another person.

Also humans are uniquely... human.

I play one of those extraction shooters and even a much higher ranked player, who would normally have no issue downing my team of three in an open fight, will eventually get worn down if we hide around and harass them. Also they might just lose patience earlier and start making mistakes due to that.

Hard to model something like this because people are different and react in complex ways.

kreco• 3 months ago

I don't mind shooting.

But I do mind shooting human being. I wish we would be more creative on that front.

Insanity2• 3 months ago

Some games explored shooting dogs (CoD and BF both had this at some stage iirc). The reception to that was much more negative than shooting humans.

Edit: but I know you mean shooting aliens or something similar.

chamomeal• 3 months ago

I think it’s more because point-and-click is suited to shooters. Look at thing you want to shoot, click on it. A simple premise that you can layer stuff onto to make a good game.

baud147258• 3 months ago

I don't think there's any purpose behind it, most like early on, game with shooting were just simpler to develop, especially with regards to limited processing power and storage. For example I remember an extract from a review on the original Doom, saying that it would be much better if they were able to talk to the monsters; but at the time, a talking game would have been nearly impossible to make, especially to the same level of polish as the original Doom.

And then it's a feedback loop: video games get the reputation of being violent (perhaps undeservedly so, like Myst was outselling the original Doom, IIRC, but violent games made for bigger headline in mainstream media) => only people interested in that buy them => violent games are the best-selling => games...

tmtvl• 3 months ago

I'm not certain that shooting is a core mechanic in a strict majority of video games (may also depend on how you define shooting, is flinging fireballs around shooting?).

But aside from that, Campster argued in his video about violence in games (<https://youtu.be/wSBn77_h_6Q>) that violence is easier to program in an accessible way than nonviolence.

hrimfaxi2• 3 months ago

Nonviolence requires more understanding than violence.

i_c_b• 3 months ago

There are a lot of properties that game mechanics can have that make people invest in games. Legible rules, clear feedback, deterministic and discrete cause and effect, clearly understandable win conditions and game states, being relatively simple to implement in code, having properties that make discrete variations and permutations of gameplay situations easy to build and easy to parse for players, setting rules up in ways that can be structured with real-time pressure, often embedded in large spatial structures to organically pace an experience...

Shooting (and combat more generally) has proven to be pretty easy to make satisfy most of these criteria. There are other core styles of actions that do as well (say, 2d Platforming, or clean puzzle mechanics like in games like Tetris).

These mechnical factors matter, because it's often the case that people who don't like violence in games would prefer games to focus on other kinds of challenges that they find more socially good in terms of morality or ideology. But then they stomp all over the mechanical styles of issues I was just listing above, and the results is predictably game designs broad masses of players don't want to play.

I've worked on both AAA hyperviolent games, as well as with educators on learning games with what they saw as pro-social game play, so this is a divide I've had front row seats to.

And to make what I hope is a productive contrast, one of the really great things about Undertale is that the designer didn't make being peaceful in the game lame. It is (or was for me) actively fun to try to figure out how to not kill enemies, because you still have to engage in bullet hell dodging while you try to psychoanalyze your opponents, and that dodging (for players who like those kinds of mechanics) still maintained a lot of the properties I just listed above.

To make a more real-world comparison, my father-in-law was an extremely successful junior college tennis coach, and he has noted in passing that he couldn't personally see how anyone could invest in Olympic sports like figure skating, just on the level of taking the competition that seriously. And his argument (he wasn't being universalizing, particularly, just tying it to his experience as an award winning coach) was that the extreme subjectivity of judge ratings was really offputting to him, as a competitor. Obviously tennis can have bad line calls and other controversial judge issues, too - all human sports can. But I think his argument ties in with my original one here; a lot of game players really like clean, legible rules with clear good and bad states so they can invest in getting good at games and take pleasure in their good play. And, as I say, shooting and combat at this point often fulfills that well.

hyperman1• 3 months ago

One thing I liked about Gothic 1 was how you could fight people and not kill them ( Kill was an extra action after you won).The NPCs reacted differently to winning vs killing, pushing you to let others live. In a brutal penal colony, this made a lot more sense than win=kill.

dude250711• 3 months ago

Mordhau is a bit like this. We also need Team Fortress 3 now.

klondike_klive• 3 months ago

A while ago when I got Resident Evil on the Wii. I found myself really fed up and depressed with the pee and poo coloured levels and relentless misery (maybe I should have known better than to rent Resident Evil!)

I had the idea of taking classic 3d videogame levels and landscaping them with flowers and benches. Executive function got the better of me, I but I still muse about it from time to time.

thebruce87m• 3 months ago

I’m always on the lookout for non-violent low-stress games. I do like exploration. Games like A Short Hike are few and far between.

I thought Death Stranding was supposed to be less-stressful but I’m quite near the start and so far I’ve got to worry about items degrading, inventory management and enemies. I was just looking for more of a peaceful walking simulator game. I wish more games had a non-combat option, or maybe a “Jesus take the wheel” mode for the stressful bits that turns it into more of an interactive cutscene.

happosai• 3 months ago

There are lots of non-violent low stress games. It's just a challenge to find the good ones. Some ones I have enjoyed

- spirit farmer - planet of Lana - far: lone sales - Dave the diver - art of rally

nemomarx• 3 months ago

You might like something closer to powerwash sim?

yetihehe2• 3 months ago

Try "Sky: Children of the light". Or just watch one of the best game trailers I've seen. www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3DNTfhUy0k

lamasery• 3 months ago

I really, really wanted a non-violent mode in Far Cry 5 for my son. If a mode that removed the hostiles and weapons had existed I can guarantee that would have been my son’s (he was probably about 6 at the time?) favorite game for a couple years straight. Flying and driving around rural Montana landscapes, fishing, watching wildlife? He’d have spent 20x more time in that mode than I did beating the game ordinarily. Super bonus points for two-player local multiplayer so we could play together.

(It came frustratingly close to this if you kept playing after beating the game, but there were still guns and still some hostiles wandering around, IIRC)

adzm• 3 months ago

I'd love to mention the Endless Forest, an artistic game from nearly twenty years ago where you were a deer and there were no real goals and communication was entirely with deer gestures and sounds. The idea was great and it was fun finding random other people (as deer) and exploring the fantasy world together.

tetris11• 3 months ago

Same with Journey, a beautiful landscape that you traversed with other nameless ones, mirroring each other's actions and falling into a cohesive unspoken group mindset

hackable_sand• 3 months ago

Children of the Light is also very sweet and low-key. Same studio. Your progression is tied to social expression and I find it very a uplifting break from competitive games.

viktorcode• 3 months ago

The game smartly sorts players into lobbies based on their aggressiveness towards others. And this is where it diverges from real life scenarios.

aggakake• 3 months ago

People sort themselves into cliques and bubbles all the time?

Tade02• 3 months ago

Yes, but the guy waiting for you in a dark alley is definitely not part of your clique.

the_gipsy• 3 months ago

If you could pick PvP/Coop, then this would be a non-story.

So this is kind of something that has not been disclosed that makes TFA... less of a story.

moregrist• 3 months ago

There are plenty of real life examples of this, from softball leagues that self-sort based of levels of seriousness / competitiveness / aggressiveness, to people actively avoiding going into areas like investment banking or high-pressure sales because they have a reputation of being very aggressive.

You can’t always avoid people who are aggressive towards others, but I’ve found that my life is a lot more stressful when I work with aggressive people, so I actively try to avoid these situations and work in more collaborative environments.

ekidd• 3 months ago

Yeah, ARC Raiders has a lobby system to sort people by aggressiveness.

Which is interesting, because the early Steam reviews loved the fact that the game was mostly cooperative. Most players were helpful or neutral, but some would attempt to kill you. This meant that running into other players was tense. Would they heal you? Would they help you take down a machine? Or would they rob you? You had to guess, and guess quickly.

Then there was a big influx of Twitch viewers who were just there for PvP.

I actually think the "mostly cooperative but not always" dynamic is a really interesting vibe, but probably a hard one for the developers to maintain.

michaelbarton• 3 months ago

There’s also the recent release of Marathon where I think some ARC players might be attracted if they want more of the sweaty gameplay. Definitely a different vibe with appealing aspects to both

gavinray• 3 months ago

This is a brilliant idea that Escape from Tarkov might do well to adopt

anthonj• 3 months ago

I remember a lot of online servers from the Jedi Knight series where people would spend a lot of time talking (well.. writing in chat), messing around, making friendly duels or exploring weird custom mmaps.

It was kinda weird considering the game type.

wafflemaker2• 3 months ago

When playing EvE online many years ago, I was surprised by one enemy militia player.

Context: we were living partially in low sec systems where PvP was allowed. That's where PvP players from big alliances came when there were no 5k ppl fights for system control.

I've noticed one enemy player consitently being very chivalry about fights. He returned loot to less experienced people he won a fight with and was always humble in both defeat and victory. He even once returned a very expensive module that dropped from my ship after he won a fight with me. And that showed clearly I wasn't a new player that needed taking care off.

That taught me a lot about playing and general behavior in life. That it's not always about your results, but it's always about your style.

Groxx• 3 months ago

My first "player encounter" was with someone who patiently took me through many of the basics for over an hour at the very beginning (like 15 minutes in), then tricked me into attacking them so they could blow me up and get away with it. They were even in the process of explaining why some players might do it, but just left out the important parts.

That's the kind of troll I love. Technically they taught me another useful thing in the process, and it cost me effectively nothing because I could just reroll the character. High effort and low payoff is the best kind.

wafflemaker2• 3 months ago

It might surprise you, but the tutorial nowadays actually gets you blown up twice. It's so strange, that the game actually tells you what to do now and you don't have to ask in help.

nirui• 3 months ago

was always humble in both defeat and victory

I never played EVE Online much, but I've heard there was a time some player were camp-killing newbies (known as Suicide ganking) in Jita star system which is a tradehub with a lot of activities. It got so bad CCP has to ban players who's doing that.

Another game, Elite Dangerous, also faces ganking problems, some people just doing it shamelessly (judging by the videos they uploaded), some even do it with cheat enabled.

Based on that, I think what you've experienced is rather rare. Maybe the individual are just a good person who's willing to do good even in a competitive environment, and you're lucky to have encountered such person.

sxp• 3 months ago

Low sec runs by different rules from the gankers in high sec or the politics of null sec. Especially if you're in the Faction Warfare zones. The standard view in Eve is that if you're in a fair fight, you're playing the game incorrectly. But with FW, a good chunk of the fights are honorable duels. And since FW players want more fights and more players in that zone, refunding ships for newbies and setting up balanced duels and rematches are common.

homeonthemtn• 3 months ago

Hopefully we come full circle back to game lobbies. Game lobbies and fixed servers were the micro communities this article is dancing around. It worked remarkably well in the early days. I know I certainly miss it

Insanity2• 3 months ago

Many games with a dedicated servers browser back in the early 2000s just turned into chatrooms at night. I’ve seen that even in games that this article calls out as being just about “shooting” like cs. But it happened on ET, CoD, JK, etc.

incomingpain2• 3 months ago

Friendly Hoovies offer peace Sandviches and talk.

Next level, you medic and heal the hoovies. Winning every round automatically by not fighting.

strangegecko• 3 months ago

IMO this is aggressively unfriendly to the rest of the team that didn't consent to part of the team refusing to play.

There are so many other ways to chat and make friends without breaking tem balance.

incomingpain2• 3 months ago

It's TF2. Dont be so serious business.

Go play CS if you care so much about balance.

olalonde• 3 months ago

The cynic in me is getting "submarine"[0] vibes from this article.

[0] https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html

intended2• 3 months ago

Of all the recent video games, Arc raiders has been just good fun to watch.

Cohh Carnage’s Arc Raider streams and saw many genuinely nice interactions, especially on rubber duck runs.

Interestingly, Solo Arc Raiders has a very different vibe than team Arc Raiders. In the few group based streams I watched, players shot each other by default. In solo it was less competitive.

intended2• 3 months ago

Video games are incredible for the kinds of mini experiments and insights on human nature they throw up.

Player driven economies are a case in point. Everyone joins the game at the same level, and same handicap. Yet you end up with the same power law dynamics of wealth concentration.

Gaming is also one industry that does real research on online toxicity, and one of the more motivated sectors to finding a way to balance it out.

This is something that makes the frequency of cooperation in Arc Raiders somewhat anomalous.

moribvndvs• 3 months ago

Has this changed recently? I started playing at launch, and while initially it was a lot of fun and I had predominantly positive experiences, after a couple of weeks I quit because it devolved into little more than griefing. I don’t mind it getting a little sweaty here and there but I don’t have time for nonstop edgelords going lord of the flies in front of their 3 twitch viewers.

deflator• 3 months ago

Reminds me of the coop mod for Half Life 1 years back. It completely removed PvP and set dozens of players against puzzles and waves of enemies.

jareklupinski• 3 months ago

"It Takes a War" gets into the social part of multiplayer action games: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3919530/It_Takes_a_War/

(the store page and gameplay videos are purposely obtuse, its one of those 'dive in with no precognition for best results' kind of games)

melonpan7• 3 months ago

I’ve always been fascinated about Arc Raiders since I’m more of a solo player these days. Might try it out next time it’s on sale, especially since I heard it runs flawless on Linux.

danish00111• 3 months ago

Spent years playing dota and honestly the most memorable thing wasnt any rampage or comeback. it was this one ranked game where our carry was flaming everyone, we were losing towers, team going quiet the way they do right before everyone gives up.

Our pos 5 just started calling plays. didnt argue, didnt mute, just "smoke in 30" and "ill ward their jungle, go." something about how calm he was made the carry stop typing and start playing. we won that game. nobody added each other after. just five strangers who pulled it together for 40 minutes and moved on.

Dota does this thing where it forces you to cooperate with someone whos actively hostile to you, in real time, with your mmr on the line. thats a very different kind of social experience than a peaceful lobby where everyone just decided to be nice.

'Seeking connection': video game where players stopped shooting, started talking

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