Why So Few Violent Games?

http://ludusnovus.net/2011/08/15/why-so-few-violent-games/

by Impossible • 12 years ago

46 72 12 years ago

ludusnovus.net

Xlab• 12 years ago

Gotta be fixed http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tff9eN7XAI

jheriko• 12 years ago

i don't get the point - but entertaining read.

i don't think we have violent games dominating for some random fluke of what was made first and what the creators wanted.

its just supply and demand. although this is also why other, much more popular, casual games have completely eclipsed the 'core gamer' focused 'AAA' industry with their reach and money making power... now that computing has become ubiquitous demand is coming from everywhere and not just the traditional early adopters.

hcarvalhoalves4• 12 years ago

I'm sure the author is being sarcastic.

cwyers6• 12 years ago

I'm sure it's sarcasm. I just have a hard time understanding what the point it's trying to make is.

mark_l_watson3• 12 years ago

When I worked at Angel Studios about 15 years ago (doing projects for Nintendo and Disney), one of the many things that I liked about the company was a conscious decision by the four owners of the company to not create violent content. They were a class act.

Not too far off topic: my brother and my grandson absolutely love violent games. I don't understand the appeal. What I do like are driving games and strategy games.

jiggy2011• 12 years ago

Only non violent strategy games?

saraid2168• 12 years ago

When you're at the thousand-foot view, the fact that a baneling hit causes marine gore to fly several yards to the edge of the map is sort of... beside the point.

darkFunction2• 12 years ago

The appeal is in infinite possibilities, sport and teamwork. Single player games don't appeal to me as an adult, the outcome is scripted and the characters are hollow for the most part. It's entirely passive and a film or book gets to the point quicker for me. Violent multiplayers though- Counter Strike or Battlefield- give rise to fluid, human, tense stories. Stories in the context of violence sure, but real and non-scripted. It's yours and not the developers'.

cyounkins• 12 years ago

Please describe the story of Counter Strike, because I've logged hundreds of hours on the game and have no idea what you're talking about.

mark_l_watson3• 12 years ago

OK, thanks, that makes sense. That said, I worked on some prototypes of multi-player racing games and "dicing" with friends around a racetrack has a bit of the appeal you mentioned.

I do watch a few fairly violent movies a year, it is just the violent games that I don't enjoy.

Retric• 12 years ago

I have been thinking you could probably build an open ended world with a reasonably deep autogenerated quest system. there are already weak AI systems that can respond to open ended text fairly well. Start with some basic relationships and the game could decide the second son wants to kill his older brother to take the therone but needs to frame someone to take the fall... Ect.

You can Restrict dialog choices while still giving the player real choices.

EpicEng3• 12 years ago

Angel Studios released Resident Evil 2 in 1999. Non-violent you say?

mark_l_watson3• 12 years ago

That was after I left :-)

hcarvalhoalves4• 12 years ago

IMHO, I don't think violence is the main point of Resident Evil, it's more about the horror/suspense.

A bit different than mindless violence as in e.g., GTA, Call of Duty, Battlefield, etc.

loup-vaillant2• 12 years ago

Interestingly, even extremely graphically violent games on the surface can be felt as non-violent in a competitive setting. I recall this "playing to win" essay, talking about Street Fighter. (If characters punching each other to unconsciousness is not violent, I don't know what is.)

In fighting games, competitive players tend to concentrate on the structure behind punches and suffering. They see a game of anticipation, dexterity, and timing. They talk about hit boxes, priorities, frame advantage… Those players would probably enjoy an abstract version of those fighting games.

Hmm… we could even test that: could we make a game that have a similar structure to Mortal Kombat, only it doesn't even look like 2 characters punching each other to death?

cwyers6• 12 years ago

It's interesting that you bring up Mortal Kombat, which wasn't the first fighting game, or necessarily even the best fighting game, but it certainly was the one that looked the most like two characters punching each other to death.

wrthomps• 12 years ago

Hi, fighting game player here. You're very right about the way we see the games: Ryu's Shoryuken isn't a stylish kung-fu uppercut, it's an attack that's invincible on startup and with a strong vertical hitbox, making it useful against jumping attacks and to beat careless attacks from the opponent, but which is easily punishable if blocked.

The essay you're referring to is written by a man named David Sirlin, and he runs a website where he talks about his ideas on game design[1]. He's perhaps most known in the community for helping to bring to light the concept of "yomi," (lit. "reading"), the process of taking actions specifically to get a grasp on your opponent's thought process and be able to predict it. To him, that's the one pure essence of fighting games (though this view is not universally held).

In fact, he's already done something like you describe. He designed a card game named, appropriately enough, Yomi[2], that attempts to bring the core of a fighting game into a card game format. Much like in fighting games, attacking beats throws, throws beat blocking, and blocking beats attacks. Hitting a player allows you to attempt to combo them, but the opponent can play cards (that may be bluffs) which can break the combo.

He did something similar with chess, calling it Chess 2, though it's much less popular than Yomi.

[1] http://www.sirlin.net

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yomi_(card_game)

hcarvalhoalves4• 12 years ago

If you abstract any game you'll end up with chess or something similar. Deep down all games are about luring the other player into doing something you expect. You are left with a decision tree.

That has a lot less appeal than fast paced, cool looking ninjas kicking each other - hence why video games are an art form and not just intellectual exercise.

Qworg• 12 years ago

Divekick is a game that doesn't necessarily take out the violence, but does pare the fighting game down to its barest essentials.

You only have two moves - jump and divekick.

100984• 12 years ago

I don't understand the appeal.

What's the appeal of action movies?

It's fun. Haven't you ever tried blowing something up when you were a kid?

morsch• 12 years ago

That's begging the question. Why is it fun?

aidenn02• 12 years ago

If you didn't get the crawford reference, you need to play Siboot[1] right now. It's middling in terms of how fun it is, but interesting to see how much it was possible to model social interaction 27 years ago.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trust_%26_Betrayal:_The_Legacy_...

ripter• 12 years ago

Where can we play it? Wikipedia just describes it.

aidenn02• 12 years ago

It used to be posted on his home-page (and I think the wikipedia article used to link to that?) But I couldn't find it on there any more. It's available on most abandonware sites though (use the Mac version with a mac emulator, the MS-DOS version has some important bugs in it).

[edit] The source code for it is available still on his homepage, but You'll need paschal and assemblers for MacOS to build it I imagine.

http://www.erasmatazz.com/library/source-code/index.html

smacktoward• 12 years ago

Another good game along these lines from the same era is Jim Gasperini's Hidden Agenda (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_Agenda_%28computer_game%...), from 1988. A fascinating exploration of how politics evolves out of the interactions of the personalities of a few well-drawn characters.

topherreynoso• 12 years ago

Jonathan Swift is slow-clapping somewhere.

emsy3• 12 years ago

The author is sarcastic, but actually quite right. We don't have many games that actually explore violence, give it a deeper meaning or use it as a rhetorical device (like GTA V did superficially with the torture scene). There are many games with a violent shell, but it's actually about scoring points. Killing an enemy in an FPS gives me the same kind of satisfaction as solving lines in Tetris. The last time I played a violent game for its violence was as a teenager.

lotharbot• 12 years ago

"it's actually about scoring points"

Right -- you can replace all of the humans with mechs, and the ak-47 with some sort of power-sapping stun beam (that disables, rather than destroying, the mech) and many AAA games would play just as well.

There are people who seem to really like "ultra-realistic" gore instead of exploding robots or de-summoned cartoons, but that doesn't change the fundamental basis: most AAA games are about scoring hits against hitpoints, not really about violence.

derefr• 12 years ago

Right -- you can replace all of the humans with mechs, and the ak-47 with some sort of power-sapping stun beam (that disables, rather than destroying, the mech) and many AAA games would play just as well.

Or with paint! (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splatoon)

vlunkr2• 12 years ago

Most likely because the average person doesn't want to explore violence that way. I love some FPS games, but not because they are violent. I like how fast-paced and strategic they are.

The same goes for movies. Most people will watch movies with some violence, but movies like Saw don't have mainstream appeal.

emsy3• 12 years ago

Sounds like something an Indie game could achieve. But even in mainstream titles, I think violence could be explored, as long as it's not the main theme. Many TV shows lately have violent scenes that go beyond mindless splatter. I think the torturing scene in GTA V went into the right direction, but it's just not there yet. In TV shows, such devices are usually used for character development, to mark major plot changes or to emphasize the setting the show plays in. Those scenes revolve around who, how, where when and why in regard to violence. And I would love to see that applied to games as well.

manachar• 12 years ago

Oddly enough, one game that hit me hard with the violence in it was Pikmin. Simple and cute, you can't help but learn to love and nurture your little underlings, but as the game progressed it became tougher to overcome challenges and before long you started having to plan on sacrificing percentages of your Pikmin just so you could achieve your goal. The first Pikmin death (with a beautifully haunting wail) hit me pretty hard. I never fully got comfortable with their sacrifices and felt every death fairly strongly.

This is of course fairly different than something like your average game where death isn't permanent or particularly impactful, especially when killing nameless/faceless opponents.

vlunkr2• 12 years ago

haha, I've never thought about it that way when I played it, but it does seem especially heartless since you have no choice but to let some of them die occasionally, after you raised them to help you.

Crito• 12 years ago

In Kerbal Space Program, I have launched rescue mission to save stranded Kerbals that took several hours of planning and flying. Anytime an engine breaks off a lander or a ship runs out of fuel, I feel compelled to send a robotic rescue mission to bring them back home (even though they won't die when merely stranded).

I'm not sure what about the game creates that feeling, but I think the game is much better because of it. Some of my best moments in the game were during rescue missions (one time I had a lander on the Mun with no docking ports and only enough fuel for a short sub-orbital hop; I managed to rendezvous with the lander mid-hop, then EVA the kerbal into the rescue craft.)

emsy3• 12 years ago

I was too young to "appreciate" the gruesomeness of Pikmin when I played it, but your post got me thinking if it was intentional. For anyone interested, I found an interview that covers the topic right at the beginning: http://www.gonintendo.com/s/208519-miyamoto-on-pikmin-3-and-...

cwyers6• 12 years ago

I think the video game that actually has something to say about violence is "Spec Ops The Line."

vxNsr• 12 years ago

This needs a (2011) tag but other than that it's funny.

hawkharris2• 12 years ago

A solider once told me that boredom is one of the most mentally challenging aspects of war. Because you can go long stretches without running into anyone, let alone your enemies, the moments when you do clash are especially intense. It's like someone switching the radio dial from a low static sound to hardcore metal.

The games that try to juxtapose conflict with stretches of non-action are usually the most successful at conveying the experience of combat. The new Tomb Raider comes to mind. You can travel awhile without fighting because there's a lot to see and do in the environment. When you do encounter adversaries, they're usually in small numbers. They'll speak to each other and respond to your attacks with unique dialogue.

On the other hand, games like Call of Duty, which overwhelm the player with hundreds of enemies at all times, fail to convey the experience of war. The key is to provide contrast between action and non-action, and to provoke suspense by limiting the scope of the conflicts so they can be felt and comprehended more easily.

mbell• 12 years ago

There is a saying I've heard a few times in regards to aviation that seems to apply here, not sure who it should be attributed to: "Flying is hours of boredom, punctuated by moments of stark terror." On the gaming front, I think the closest I've ever seen to this was playing Eve Online, it certainly seemed to fit this description and the 'stark terror' parts were great, but I haven't played in years, I just don't have time for the 'hours of boredom' part anymore.

hawkharris2• 12 years ago

I love that quote! It captures what I was trying to say in a more succinct way.

saraid2168• 12 years ago

Heh. It's sort of odd to read reactions to this by people who are completely outside the game industry.

This isn't sarcasm. This is a parody.

Every line is one that game designers who advocate for games about social dynamics have heard in response. That modeling a gunshot or a sword stroke is much easier than trying to capture the nuance of a conversation. The "Gorytron" reference refers to "Erasmatron", a computer system that tried to model story more abstractly than interactive fiction games.

It's basically just one long in-joke for those of us who are tired of the sheer quantity of games easily reducible to violent conflict resolutions.

cwyers6• 12 years ago

"That modeling a gunshot or a sword stroke is much easier than trying to capture the nuance of a conversation."

I think that's really kind of true, though. If you look at the kinds of movies we export successfully, spectacle sells overseas a lot better than movies about conversation. Is it because mass audiences are dumb? I don't think so. Are the Chinese less sophisticated than us? No. So why is "Transformers Age of Extinction" a cash rake outside of the U.S., with 78% of its box office take coming from foreign markets, while something like "The Fault In Our Stars" only gets 19% of its money from overseas?

Because spectacle is easy, and more importantly, spectacle needs very little translation. A giant truck robot riding an even gianter dinosaur robot and wielding a giant sword speaks for itself. Movies about human interaction require a lot more translation. You need subtitles for all the text, and a good translation is difficult -- for one, film is a visual medium, and having to read subtitles distracts your visual attention more than being able to hear the dialogue and understand it. And even if you understand the words, that's not the same as understanding the context -- subtle nuances of wordplay can be lost in translation, and translation doesn't help with allusions to things that audiences may not be familiar with.

So what does that have to do with video games? Well, video games have always been rather limited in what they can convey. Early videogames especially, and since the author mentions Doom in passing, let's focus on Doom's level of technical sophistication. So much of what makes for conversation wasn't possible with Doom's level of technology. Forget anything but text -- Doom's audio was limited to a bunch of nearly-MIDI files and a handful of WAV files for sound effects. We didn't have MP3s yet, bandwidth and storage were both in short supply, and text to speech was rather eerie and easily identifiable as synthetic. You couldn't have inflection or tone to your dialogue.

At the same time, facial expression, body language -- all of those things are very difficult to convey in graphics that were 320x200 pixels with 256 colors. (They're also difficult to convey on modern high-res polygons; there's a reason we have the term uncanny valley.)

When Doom came out, I have absolutely no doubt it was easier to meaningfully convey violence against creatures from hell on Mars than it was to convey social interaction between people in the medium of video games. And in a lot of ways, I think that's still true.

saraid2168• 12 years ago

It's worth noting that Chris Crawford was working on this problem long before DOOM came out, and he did not succeed. He gets referenced in the OA for a reason:

He denounced the hack-and-slash genre in the 80s. The Dragon Speech happened in 1992.

SAI_Peregrinus• 12 years ago

Some games manage to do both, and do it well. The Borderlands 2 Tiny Tina DLC is a perfect example. It's a gung-ho adventure with explosions and dragons and guns and blood and death! It's also the touching story of a mentally-ill thirteen year old girl dealing with the murder of her adoptive father, after having had to deal with the deaths of her natural parents in a Goebbels-like experiment. It's about the rules of morality, and about how people break the rules in desperate circumstances, often to their own detriment.

It's not a friendly, fun social discussion, but it is a social discussion, and it's very well done. It manages to use the spectacle as a tool to tell a heartbreaking story, and is all the more impressive due to the contrast with the rest of the series.

tn13• 12 years ago

The game I liked for violence was Age of Empires and Age of Nations. I use to build custom maps with obscenely large armies maintained level peace till the enemery ran out of resources and then use to starve them to death. Eventually use to nuke the enemies.

After destroying enemies I use to destroy my allies in the game.

Chattered• 12 years ago

I have to imagine the arguments or excuses that the author is parodying. I guess they are excuses that there are more violent games because violent interactions are easier to simulate than non-violent interactions.

Rather than do a parody, I'd just point out that excuses about simulation are crappy because games hardly simulate anything. Outside of rigid-body physics, game logic is just a nonsense of magical rules. Why can't I blast open this door? Why do all the light switches still work after I've released several grenades in the room and decaled all the walls? It's all happily absurd.

So if it's a standard in games that stepping over a medkit can cure you of the shotgun blast you took to the face, in some ridiculous simulacrum of first-aid, then why isn't it standard in games that gifting the love interest a rare flower makes them follow you around in some sort of ridiculous simulacrum of infatuation.

It's a nice parody argument. But I'd rather have a history of how games got where they got. Maybe we can blame it all on Dungeons and Dragons. That game had HP.

JoeAltmaier• 12 years ago

I'm guessing its simple, blind evolution. D&D and such had kill-and-gather-loot mechanics, and were pretty popular. So many offshoots of that genre got written and sold. Evolve some wings and fins etc and we are where we are.

If we actually decided where we wanted to go with video games, we could get somewhere. Til then we're going to wander around in this violent killfest wasteland, upgrading the graphics on the explosions.

100984• 12 years ago

why isn't it standard in games that gifting the love interest a rare flower makes them follow you around in some sort of ridiculous simulacrum of infatuation

Actually, it is. Try giving a porkchop to a wolf in minecraft :)

saraid2168• 12 years ago

But I'd rather have a history of how games got where they got.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_video_games ?

igl• 12 years ago

Are you familiar with "Sniper Elite"? (Slowmo murder porn) Do you know the stories they build into Battlefield games these days? (nuking iran, america fuck yeah)

Games are horrible... and mainly made for kids.

100984• 12 years ago

whoosh

Rangi42• 12 years ago

This article rightly points out that violence isn't actually much simpler to simulate than social interaction; it's just that players accept crude simulation because it's still fun. Space Invaders is essentially a game of Breakout with reskinned sprites, but just providing those skins lets the player imagine the details of an alien invasion.

Maybe a similarly crude level of simulation could work for social games, if the artwork allows players to get immersed in the game and fill in details with their imagination. Japanese relationship games and dating sims get part of the way there; since they're "visual novels," they can convey subtleties of character through narration, instead of having to come up with game mechanics for everything. The actual mechanics are little more than a single love/hate score for each girl, with the player successfully dating one when their score gets high enough (and getting a "bad end" if all are low -- or if too many are high).

Chris Crawford on Game Design mentioned that for the game Gossip, he simulated relationships as a network of springs. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gossip_%28computer_game%29) The closer Alice is to Bob, the more she can influence his opinion of (distance from) Carol. Another spring-based AI by Michael Heasell (Wizard Dude) won CodeCombat's programming tournament. (http://blog.codecombat.com/a-31-trillion-390-billion-stateme...) This "system of springs" could be the core of a social game the way "collision detection" is the core of shooters.

I suspect that one could create a relationship simulator with an emergent storyline by modeling the characters' relations towards each other (not just having a love/hate counter for their relations with the protagonist), and by having a skilled writer create dramatic scenarios triggered on certain conditions and "everyday" scenarios to move the plot along and provide chances to adjust the relationships. The standard plot tree of a dating sim would become a plot graph. It's still a far cry from real human interaction, but Call of Duty is far from real warfare and it sells anyway. The hard part is modeling just the interesting parts and making an entire playthrough be "fun."

gwern• 12 years ago

I thought the same thing about Japanese games & VNs when I read

Think about it. When modelling a conversation between two people, there’s a limited number of variables in play. How much do they like each other, and in what way? Given a few basic ways of manipulating the interaction, how does that change the relationship? These are all simple systems to simulate, so much so that we have a long history of unimaginative, sappy romance games made by genre-obsessed, cookie-cutter developers. Physical positioning can be pre-scripted, movements can be automated, and emotions are a well-understood programming domain.

Indeed. Just so.

adrusi• 12 years ago

To be fair, it _is_ a lot easier to make violent games than games about people because of existing infrastructure. You can make an FPS in a day with the unity game engine, using free art assets, the built in physics engine, a tiny bit of scripting, and even the built in netcode. I know next to nothing about other game engines targeted at such games, but I'm sure Source, Unreal and Cryengine all make it just as easy. This means that essentially all the money that big AAA developers throw at these games goes to making them the most refined experiences possible.

But beyond that, every way of simulating human interaction short of advanced AI will feel awkward because it's too fundamental a part of human nature. Games like _Long Live the Queen_ feel like spreadsheets and dating sims are just a genre of point and click adventure. The best game focused on human interaction that I can think of is the recent _Papers Please_ (disclaimer: I haven't played it, but it's on my list). Its modes of interaction are restricted, and it's not really a game in the strict sense, but rather a story told interactively. Interpersonal games need to move more towards the story telling if they want to be successful.

omgtehblackbloc• 12 years ago

Violence simulations are easier to /fake/ than social simulations because few of us have routine experience with violence in our daily lives. We have little to compare the simulation against, so even though it's clunky, the violence seems plausible enough.

But since we have social interactions every day, we have sophisticated intuitive expectations about what's a reasonable reaction in a given situation. So social simulations are judged very harshly, because they have a lot more to live up to.

Why So Few Violent Games?

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