Dante Posted June 22, 2010 Posted June 22, 2010 Gamespite - Over The Line Last weekend, I had dinner with my fiancée's mother. She spent a good part of that meal talking about how harrowing it had been living in war-torn Vietnam through four decades of conflict before finally emigrating to America in the '70s. She talked about being forced to seek bomb shelters daily during the Japanese bombings of World War II, about her uncle who didn't make it to a shelter on time and was literally eviscerated by shrapnel from a Japanese bomb. She told me that before her uncle's younger brother could bring his body home, he had to gather the dead man's scattered organs and shove them indelicately back into his abdomen. She explained how terrifying the Tết Offensive was, since America's war in Vietnam was largely restricted to the countryside; no one had expected the conflict to come to the cities, least of all on a holiday for which a cease fire had been declared. A day later, I found myself sitting in a press conference in Los Angeles, watching a couple of guys demo a videogame on a wall-sized screen. Their avatars hijacked a Russian helicopter, guns blazing, then took off from a jungle clearing before peppering villages of Vietnamese shanty huts with turret fire and missiles. With the previous day's conversation fresh in my mind, it made for an uncomfortable juxtaposition -- one that that no one else in the theatre experienced, of course, but no less unsettling for its specificity. What are videogames if not an experiential medium whose greatest strength is the way they adapt to everyone's individual approaches and yield so many different results? Honestly, I don't even remember which game was being demoed -- Medal of Honor? Black Ops? All the shooters I saw at this week's conferences kind of blurred together for me in a stream of non-stop exp I get that violence is a part of videogames; it always has been. Arguably the first videogame ever was Computer Space, which consisted of using detailed physics models to blow up someone else's spaceship. Most of the games I enjoy are fairly violent as well, or at least use conflict as their primary mechanic. After thinking about it for most of the past week, I've come to the conclusion that what upsets me about most of this year's E3 press conferences is that most of them opened up by focusing on games that cross a line. It's an invisible, but it's one that -- for me, at least -- is very real. It's a line built of motivation, of intent, of tone. The near side of the line is a place where violence exists as a means to an end; on the far side, violence is the end in and of itself, and the goal is to explore it with sociopathic abandon. This is, of course, the point at which everyone comes out of the woodwork to tell me I'm a puritanical idiot who doesn't understand the concept of escapism, which is to be expected. But my gaming tastes have always been defined to some degree by that invisible line. I couldn't stomach Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain when I realized that the game forces you to survive by killing innocent people who have been chained up in dungeons; I couldn't find any joy in the premise of Wild 9, whose advertising tagline gushed about how thrilling it is to torture enemies. That same part of me watched Cliff Bleszinki present Bulletstorm with increasing unease as he showed off the game's focus on brutally slaughtering random bad guys in increasingly violent ways to the accompaniment of sub-comic-book tough-guy dialog. Shortly before that, the part of me that plays through every Metal Gear Solid game with the MK-22 tranquilizer gun as my primary weapon and could only watch the Rising trailer with horror as Raiden visibly cut human enemies into graphically rendered meat slices. (Incidentally, the first thing I asked in our Rising roundtable interview is whether or not it's actually possible to take a non-lethal approach to the game. Supposedly, you can; disarming human enemies -- and not literally dis-arming them, I mean by destroying their weapons -- is a valid tactic, while the game will provide lots of robot foes in order to give you things to cut more directly without feeling bad about it. So that's something, I guess.) I really enjoyed Sam Keith's The Maxx in high school, and a sequence in the comic's sixth issue has stuck with me over the years. The protagonist is ambushed by an assassin named Mako, who sets about pummeling Maxx as the scene cuts back and forth to a conversation about violence in the media; meanwhile, the comic's villain (of sorts), Mr. Gone, narrates the Maxx/Mako battle, editorializing on the manipulative nature of how violence is presented: "An' here's where th' hero is trapped! The evil villain is unstoppable! Look how strong he is! How powerful! 'Fight back!' we scream. 'Don't just take it! Fight back!'" And of course, the villain wails on the hero until a turning point is reached and the hero is finally able cut loose in retaliation -- but his own use of violence is of course fully justified by all that's been inflicted on him, so we can feel good about him resorting to the same means as the bad guy, because the bad guy deserves it. Terry Pratchett touched on the same topic in The Fifth Elephant as surly-but-good guy Sam Vimes barely survives a werewolf's game of cat-and-mouse (er, dog-and-mouse?) and is eventually forced to kill the villain out of desperate self-protection. At that moment, Vimes rejects the urge to make an action hero quip as he strikes the fatal blow, aware that the moment he takes pleasure in the act he's reduced himself to a monster, same as the villain. For me, those are two defining statements on the role and nature of violence in the media, and they're all the more effective for the way in which they're delivered in the context of media. I don't know that anyone's ever done the same thing with gaming, though -- BioShock's golf club sequence is the closest thing that comes to mind, or maybe The Sorrow in Metal Gear Solid 3, which is a shame given how thoroughly violence is woven into the fabric of gaming. You'd think someone would have stepped back and said, "Wait, here's another way." Unfortunately, it's clear from E3 that games are still very much in their creative adolescence, and that no one's really questioning why violence is so intrinsic to the medium -- for the moment, the only question anyone seems to be asking is, "How much more over-the-top can we make the killing aspect of our game?" I don't question that there was a lot of creativity on display in this year's E3 demos! But so much of it was centered around interesting new ways to pierce, dismember, and brutalize the bodies of enemies, and that bothers me. It's one thing for a game like, to take an example from my current playlist, Persona 3 Portable to send you into a dungeon every midnight to slay demonic shadows that threaten to consume the world of the living, and quite another thing altogether to earn bonus point for chasing down a mutant who's running from you in terror and killing it by emptying a machine gun into its anus. (Achievement unlocked: "Fire in the Hole.") One of these places the player in the role of protector, the other in the role of psychopath. Personally, it's not a jump I'm comfortable making. I realize it's pointless for me to write about this, though. People already have opinions, and they're not about to sway one way or another because of a blog post. People who agree will say, "Right on!" while those who don't will tell me to chill out, lighten up, grow a brain/spine/sense of humor, etc., etc. It's a shame, because I'd like to see a rational dialog on this subject, but the change can ultimately only come from within the medium... and as long as there's money to be made from pushing boundaries, those boundaries will continue to be pushed. And hey, fair enough; there's range for all manner of expression in the medium. My concern is that, at the moment, this freedom expression seems to be weighted disproportionately toward a particularly vicious end of the spectrum. Here's hoping for a little balance sooner than later. In the meantime, I guess I'll just dwell here on the boring, puritanical side of the line and watch the happenings on the other side with dismay. Yes, there was a wonderfully diverse software lineup at E3, but the point I'm making is that most of the press conferences -- the public showings that were streamed live to giant screens in Times Square! -- put the ultraviolence front-and-center. These games are the medium's ambassadors to the public. They are the games publishers have chosen to use as their vanguard, as their public faces, as the framework by which to define their businesses. That is my complaint: That this E3, the biggest publishers in the industry said, "You know all those stereotypes about games and gamers? They're totally true!" I agree with his points that some games have become mainly about violence and publishers only see that pushing the boundaries of violence for top budget games can sell games alot to gamers also how games have become the stereotype that the media sees it as. Do you agree with his views or disagree with them?
Pit-Jr Posted June 22, 2010 Posted June 22, 2010 Honestly, I don't even remember which game was being demoed -- Medal of Honor? Black Ops? All the shooters I saw at this week's conferences kind of blurred together for me in a stream of non-stop exp This is pretty much how i felt throughout the various conferences. Great.....another shooter...Pew! Pew! Pew! Watching the various devs demo their big shooters on stage felt awkward and somehow juvenile to me. Thank god Nintendo was there to balance it out. At the risk of sounding like a hypocrite though, i thought MGS:R, Mortal Kombat , and Twisted Metal looked fantastic
Aimless Posted June 22, 2010 Posted June 22, 2010 A large part of the reason for the amount of violence in games is a purely practical concern: one of the easiest, most reliable game mechanics to code is shooting a dude in the face. It's relatively easy to make engaging, you can replicate it across the entire span of a game, and the player will get to see around 99% of the content you created. Personally my favourite parts of Mass Effect 2 are the conversations; I know I'm not alone in this. Unfortunately it's far more time consuming and expensive to create 10 minutes of interactive dialogue than it is 30 minutes of shooting. Obviously there's plenty of work involved in the latter, but these days everyone expects characters to be fully voiced, faces well animated and camera shots to be more dynamic and orchestrated than your traditional talking heads. Worse still, people aren't even going to experience all the content you created unless they're playing the game multiple times, on top of which there's the logistical issue of how this dialogue choice affects that, how the resolution of the dialogue changes the larger world, et cetera. In practical terms it's far easier to create a film about two people talking than it is an all-action blockbuster; I could make a film about people talking as I don't need to create assets, just grab a couple of actors and shove them into a real world location. For games it's the opposite, they start at square one: if you want a scene showing someone walking down an alley, someone has to model, texture and light that environment, then you need to model, texture and rig a character to walk down it. What's worse is that your game is expected to last at least 8 hours, if not more, so not only does the content you're creating have to be far more robust and labour intensive than film, you also have to make at least four times as much of it. Violence simplifies things. You have a clear objective: neutralise enemy. You have a clear outcome: enemy is dead. It's a loop of action that's discrete and relatively trouble free; the enemy is hostile and then they're dead, there's no need to account for all potential player actions like trying to talk to them, jumping up and down on the scenery to see how they react, et cetera. Edge cases lead to more edge cases, accounting for all player actions being pretty much impossible, so simply from that point of view you can see why closed-loop systems are attractive to developers. Here's an excerpt from an article on Thief 3 to give you an idea of what I mean: [The player has tried to hide a body on a bed, a patrolling AI guard immediately twigging that the body was 'dead'.] I should have known better. The AI was just looking for knocked-out people. It didn’t care where the body was. I was so into the game I stopped the metagame thinking about AI and started thinking about what I’d do in the given situation. In that situation, placing a zonked person in a bed made a lot more sense than dumping them in a corner. However, to the AI it was just a poorly hidden body. Sigh. But fixing this problem would be tricky, and would involve a lot of extra work. The level designers would have to designate certain areas or objects as “beds”, and the programmers would need to make it so that bodies laying on beds rouse less suspicion than bodies found elsewhere. Then they would need to add some new dialog and behavior: If an NPC sees someone “sleeping” on a bed (most likely not in their own bed) while fully clothed and while they should be working, he shouldn’t ignore them, but he also shouldn’t run away screaming about murders and dead bodies. You need some new behavior along the lines of “try to wake someone up and then discover they have been knocked out”. But even with that extra effort, you can still have some amusing failure modes. Placing a servant girl on a bed in the priest’s quarters or the barracks should raise some eyebrows. Likewise, stacking two or more people in the same bed should tip off guards and servants that something is amiss. It wouldn’t make sense for them to just assume they all decided to take a nap together. It would be annoying to code in such a way that it works right. The programmer would probably need to take the victim’s position into account as well. If I just toss somebody on the bed so that their upper body hangs over the side and their head is resting on the floor, it’s going to look pretty stupid if someone comes along and assumes they’re asleep. Also, it seems like the length of time since the NPC’s last saw each other should be taken into account as well. If you greet your fellow housekeeper, walk out of the room, and come back a few seconds later to find them motionless in someone else’s bed, you are not going to think they are sleeping. All of that said there are of course many ways to navigate around these problems, but it's easy to see why developers would be inclined to stick to the popular and lucrative shooter market rather than trying to make, say, Shadow of the Colossus. Even so that doesn't account for the glorification of violence which I do find rather off-putting — Gears doesn't give me the "Fuck yeah!" feeling I'm apparently supposed to have — but that's enough words for one post.
Dan_Dare Posted June 22, 2010 Posted June 22, 2010 Well said Aimless. Violence is...handy videogame shorthand. It's the easiest A-B like you say. I'm with you on ME 2, too. I'd have much preferred some more extended non action sequences but in terms of man hours in development it's probably not feasible. It's a shame because it's a total fiction killer. If Shepherd is going to a nightclub to ask some questions, why is he doing it in full power armour carrying a pistol, an assault rifle, a shotgun and a flamethrower, And why does nobody try and stop him? Answer: because whatever you ask, five minutes from now you're going to be shooting a droid in the face.
Nolan Posted June 22, 2010 Posted June 22, 2010 The guy comes off as a total twat to me. He makes good points though, games are violent and at times needlessly so. The Manhunt series springs to mind, and Postal. They revolve around killing and often in rather gruesome ways. However, when the guy says he couldn't stomach Bloodomen because of the innocents (not necessarily imo) you kill for life. In fits within the story, and it's not trying to go OTT like say Bulletstorm or Madworld.
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