A History of Videogame Violence

Warning: This article contains spoilers for a minor but well-done sidequest from Troika's "Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines"

I am a creature of violence. In the past year, I have attacked countless people, savagely beaten them, run them over with cars, and rained down all manner of ordnance upon them. I have killed hundreds, if not thousands; typically in self defense, but occasionally out of pure malice. And I'm assuming you have too.

Make an estimate as to your own butcher's board; quickly tabulate the masses you have executed to achieve your goals. We are all virtual Pol Pots. We have raged regular swaths of death and violence across multiple worlds. While these atrocities will never bring about a trip to The Hague, that does not change the fact that we've committed them. Yet somehow these innumerable deaths do not weigh on our consciences as much as one might expect. One does not meet too many gamers suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, haunted by an innumerable cast of simulated ghosts. We live such violent lives, yet they never move us to seek any redemption. It is difficult for me to pick even one of these moments which made me stand back and look at what I'd done in horror; of all my monstrous acts, almost none have made me pause and think "I am a monster".

So many of our games are inextricably linked with violence, but it's a violence which typically does not move us in any way. Think about every game you've played. Think about every character you've killed. Try and compose a mental list of in-game obituaries. For how many of these deaths do you feel anything resembling remorse?

Here is where a word like "desensitization" might come into play. I am not fond of this word. To say that someone has become "less sensitive" to violence is is to imply they have become less of a human being. Though the typical violence of games has little effect on me, I don't think it's because some essential portion of my humanity has been deadened. I think it's because what we most often see in games can't be described as violence at all; at least, not in a human sense. Our games often compel us to commit violent acts to progress, but we cannot usefully compare the typical experience of this to real-world violence. It is an abstraction, a gameplay mechanic for which there is no suitable analogue in real life. Distilled of its avatars and setting, it is a relatively simplistic device, based on numeric values, as most gameplay is at its core. This is a violence without any sense of suffering, and therefore, without any sense of regret.

True violence can't be quantified. There are no numbers at its core, only raw experience; and a videogame mechanic is no approximation. The numbers may count down to zero and the game may pronounce a character as dead, but usually there is no agency in this pronouncement. The character may have disappeared from the gameworld, but there are most likely a thousand other characters just like it waiting to be dispatched similarly. If the character is unique in such a way that a player might regret their passing, she may simply reload and spare that character. This ability alone dilutes nearly all videogame violence of its potency; for the most affecting moment of any real-life violent act must be in the realization in the moments after it has occurred, the realization that you can never take it back. I fear more for gamers' warped sense of mortality than their supposed "desensitization".

Let's get back to that list of obituaries. Of my own incalculable casualties list, I regret only a few: the family of Sims I allowed to burn to death because I was sick of telling them to go to the bathroom, all the colossi in Shadow of the Colossus, and the stuttering vampire.

The stuttering vampire was a character in a sidequest in Troika's much-maligned Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines. He had been sentenced to die, for reasons I cannot recall, and I was to be his executioner. He was a pathetic figure; a powerless, thinblooded pseudo-vampire, abandoned and confused, unsure of how to conduct himself in this dark new world in which he had been forced to live. I had met him at the beginning of the game, when I was essentially just as confused as he was, and to complete my mission I had to return to the beach he lived on in the game's starter hub. And though he had no idea he'd done anything wrong, and though he pleaded for his life, and though at the back of my mind I realized I could easily let him go and, since this was a game, suffer no consequences, I also felt that I had a job to do; a job given to me by dangerous employers. I felt, for a brief second, that it was either my life or his. These are the moments when true violence occurs.

I was surprised that, after it was done, after a single stroke had rendered him as ash, I stayed in this now meaningless side-level for a few minutes. I looked out at the simulated waters, and I reflected on this feeling I had: that I had just done something terrible and inhuman, and that there was no way to undo it.

This experience was fundamentally different, and inherently better, than a typical violent scene. It was poignant, it was moving, and it brought on a moment of genuine introspection. It was the complete opposite of desensitization. It'd be too much to ask for every moment of videogame violence to be like this; it'd simply be too exhausting. But videogames present a unique opportunity. In a culture whose media is already heavily infused with violence, they offer their audience a chance to experience violent moments that they alone are responsible for, moments that might make them feel something that cannot come from watching other people be violent: remorse and angst and self-doubt. These are such important emotions; they are so powerful, so fundamental to the human experience, and games could strike right at the heart of them--if they wanted to. But no game can evoke these emotions, so long as the violence in them stands for nothing more than a means of progression.

I would like to see more developers attempt to design games where violence exists, but it is not ingrained into the world--where it is not a mechanic, but a last resort. Someday, I want gamers to seek redemption for their violent acts; because in real life, redemption is the only good thing that can come out of violence. Games should start forcing us to look at our bloody histories with a little less triumph, and a little more remorse.

Comments

Very well written article, I to have this feeling when playing. I have played games where deaths were mere counters and statistics, but I have also played games where NPCs actually meant something. The latter were few and far in between. I would love for a game to evoke an emotion of remorse and actual wrongdoing when violence occured.

I usually go out of my way to kill everything in games. I think it all goes back to that laughing dog in Duck Hunt. Damn him and his mocking laughter.

I remember letting him go in Vampires: Bloodlines and not suffering the consequences. He just had to leave town, if I remember correctly.

The character may have disappeared from the gameworld, but there are most likely a thousand other characters just like it waiting to be dispatched similarly. If the character is unique in such a way that a player might regret their passing, she may simply reload and spare that character.

This makes me wonder if a real human being has to be unique in ones eyes to be worthy of not killing, to make you sensitive to his or her death? I don't think so. There's always an emotional reaction to killing a fellow human being (if you're a bit of a human yourself, that is) which is hard if not impossible for art forms to recreate. It can, as you point out, only be done by forcing you to emphatize with the characters. Them being there just isn't enough.

I let him go. You're an evil bastard for killing him, and you deserved that moment of self-reflection. And a number more.

That said, at some level, we all know this is fantasy. If that had been real, would you ACTUALLY have stuck a stake in that poor wretch's heart? Probably not, because in real life you have multiple conversation options, and you can change your mind immediately after making a choice. If you decide to let him go and he's headed to the bar to tell his buddies you let him live.... you'd intervene. You might even kill him after all. If you decided to kill him, but he was cowering and whimpering, you might develop a streak of conscience and stop.

But in games, you almost always have a black/white choice, and you rarely can change your mind. This leads to strange behavior. You're forced to choose A or B, instead of what you'd really decide. You can't be creative with solutions, for the most part... you have to choose one of the paths the designer intended. That, in and of itself, removes moral culpability; you are following a pre-scripted path, you're not making your own decisions.

I rarely feel guilt for killing characters in computer games, for several reasons.

A) They're not real.
B) The ones that have strong enough characters for me to care about, I generally CAN'T kill.
C) There's never a sense of suffering; you shoot them, they keel over, die, and disappear. Usually, not even a corpse is left... there's no time to render corpses!
D) Generic bad guys all look the same; it's obvious that they're just fiction.
E) There's just no emotional impact to death in computer games. I cooked a lobster once, threw it alive into a pot of boiling water, and that one act gave me more trouble than all my computer gaming combined has. I felt it alive and struggling in my hands, and tossed it in the pot. Thirty minutes later, it was food. That bothered me.

But no, you shouldn't have killed that guy. Of the two paths you were allowed to tread, you chose the Dark Side. Shame!

Malor wrote:

But no, you shouldn't have killed that guy. Of the two paths you were allowed to tread, you chose the Dark Side. Shame!

The dark side in games is almost always more fun... how many of you have played star wars jedi knight and played a good character... did you they play a dark side? Which was more fun? Not one person I know ever finished the good side as it wasn't as fun.

Well I, for one, played light side in pretty much all the Jedi games, including KOTOR 1 and 2. I went back and replayed most as dark side, just to see what it was like, but mostly I've always been more motivated by the lightside choices. Both were probably about equally fun, but the first play was always 'ok, these are the choices *I* would make', and the second play was 'let's see what it would be like to be a completely evil bastard.' My darksider in KOTOR1 was an utter ass-kicking wench, which *was* pretty cool.

Judging from how many people get into the dark side Jedi thing.... if they really existed, I think the good ones would be just as outnumbered by the evil ones as they are in the movies.

Edit: reworded a tiny bit.

Three games I'd like to mention:

Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy: They blurred the lines between light and dark here, allowing you to use light and dark powers, and supposedly trying to track how much of each you used. Frankly, the best way to get through the game is to choke your enemy and fling them over a cliff. Other than that force healing was very important for covering up injurious mistakes. So morality kind of takes a back seat in this latest edition.

Champions of Norrath: The first Champions game on PS2 had me scratching my head about exactly why you had to go and slaughter the giant ants. The gnomes were digging and blasting, and that's what got the ants mad, so why don't the gnomes go elsewhere, or stop blasting there? This theme of "go there and kill everything you find" was a little unsettling to me. There wasn't enough justification for it. A nice little village where all the children were orphaned by vicious smart giant ants that wanted to make them suffer by killing all the adults or something, that's motivation. But animals defending their turf? Not good enough.

God of War: (SPOILERS WITHIN) For me GoW was more distressing than just about anything else I've played. The violence is seductively beautiful in its execution, but Kratos' motivations and attitude are really out of whack if you look at them closely. Kratos is the one who was so blinded by his own ambition and bloodlust that he became the premier general in his army, then in a bid to save his life gave it over to Ares to become the mortal superweapon of Ares. This drives him even further over the top in service of his new master. He loves the killing and destruction completely, and his wife thinks he has become a monster of a man, which he has. So when Kratos does the deed that marks him, he then feels entitled to vengeance, entitled to go after and kill Ares, entitled to get help from the other gods to kill Ares, it's so unbelievably one-sided. All the gods did was give him what he wanted, all they did was let him go down the path he wanted to go down. He committed the terrible act himself. He was warned.

Because of this, in the end, I felt more than a little bit dirty and disconnected from Kratos. To me, the nightmares and everything else that plagued him, he deserved all of it. He got his revenge, he kills Ares, but when all is said and done, if I were sitting on the throne on Olympus, I'd basically go insane with all the time in the world to be reminded how I'd made my own bed, indeed an infinite amount of time if he was indeed immortal. It is fitting that Athena basically blows him off, saying she can't relieve him of his nightmares in the end because really, he did it to himself, but I think there's something unusually American -- in a bad way -- in his sense of entitlement throughout his quest.

Maybe he goes on the rampage that is God of War 2 to try and fill the hole in his soul, but I dunno. It doesn't really work for me. What could possibly be the motivation this second time around, and how can it hold together?

Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening Special Edition: Here we have highly stylized violence in a classical antiheroic mode. Dante is fighting because, well, they come after him, and he knows he has to take out the whole heap of them or he'll be killed for who he is. He basically just wants to live his own life, and all this trouble comes knocking at his door to drag him outside, up a giant tower, and through to the demon world.

He's skilled because of his half-demon lineage, basically, so he didn't make a deal with a devil to get his power that brings trouble to him. He doesn't pose or bray at the gods like Kratos that he's coming for them. He's gotta take care of business in a basically cut-and-dry them-or-us kind of fight. They're demons, they're not people, so there's no real guilt there. They basically shatter like glass when you kill them and evaporate, so there's no bodies, and the boss fights against human(oids) typically end with cut scenes where you basically see you've defeated them, and they run off, instead of slaying them outright.

According to my Battlefield 2 stats, I have killed over 11,000 people. Sweet.

EDIT

They all deserved it, especially the chopper whores.

painthappens wrote:
Malor wrote:

But no, you shouldn't have killed that guy. Of the two paths you were allowed to tread, you chose the Dark Side. Shame!

The dark side in games is almost always more fun... how many of you have played star wars jedi knight and played a good character... did you they play a dark side? Which was more fun? Not one person I know ever finished the good side as it wasn't as fun.

I played both games once, as the Good Guy/Girl. I don't like to play it again as another character, since it interferes with the story as I know it. It can only be MY story if it stays that one way forever. Btw, I DID have fun

Malor wrote:

IIf that had been real, would you ACTUALLY have stuck a stake in that poor wretch's heart?

Yes, expecially since the turning to ash bit would've eliminated that pesky body removal problem. Besides, he was an insult to vampires.

JimmDogg wrote:

They all deserved it, especially the chopper whores.

Even the 343 people who were on your side?

Sincerely,

Chopper Whore in Training

Good post. The biggest problem with videogame violence isn't desensitization, it's that game violence is usually divorced from any sense of long-term consequence or moral implications, beyond how it affects your score. I feel nothing for the countless victims of my bullets and blades, just as I feel nothing for the pieces in a chess game, because there is no sense of their existence mattering. No matter how realistic-looking my game targets are, nor how gory their deaths, there is rarely any sense of them being more important than the scenery - they are things, not people. The example you provide from Bloodlines is one of those rare occasions where the player is presented with a moral choice which has some meat to it - beyond "which action gives me the cooler reward?"

CC wrote:

Even the 343 people who were on your side?
Sincerely,
Chopper Whore in Training

You are going to be 11,166.

Infinity is perfect in his look at Kratos, and I think that is what makes Kratos a more intersting main character, as he is a deeply flawed person.

On the Star wars ideas... I remember in KoTOR2 there was a couple times when doing the light-side thing made things worse for others, such as giving homeless people money for nothing. It made me think that maybe being a goody two shoes may be a bad thing in it's own way.

Even though in games I tend to do the lightside thing unless the task is just amazingly stupid. So I am more of a nice guy instead of a shining beacon of truth.

Pardon me, is that a sexy new Sway-made article avatar? Thanks Sway!

Nice avatar coupled with another well-written article.

Going the dark path of a game has always been a perversion of mine ever since I sat with the NES gun in my hand, at the tender age of only 5, pulling the trigger madly at that damn dog in Duck Hunt.

Then came along Bioware's excellent Knights of the Old Republic I and II, which fulfilled my lust quite nicely.

This is exactly why (among a few other reasons) Planescape:Torment remains one of my favorite games of all time. Placing myself in my avatar's shoes, I actually felt remorseful about Deionarra.

Good article!

Great article Ian.

I tend to think that being the bad guy in a game is so appeal for a lot of us is because we are mostly people who try to do good in the world. But since we are naturally curious creatures, we innevitably are drawn to the opportunity to experience the "dark" side.

I too don't believe that games "desensitizes" people. In fact, I think it is quite the opposite. Games that offers great storylines will truly immerse the player into the game world. The immersion is so great for some games that we begin to "feel" the consquences of our actions in the game.
There are games that uses killing as a required mechanism of the game (to win you must frag the other guy type of things). But in most of those games, you don't really get to kill anyone anyway, since they will respawn right after "death."

Good points abound in both the article and the comments.

I think it boils down to a privileging of appearance. If it looks alive, it is alive. The problem is, no matter how lifelike (looking) enemies in games get (talking single player here - multiplayer deathmatch is a little different), most of the time they are still functioning the same way as the ghosts in Pac-Man - they're moving obstacles that make a maze more difficult to navigate. Spikes that you can kill.

A lack of remorse suggests to me that the relationship between player and game is more complicated than just "I am immersed in this world and am a mass murderer who kills everything he sees", because when you get right down to it, in a single player game, you have a different relationship to the world than anything you come across in it. What Infinity said about Kratos is pretty spot-on. It's a case where the character in the game seems to have any relationship to the violence he is causing. I can only think of one example of that happening in the opposite direction: near the beginning of Second Sight, after you take out a guard in a hospital, the character is somewhat horrified that he's just killed someone. It is the only instance in the game this happens, but it was striking because it's so rare to experience.

dejanzie wrote:

This makes me wonder if a real human being has to be unique in ones eyes to be worthy of not killing, to make you sensitive to his or her death? I don't think so. There's always an emotional reaction to killing a fellow human being (if you're a bit of a human yourself, that is) which is hard if not impossible for art forms to recreate. It can, as you point out, only be done by forcing you to emphatize with the characters. Them being there just isn't enough.

Well, supposedly one of the characteristics of serial killers is that they objectify/dehumanise their targets and this is why one of the ways in which law enforcement appeals to kidnappers by trying to get them to see them as human beings. etc (see silence of the lambs)
So basically what i'm saying is that you do need to see a person as being unique (i think we see all humans as being unique entities) because as soon as we group and categorise those people into anything less than unique we are able to do things that harm them.... or at best not take steps to stop harmful things happening to them.

I usually always play good characters in games - apart from Jedi academy where i saved and played both endings because i wanted to know what happened and IMO the evil ending is better because it leaves the game world open for a successful sequel.
One of the problems i have with oblivion is that every person is basically characterless. Having voice interaction is great, though when they all have the same 10 voices in the world it really leaves me thinking less of them than i perhaps would if they were unique - though the face editor/generator has helped bring uniqueness to the characters, many other facets of their lives are lacking.

Good article and follow ups. I'd say my highest level of acceptable violence is probably WoW. Anything more "real" than that, and I get uncomfortable. Just wandering in to Duc's office when he was playing BF2 was enough to give me the willies.

And yet, I can read some of the most bone chilling horror right before going to sleep, and it doesn't bother me. Clive Barker is like a lullaby sometimes.

Perhaps because when reading, I have the ability to turn off the pictures and soundtrack in my head. But ultra violent games, horror movies, particularly icky police dramas, there's none of that I can really stomach. I think a lot of it is sound effects. Just hearing the sound effects would be enough to spook me and get an adrenaline rush going. I don't really like adrenaline unless I need it for something.

Bloodless cartoon violence, like Wow, and I'm golden. Real looking/sounding violence...not so much, no.

I find it really hard to play the evil side in games. Which is even harder since developers try to capture that gamer immature deviance by giving them a cooler aesthetic, skills, history and plotline.

**SPOILER***

I dont know what would have happened if I had known the punchline of KotOR ahead of time. In the least, I would have emphasized altruism whether redemption was possible or not. It is possible I wouldnt have played the game.

***END SPOILER***

I stommached Jedi Academy as a dark character because I was starving for the content the alternate ending and boss fight provided. I did play 2 light saber styles of good before my dark side character.

I don't know about remorse for NPC's but I have experienced the flip side of this coin a few times. The side where I get attached to friendly characters enough that I will sacrifice myself to save them, even though I know the game will end once I die. I just want to save them that once. Just to say I did it.

One example might not qualify since I was saving the life of a "real" person. We were playing Splinter Cell Pandora Tomorrow Multiplayer and I and Danjo were taking turns instructing "noobs" on the mechanics and rules of the espionage universe. I had two "privates" that followed me around when I was a spy while Danjo hunted us. There was an incident of one of the young ones wandering away from my lesson and coming under fire. I actually dove (you could dive roll in PT) in front of him and absorbed the bullets and died. It didn't really matter, Danjo shot him two not a second later, but I dove without thinking about it. I just heard a scream and leapt in front of certain death. It made me kind of step back and look at myself. I am usually very competitive and a death usually gets a few cruse words but this one just gave me pride. I had done the right thing. I wasn't a complete heel after all. I haven't had many other moments like that since but it still stays with me.

The only time I can ever recall concidering not killing someone in a game was this skooma addict from Oblivion I had to dispose of for a quest. He just seemed so pathetic that at first I decided against it. The moral dilemma dissolved once I found that he'd murdered the original occupants of his house and stored them in the basement, though.

Jaunty wrote:

The only time I can ever recall concidering not killing someone in a game was this skooma addict from Oblivion I had to dispose of for a quest. He just seemed so pathetic that at first I decided against it. The moral dilemma dissolved once I found that he'd murdered the original occupants of his house and stored them in the basement, though.

I know exactly what you're talking about and did the same thing.