GWJ Conference Call Episode 501

DOOM, Uncharted 4, Rusty Lake Hotel, Throwback Topic: Game Violence, Your Emails and More!

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This week Shawn Andrich, Sean Sands and Julian Murdoch revisit the very first topic from our first show! Game violence, where we stand 500 episodes later.

To contact us, email [email protected]! Send us your thoughts on the show, pressing issues you want to talk about or whatever else is on your mind.

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Show credits

Music credits: 

Blown Out - Broke for Free - http://brokeforfree.com/ - 29:02

Golden Hour - Broke for Free - http://brokeforfree.com/ - 50:12

Comments

00:01:55 DOOM
00:12:17 Uncharted 4
00:17:52 Rusty Lake Hotel
00:19:58 Stellaris
00:29:02 Video Game Violence
00:50:12 Your Emails

Hey, so, re: gameplay videos. I was on the fence about Rimworld for a long time. It seemed interesting, but I'm terrible at strategy games. Lots of back and forth on that for like... a year. Then I noticed that GWJPlays had some Rimworld videos. I watched four or so of them and mostly laughed at Morales and TJ Hooker. But! It also showed me "Here are the first few things you need to do to not die." So I went ahead and bought it.

I'm still terrible. I've rolled and deleted two colonies so far. They each lasted about 3 hours. I'm working on my third colony though, and I'm doing better. The batteries are spaced far enough apart that when one explodes it shouldn't automatically take out it's neighbor. I set up a fridge near the kitchen, and then a larger secondary refrigeration unit near the crops when they started coming in. I'm growing crops! I haven't managed to kill all my chickens yet. I /am/ playing on the easiest setting with the easy AI. But I'm enjoying things, and I'm actually learning how the pieces fit together.

So thanks for that, Game King. Ninopia wouldn't exist without your videos.

I had a whole post written up about the violence topic, and then the forum logged me out and it was all lost.

The universe has saved you all from having to scroll past my post.

Instead: Shawn, let's assume I played the first few hours of Uncharted 2 and found the combat to be lame and uninteresting. Would Uncharted 4 still be a "must play"?

I'd honestly shrug such a recommendation off, but knowing that the Last of Us guys made it has me scratching my scruffy chin...

ccesarano wrote:

Instead: Shawn, let's assume I played the first few hours of Uncharted 2 and found the combat to be lame and uninteresting. Would Uncharted 4 still be a "must play"?

Was the combat the main thing that put you off of the game? I think one of the main things things that separates Uncharted 4 from the previous ones is that the ratio of combat to everything else is substantially lower than before. The last couple hours of the game have much more combat than the rest, but I would say that I was in combat maybe 20% of the time. In the previous games, that was closer to 40 or 50% of the gameplay. You will go through huge stretches of the game without interacting with an enemy. Most of what you'll be doing is traversing the environment, solving puzzles, and exploring.

My name is Shawn, so I feel qualified to answer this question as though it was directed at me.

I think Other Shawn has the right of it.

Hrm... how does the exploration and environmental navigation compare to Rise of the Tomb Raider?

I'll throw another voice into the teeming throng recommending Hardcore History, especially the WWI series. And I also agree that after hearing about the absolutely horrific nature of WWI, I'm not sure I want to play a shooter in it. I really have no desire to be immersed in the battle of Verdun or, worse yet, the third battle of Ypres where people were getting slowly swallowed by mud. I could handle an isometric RPG, though.

Since Chris had browser issues, I guess that leaves building the wall of text to me. You're welcome.

I feel like I'm always late to the party on these sorts of discussions. If you had asked me ten years ago about my thoughts on the violence thing, I probably wouldn't have been too far from Jack Thompson. I spent a few years thinking that video games were a manifestation of your inner desires-- sort of a "character is what you are when nobody,s looking" philosophy. I thought that playing he really nasty games meant that, deep down and in the absence of consequences, that's the person I would be.

This was, not coincidentally, around the time my wife got pregnant with our first child, and I started taking a long hard look at the kind of man I wanted our child to call Dad.

I spent a lot of years refusing to buy certain kinds of games and specific instances of games if they strayed too close to the needle of my moral compass. It didn't earn me any friends on various forums, let me tell you. People don't like it when they think you're moralizing at them.

Then Duke Nukem Forever came out (oh, stop acting like you didn't know that was coming) and my memories of playing the original, back before I got all introspective and preachy, and I had to face a moral dilemma. Here was a game that represented everything I was supposed to disdain about the game industry, and I really, really wanted to play it.

My wife, ever the voice of reason in my life, pointed out something that I had forgotten: it's not real! It never was. That hit me like a Holyfield knockout, and not just because she was enabling me to do something I already wanted to do. It was a revelation!

Just playing the game didn't make me a bad or disrespectful person. It was the way I played, or rather how I enjoyed it, that made the difference. Was I enjoying it because of the depravity? Was I reveling in the violent debauchery? No and no. I was just running around, blowing up aliens like a boss and smirking one liners all the way. It was fun, it was hilarious, it was like waking up and being yourself again.

I still haven't played a Call of Duty or Battlefield game, but not for ethical reasons, just because they focus so heavily on multiplayer, which I have negative interest in.

Maybe I'll circle back around as I age and start to feel empathy for all the fake people I've murdered. More likely I'll just keep on giggling maniacally as I play yet another round of Insurance Fraud in Saints Row 12.

Maybe I am a bad person after all. Oh well. At least I'm having fun again.

At the risk of being a bit too self-promotional, I go through similar bouts of introspection.

ccesarano wrote:

Hrm... how does the exploration and environmental navigation compare to Rise of the Tomb Raider?

They're pretty similar in both regards, though making direct comparisons between the two games is a bit misleading. I'd argue that the things Uncharted does best are things Tomb Raider hardly attempts and vice versa.

Both fit into the "wide linear" mold. Tomb Raider is a bit more open, while Uncharted is more focused. There is more stuff to find in Tomb Raider because it has a crafting and progression system that requires you to find upgrade materials. Uncharted has no such character progression. It still allows you plenty of opportunities to wander around its large areas, but you aren't going to be hunting wolves and picking up leather to make a bigger ammo pouch.

Exploring areas in Uncharted will reward you with treasure to unlock bonuses (think Ratchet and Clank's golden bolt rewards), letters that flesh out the pirates from the story, and vistas that will leave you wondering how the hell a game that looks this good is running on a PS4.

Thanks for your measured discussion of game violence.

My problem is that modern military shooters are my thing. I sometimes hear or read people saying, 'modern military shooters turn me off. Make the same game in a fantasy or Science fiction world and I'd be all in.' I tend to be the reverse. Convert that fantasy game with orcs and elves into a war torn city with barbed wire and tanks and I'm likely to be much more interested. The more 'realistic' the better. (I could walk around The Division's world for hours on end just admiring the immaculately captured snow and detritus on those streets. My admiration for that games environmental artists knows no bounds.)

I also love the game play of a well done shooter. As Certis was saying, thinking on the fly, repositioning against multiple foes, taking shots while trying to avoid incoming fire, etc is endlessly satisfying and engaging. You can keep your platformers; give me a game with lots of fire fights.

In recent times I've been feeling a bit frustrated and, as a reaction, defensive about the distaste a lot of people seem to be showing for shooters set in the modern world. It feels like the games I enjoy haven't changed but they are suddenly being portrayed as morally questionable. For me a modern military shooter is no different from Dragon Age, Halo or Bioshock in terms of the violence perpetrated on other intelligent, living beings. Killing an enemy type in The Division (they don't hand out those red health bars to just anybody) is no different from hacking to death a random Murlock in WoW.

For quite a time I would take it personally when people would talk about any new shooter in terms of racism or as 'murder simulators' but I have actually come to terms with those kinds of comments, having questioned thoroughly my own enjoyment of modern shooters and having realised that, as you expressed in the podcast, you and other people have legitimate feelings of discomfort when it comes to shooting in a modern world setting.

Higgledy wrote:

For quite a time I would take it personally when people would talk about any new shooter in terms of racism or as 'murder simulators' but I have actually come to terms with those kinds of comments, having questioned thoroughly my own enjoyment of modern shooters and having realised that, as you expressed in the podcast, you and other people have legitimate feelings of discomfort when it comes to shooting in a modern world setting.

This, I think, really gets to the crux of why these discussions tend to get so heated. It's almost impossible to say "I have a moral objection to X" without coming across as a scold at best and a wannabe censor at worst. I applaud the conference call crew for keeping the discussion personal to themselves and walking that line of raising an issue without inadvertently calling people monsters for being on one side of it.

In the end, it's a funny old world but it would be a lot more funny (and a lot less fun) if everybody thought the same.

Does anyone else remember the Metal Gear Solid 3 movie that was packed in with Subsistence? It was pretty much what you talked about today: the cutscenes and edited combat (very montague-y) to tie them together.

So I decided to try and reiterate the points devoured by my web brower. Partially because some of them tap into what Higgledy and Greg brought up.

If we really want, we can naval gaze to conflict being a natural part of stories because conflict is a catalyst for change. Physical conflict is much more easier to tie to mechanics than mental or verbal. Even outside of video games, consider Chess and sports like soccer/football. These are games with mechanics, where Chess imitates combat with a foe by the active removal of pieces from a board. Naming the pieces knight, pawn, bishop, etc. contextualizes it into a narrative. We understand why these two sides are opposed, and thus meaning is given to the mechanics.

This carries over to video games. Whether we want to craft a story or craft gameplay, the easiest thing to go for is some form of conflict. Now, this isn't always the case, naturally. Tetris and other puzzle games tend to be built around abstract ideas or problem solving. If there is a conflict, it is in how to get A to be B. If we want to further naval-gaze, we can examine how fascinating it is that Tetris' conflict is with your past self and decisions, but I can only get so pretentious in an already pretentious post. Then there's a game like Papers, Please, where the conflict is more internal than it is external. The external factors simply reveal what you really value verses what is considered a common morality.

But most of the time, a conflict is going to be represented by one side verses another, good verses evil. Violence helps contextualize this conflict very easily.

After that, it's a matter of context and execution. This is where things get iffy and subjective. For example, is it wrong to find satisfaction in watching Doom guy crush an imp's skull? Or to see the X-Ray vision of someone ripping a guy's spine out through his belly-button in Mortal Kombat? Eh, I'd actually say "not really". Violence is exciting and exhilarating. When you get into a fight with someone, your blood starts pumping and chemicals are released throughout your body to energize you. The feeling is neither good nor bad as it knows no morality. It simply is, and those chemicals are the same or similar to those chemicals released during other moments of euphoria.

Based on footage I've watched, Doom has some other benefits going for it. In order to be more user-friendly, the Glory Kill animations are kept brief. You don't linger on the bits of skull now stuck between Doom guy's fingers as the body slumps to the ground. You move in, pop its head, and move on. This keeps the game from fetishizing the violence too much. It's a brief and satisfying thrill.

Simultaneously, the game does not linger on the suffering of the enemy. I think this is the key factor to when violence goes from being exciting to disturbing. One could also call it "cartoonish", as no violence in the Warner Bros. cartoons reflect real violence. Even cries of pain are over-the-top and sound nothing like someone actually wounded from a hammer to the thumb. People don't cuss like Yosemite Sam as they plummet to the cravasse below. Similarly, (based on footage I've watched) none of the demons in Doom show signs of typical suffering.

But that's the thing. Doom is demons. What about when you're up against real people? This is where context and execution is an issue. The Division was brought up by Higgledy, and the mention of masks and such over enemy faces means identifying features become obscured. Think about how autonomous Storm Troopers seem in Star Wars, and how little guilt you as an audience member feel when Luke shoots one. In fact, isn't it a little odd that a teenage farm boy could kill someone so easily without remorse? But no one thinks about it. Storm Troopers aren't actually people in our minds.

Now imagine if Luke shot a Storm Trooper and the guy fell to the ground screaming, clutching at the wound, asking for help. Suddenly we acknowledge that the Storm Trooper is suffering, which humanizes them.

This isn't exclusive to just people. Some time in the 2016 pile thread Clock mentioned how the longer a hunt goes in Monster Hunter the more you see the monster being wounded, exhausted, and suffering. For some people, this won't bother them so much. Some might even appreciate this detail and how it impacts the battle, creating more of a Monster Hunter Simulator. For those like Clockworkhouse, it made the monster all too real.

Going back to human foes, now let's set it in the modern world. Who is the opponent? Well, this is where things get trickier and trickier. I know I find a mild fascination with the experience of a soldier. Not so much in the equipment or anything, but the Hellish experience of being on the battlefield and how that changes someone, and what sort of strength of will it takes to keep it together. Most modern war games don't go anywhere near this, but there's still a little taste of this fascination to be found. One of the reasons Modern Warfare appeals to me is because of the struggle to save that one survivor of a helicopter crash, only for it all to be undone by a nuke.

But to others this can be considered tasteless. Either you're dishonoring those who have fought and fallen, or you're treating real cultures of real people as some sort of shooting gallery. There's arguments that Modern Warfare could be racist. It could be tasteless. It could be a lot of things. But at the very least, I can fall back to the argument that the moment in question serves as potential criticism on the creators' part of Bush's shock and awe strategy. A reading that is not my own, but one that makes an awful lot of sense in retrospect and in relation to much of the other story. In that regard, the game serves an intellectual purpose beyond "shoot the brown guys".

It's still a fine line, though, and one that could easily become questionable if we lingered on the suffering of the enemies. There's room for authenticity, but the creators of Modern Warfare clearly wanted to deliver a blockbuster experience as well. They're not trying to put you into a battle to disturb you, and by trying to make a hero out of you it would be disturbing to have such suffering acknowledged. But questions and concerns can still be raised.

To me, the worst case scenario for violence in a game is essentially Hatred. Where pain and suffering is lingered on and fetishized. Where it is the point. I can comprehend and acknowledge on an intellectual level what the developer wanted to say, or rather the impact they wanted to have, but I vehemently disagree with their methods and their art. But art can be distasteful, too.

At this point I think I'm at risk for too much naval-gazing, but my ultimate point is that I don't think there's a reason to really feel guilt about the sort of violence found in video games. Just because you find a visceral thrill in sliding a blade into your assassination target doesn't mean you yourself are a disturbed individual. Enjoying taking a chainsaw to a demon's taint isn't necessarily childish just some folks have gotten older and found it less interesting or more disturbing. But at the same time, just because you don't find something objectionable doesn't mean it is not. Once you bring in real world politics and people, things get iffy.

I think that's one of the reasons WWII is so popular, as it is easy to dehumanize Nazis (which is a shame. I'd love a game where you go from playing a Nazi officer tasked with finding Jews hidden in towns and cities to trying to hide a family yourself, but I imagine most people would recoil at the thought). Fantasy and sci-fi can be filled with creatures that are not human at all. By putting CoD games into the future you can remove politics from the equation (sort of (not really)) by having the player shoot evil white guys instead of a real population of people.

...man, that's a lot of thoughts. Sorry for being so lengthy on it. Hope that addresses some of your own thoughts, Greg and Higgledy.

I was jazzed to hear you guys mention the GenCon thread as the thread of the week and that a bunch of you will be going this year. I'm looking forward to putting some in-person faces with the voices that I've been listening to every week for around...uh....8 years? At least 8 years. Cripes.

Great podcast as usual! I loved the shout-out to Dan Carlin's Hardcore History, which I concur is an absolutely stellar piece of work. My favorites are the Wrath of the Khans (Mongol supremacy whose impact is still felt today) and Ghosts of the Ostfront (the description of the bonefields at Stalingrad is simply awesome...)

I think that the violence in videogame discussion was mostly targeted at first person shooters. I was thinking that scale has much to do with our acceptance of violence - for example, EU IV has many incidents of violence occuring but since it is at an operational or strategic level, it becomes more palatable I guess. Or, to bring it around, Commander - The Great War is an excellent strategic/operational videogame on World War One. The violence is muted because of scale obviously, but one may feel a little odd as a research goal for the Entente or Central Powers is chemical weapons for your artillery. These chemical weapons give you an attack modifier when using artillery, so it is definitely 'recommended' research. But.... If you think about your virtual soldiers, it definitely may give you pause. Great subject, however and thanks for the podcast!

I thought the insight from Certis comparing gaming to eating chocolate cake (in the "your emails" section), was excellent.

As recently as this past week, I was ruminating on the fact that getting a new game at, say, age 15, was generally orders of magnitude more exciting than getting a new game now (nearing 40).

Comparing "playing new games" to "eating chocolate cake" does a lot to explain this phenomenon. At this point in my gaming career, I've eaten hundreds of chocolate cakes, so of course sitting down to eat #401 is not quite as exciting as it was to eat, say, #10.

It's still quite enjoyable, though!

ccesarano wrote:

I had a whole post written up about the violence topic, and then the forum logged me out and it was all lost.

If you're on Windows, may I recommend TimeSnapper? It takes a screenshot of your desktop (or active window) every 10 seconds (or any configurable interval). Among other applications, it's saved me on numerous occasions where I had a long post typed up and it got lost.

(I have no relationship to the product or its team; I'm just a longtime user and fan!)

ccesarano wrote:

Think about how autonomous Storm Troopers seem in Star Wars, and how little guilt you as an audience member feel when Luke shoots one. In fact, isn't it a little odd that a teenage farm boy could kill someone so easily without remorse? But no one thinks about it. Storm Troopers aren't actually people in our minds..

I think this is why early in Star Wars 7, it's an effective moment when the Storm Trooper rips off his helmet after a mission and hey, it's an actual person under there! (And probably would have been far more effective if we all didn't know it was coming in advance via trailers and such.)

Yeah, but one of my gripes with The Force Awakens (I'm one of those killjoys that has many) is that the same character having a crisis of conscience is later blowing away his former fellow soldiers while whooping and hollering like it's a roller coaster ride. I call that bad execution and proof that J. J. Abrams is a hack.

But, again, I'm a killjoy.

ccesarano wrote:

Yeah, but one of my gripes with The Force Awakens (I'm one of those killjoys that has many) is that the same character having a crisis of conscience is later blowing away his former fellow soldiers while whooping and hollering like it's a roller coaster ride. I call that bad execution and proof that J. J. Abrams is a hack.

But, again, I'm a killjoy.

Star Wars? Thematically inconsistent?

Aw, g'wan!

Rusty Lake Hotel has me interested. I'd be getting it either for my phone or Steam. I like the convenience of phone gaming, but my fat fingers and the screen size make it kind of a pain sometimes, depending on how well the game is built to handle the phone interface. Anyone know whether this is one of those "sorry, your fingers are too fat for this game, mash keypad to obtain special dialing wand" situations?

Nah, fat fingers would be fine. Its think puzzles.

I don't think I'm a sociopath but... I haven't come across violence in a video game that has had a unexpectedly emotional impact on me that I couldn't dismiss. There are no lack of melodramatic and ham-fisted attempts to use violence for the sake of story engagement, character identification, or shock-value but they're transparent in the attempt and I can't think of many examples that meet the threshold of poignant violence eloquently presented in a AAA medium for violence's sake.

As for VR, I recently had my first foray into virtual reality via the HTC Vive and Valve's 'The Lab - Longbow' and while I understand that some folks are reluctant to bring visceral violence into an immersive space... I CAN'T WAIT! As a D&D DM all I could think about during 'Longbow' was the potential for a Doom-esque VR SnapMap, using licensed WotC content, served up to an adventuring party as turn-based combat.

"This rectangular hallway with a high-peaked ceiling has a cracked flagstone floor and water-stained masonry walls; but you already know that - you're there. A heavy oak door with iron bands at the far end looks to be barred from the other side [perception roll]. You recognize a recessed brick in the wall that hides a mechanism that has opened similar doors in this keep [lock-pick mini-game]. A lone guard dozes in a chair at the head of a T-junction on the other side of the door [sneak check OR attack roll]. [Inevitable Party Bickering] Your barbarian accomplice has NO chill and the blood curdling screams of the "lone guard" draws shouts and rapid footsteps from all directions [roll initiative]."

Thanks for the discussion about Uncharted. I'm glad to hear about the gameplay tweaks. I really enjoyed all the other Uncharteds, but did get fed up with some of the combat and chase scenes in 3. Adding that to my pile of games to play if I ever finish/get burned out on Witcher 3, which might be Holiday 2016 at this rate!

Late to the party as usual! I don't have that much to add. Clearly, context is everything and that seems to be the prevailing sentiment here (if not sorry for my poor skimming efforts).

I progressively lost any appetite for mean-spirited and exploitative violence. Things can get graphic sometimes and I can be okay with it depending on the medium. In games? I'm generally okay. I always think back to the very first Mass Effect novel by Drew Karpyshyn, which was surprisingly violent. That more hard-edged violence would actually be inappropriate (tonally) in the games but in the context of the novels and having my own imagination to guide me, I thought it was a nice touch to go in that direction for the printed word.

Speaking of relevant, Rolling Stone has a new hub called Glixel that is covering video games. They have an Interview with Neil Druckmann, Director of Uncharted 4.

Uncharted 4 has a trophy called "Ludonarrative Dissonance" for killing 1,000 people. That's a reference to the criticism that Nathan Drake doesn't respond emotionally to all the killing he does.

I told all the people on the team, "This is my proudest moment, the fact that I came up with this trophy on this project." We were conscious to have fewer fights, but it came more from a desire to have a different kind of pacing than to answer the "ludonarrative dissonance" argument.

Because we don't buy into it. I've been trying to dissect it. Why is it that Uncharted triggers this argument, when Indiana Jones doesn't? Is it the number? It can't be just the number, because Indiana Jones kills more people than a normal person does. A normal person kills zero people. And Indiana Jones kills a dozen, at least, over the course of several movies. What about Star Wars? Han Solo and Luke Skywalker, are they some sort of serial killers? They laugh off having killed some stormtroopers. And in The Force Awakens, we see that a stormtrooper can actually repent for the person he is and come around, and there are actually real people under those helmets.

It's a stylized reality where the conflicts are lighter, where death doesn't have the same weight.

We're not trying to make a statement about Third World mercenaries, or the toll of having killed hundreds of people in your life.

They discuss story and ending spoilers, so reader beware.

Part of the reason we get away with killing so many Nazis and Stormtroopers is that they are in the uniform of an enemy soldier. There is an understanding in war that each side will kill members of the opposing force without warning. Movies and games are making use of that wartime rule alongside the fact that we've all come to accept German soldiers and Stormtroopers as representations of evil rather than a force made up of individuals with their own loves and loyalties.

It could be argued that the enemies in Uncharted are often identifiable mercenaries who are operating under those same rules of war i.e. they would have no hesitation in killing Drake if they spotted him and, if Drake is to have any chance of staying alive, in a hostile environment where he is heavily out numbered, he needs to do the same.

I really dislike the use of the word murder when describing the combat in Uncharted and Tomb Raider games. It's almost a meme at this point and, for me at least, it's, more often than not, inaccurate. It sometimes feels like 'murder' and 'murderer' are used because calling Drake or Lara killers isn't quite inflammatory enough.

The stylised reality thing is a big part of it as well. Video games have to operate under certain assumptions when it comes to hostile enemy units because of the current limitations of the media. In real life you can't look at another person, even if they are carrying a gun, and pre-emptively shoot or stab them because you had a feeling they would kill you given half the chance but in games there have always been established enemy types who the player can identify on sight as hostile and attack freely.

Without an understanding of enemy types you wouldn't know for certain that that one Murlock you are targeting isn't just out for a stroll, stretching his or her legs before returning home to cook fish stew for the extended family. You couldn't be one hundred percent certain that the Gumba you just dispatched wasn't hastening towards you with hope in it's little heart, keen to come to terms if only you'd given it a chance. We all have that basic understanding of how enemies work in games but, probably because of the realism of the settings, graphics, etc, it is being ignored when it comes to the analysis and criticism of games like Uncharted and The Division.

I feel like the topic section could have gone longer. You joked about not wanting to do ridiculous stabby things in VR, but are there any games/series you are into now that you don't think you'll be able to continue with if they move to VR in the future? You talked about about how the big name games are pulling back from the violence and the realism so as to be palatable for the masses, and on the extreme indie side of 'here's the physical experience of war' with Verdun (iirc?). What about that big heap in between, that might be the next zeitgeist-dictating game, but also be gut-wrecking? I don't know, I think my point collapsed here.

Anyway, here's a blog post that's somewhat related on 'secondary dialogue', that stuff that characters yell out, and how writers have to dance around making the characters feel human.

http://post-hype.blogspot.com.au/201...

I think the thing my brain is dancing around is that games aren't that violent right now, or emotionally violent, because developers are really holding back. What would happen if they didn't? It would create games that few people would be willing to play I guess, but I dunno.