
Why So Few Violent Games? - Impossible
http://ludusnovus.net/2011/08/15/why-so-few-violent-games/
======
emsy
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.

~~~
manachar
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.

~~~
emsy
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-...](http://www.gonintendo.com/s/208519-miyamoto-on-pikmin-3-and-
death-ds-3ds-experiments-inspiration-and-a-4th-playable-character)

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mark_l_watson
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.

~~~
loup-vaillant
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?

~~~
cwyers
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.

~~~
loup-vaillant
Actually, I choose to name that one precisely because of its violence.
Hopefully helps make my point.

I would have liked to select another name for its underlying mechanics, but
I'm not knowledgeable enough.

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aidenn0
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_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trust_%26_Betrayal:_The_Legacy_of_Siboot)

~~~
ripter
Where can we play it? Wikipedia just describes it.

~~~
aidenn0
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](http://www.erasmatazz.com/library/source-code/index.html)

------
saraid216
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.

~~~
cwyers
"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.

~~~
SAI_Peregrinus
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.

~~~
saraid216
What kind of gameplay covers the "touching story"? Who do you play? How do you
interact with others, mechanically? Do you have any real say in the outcome of
the story?

I mean, if you had cited Deus Ex or Witcher, you _might_ have something,
but... what you described doesn't sound like anything more than a slightly
non-linear book to read.

------
hawkharris
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
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.

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

------
Rangi42
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](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...](http://blog.codecombat.com/a-31-trillion-390-billion-statement-
programming-war-between-545-wizards)) 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
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.

------
omgtehblackbloc
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.

------
jheriko
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.

~~~
hcarvalhoalves
I'm sure the author is being sarcastic.

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

~~~
cwyers
And the two responses to my comment so far perfectly illustrate my confusion,
I think:

> I believe his point is that we have violent games because it's a no-brainer.
> You don't have to be creative, you don't have to sweat to find an appealing
> game mechanic, and it sells.

AND

> All of the things mentioned in the article have been justifications used to
> explain why games about social dynamics haven't happened.

Is the author's premise that games focused on social dynamics are just as easy
to make as games focused on violence, and that we have to back-fit
justifications to fit it? Or is it that games focused on social dynamics
really are harder?

------
adrusi
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.

------
Chattered
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.

~~~
10098
> 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 :)

------
tn13
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.

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

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Xlab
Gotta be fixed
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tff9eN7XAI](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tff9eN7XAI)

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topherreynoso
Jonathan Swift is slow-clapping somewhere.

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igl
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.

~~~
10098
whoosh

