Giving Violence Weight

If I was so pretentious as to try and ascribe themes to my random musings – and believe me, I am– then I’d have to say a growing theme in 2013 for me has been giving game violence weight.

No, wait! Come back! I’m not going to go all Jack Thompson on you!

Let’s be clear: this isn’t some moral objection to violent content. For the storyteller – and any game designer is a storyteller, whether or not plot becomes a strong element of the game – violence is a tool like any other. (Fictional) violence can be thrilling, harrowing, righteous, cruel, vicious, traumatic, self-destructive or futile, and all of these are well and good.

The one thing it shouldn’t be is filler.

And yet in many cases, that’s precisely what it is: rote, something included for the sake of genre or market appeal, detached from the story being told. Violence should engage the player with the narrative, but all too often all it does is occupy them between significant intervals.

Telling a story through media is about determining the way your audience consumes your work – and thus, your desired message. The novelist’s tools to create narrative are linguistic and literary – word choice, sentence and paragraph flow, imagery and dialogue. The filmmaker replaces word choice and flow with scene direction, cinematographic tricks and soundtrack.

While the game designer uses elements from both novelist’s and filmmaker’s tool kits, their unique tools rely on a game’s interactive qualities. It’s understandable that games want to be more like films and television – these are our chief visual mediums, with much to teach us. Developers still have a long way to go in learning from film and television. But that doesn’t mean they should neglect the most important participant in any game: the player themselves.

Whatever mechanism the player is given to interact with the game is automatically the most important part of that game. If you spend hours shooting enemies in battle, that game is a shooter, whether or not the moments when the game goes into Cutscene Mode it becomes the mournful tale of your isolated and innocent companion. Players are protagonists by default; they are the other half of the game conversation, and as is well known what’s heard is more important than what’s said.

It’s important, too, to separate the player from the protagonist. The player is the leading role; they drive the plot towards its conclusion. The protagonist is the lead figure of that story, who may or may not be the individual the player controls.  (That said, making your player an Ishmael is a chancy decision.) But whether or not the player is also the protagonist, their actions must have narrative consequence; the player should not think of themselves as a mere observer.

Violent action is no different.

A boss fight or dramatic setpiece is the game’s Showstopper Number, the Big Monologue, the emotional climax. It’s the point where the player’s participation and focus are most called-for. A player will never be more involved than the time they are essential to success. Separating that moment from story progression turns the player from actor into extra.

Violence sells. Threats to life and limb are primal conflicts with direct solutions and built-in drama. More to the point, the mechanics that simulate violence are primary concerns in many mainstream titles, and have been from gaming’s very beginning. In fact, it’s so culturally ingrained that non-violent games are often derided or condemned to niche status, even though a number of those non-violent games, such as The Sims, have positively enormous market share.

Now, as the medium grows and evolves, a number of developers want to tell deeper and more nuanced stories. And of course not all these have much interest in engaging with violence as a central theme; why should they? Most people aren’t going to relate to a professional killer or a larger-than-life superhero. In fact, gaming’s preoccupation with violence (though not especially unusual) is regularly criticized as proof that the medium cannot evolve beyond juvenile fantasies.

There are nonviolent or less-violent games, of course, some very highly acclaimed. But as mentioned above, violence is primal; it grabs attention even when it shouldn’t. A conversation might or might not grab your notice, but people jump at explosions and gunshots regardless of whether they know who’s involved.

So what’s a modern developer of a AAA title to do? Their wires cross; they may want to tell a cerebral, non-violent tale, but of course no matter how compelling that story may be once your sale is made, selling it in the first place is going to be harder. And of course there’s the legacy issue: games are so defined by competition and challenge (often equated with violence) that most of our existing genres are defined by it, built on it.

All too often, they try to have it both ways. Developers and publishers include violence de rigeur, something to pull the groundlings in regardless of whether it’s suitable. It’s proverbial, after all, that many people don’t play games for their stories.) And you don’t construct mechanical systems without using them. The more fleshed-out your de rigeur combat system, relative to other features, the more you claim parts of the player’s headspace.

By contrast, traditional cutscenes require no input from the player. Even quick-time events are a flawed way to maintain player focus. Therefore, the cutscene must follow naturally from the gameplay before it; the player needs to be eased smoothly from participant to audience and back again. A game that pulls out violence but then spends all of its Narrative Time denying (or worse yet, not even acknowledging) that violence is a point of cognitive dissonance; it divorces player agency from narrative result.

Games aren’t criticized for being violent. No one is especially horrified by the hardscrabble conflict of The Last of Us, because the violence fit the narrative at hand. They’re criticized for being mindlessly violent – for violence that serves only as literary junk food, a time-waster, an occupying bit of filler between the points where Important Things Happen.

Mechanics equal participation, and games are a participatory medium. Your player consumes even as they interact. Without this two-way street of input, a game is no game; it’s a movie you have to keep pushing buttons on the DVD to keep running.