Culture Clash

(December 2008)

It's the Allegory, Stupid

Violence is just a proxy for progress

It struck me a few weeks ago, as I patiently listened to someone complain: “All games are the same thing, kill kill kill.”

He kept using that phrase, “kill kill kill,” as though repetition in triplicate would somehow make it so. Though this oratorical technique actually does work, it was driving me crazy. We'll go ahead and set aside LittleBigPlanet and Portal and Madden and all the literally thousands of games that have no killing at all; in fairness to my interlocutor, we were discussing my review of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky, a game that is pretty liberal with the killing.

What struck me was the sudden realization that killing, or violence of any kind, may have been getting a bum rap in games all this time. Raph Koster has discussed the concept in his work, as have others, and we need to bring it into more conscious prominence. Violence in games is a means to an end: i.e., you have to kill all these dudes to get to the next level.

That's the disconnect: it's not about killing all the dudes. It's about getting to the next level. The dudes are just milestones, breadcrumbs along the way. Even so-called “sandbox” games are progress-driven experiences. Gamers (and developers) use and understand recognizable proxies to make the player know that they're on the right track. Thus, as Raph says, a hooker in GTA is not a hooker, it's a recognizable stand-in for a powerup. Similarly, the killing in Clear Sky isn't glorifying murder; it's a proxy that tells the player he's advancing toward a goal. All entertainment media need a mechanism to communicate a feeling of forward momentum or progress. In a book you turn the page and travel a little closer to the end. In a movie you just sit there. Television commercials, while annoying, provide an act-based structure to narratives. But games, with their unique interactive user-guidedness, face a challenge. How do you make sure your player knows he or she is progressing toward a goal?

One of the easiest ways is with violence. Think about it: a player who mows through enemies and keeps finding new ones beyond immediately understands that they're making progress. Plus, violence and iconic imagery thereof are universally recognized and always interpreted the same way. Other messages might get garbled in transmission; remember the early days of the emergence movement, when players simply didn't realize that they had options other than the direct guns-blazing approach? Violence is easy to implement, hard to misunderstand, and time-tested. Unlike complex themes such as estrangement and friendship and ambition, unlike detours and air ducts and alternate routes, unlike negotiation and diplomacy and compromise, violence was communicable using the limited technology in the games of yore. And like it or not, such archaic constraints still influence modern game design. Viewed from this perspective, games cast violence in a very different light: even kill-heavy games like Clear Sky or Gears 2 are just employing violence to signify momentum.

Not all games do it with violence. Like a 21 st century version of Dolphin, Mirror's Edge uses momentum to signify momentum. It's actually pretty revolutionary, since it employs recognizable tropes (first person, platforming, dystopian setting) in unusual ways. Typically in a game like that you'd be killing stuff to move ahead, and they did throw some in to cover their bases, but it wasn't necessary. Similarly, stealth-based games manage progress by rewarding the avoidance of violence. And, obviously, there are the aforementioned thousands of games that have no killing at all and still satisfy the need to communicate progress. Proxy violence isn't the only way to do it, just a common and easy way. Games are not all “kill, kill, kill;” and even the ones that are don't mean what you think they mean.

Another point to keep in mind is the crucial difference between proxy violence and sadistic or self-consumptive violence, where the killing matters more than the progress. Take the whole crop of games since time began, and you'll find those that glorify violence as its own end represent a minute fraction of the whole. And these games – Manhunt , Postal , the tasteless online Flash games that always materialize in the wake of a tragedy – all have one thing in common: they suck. They're simply not fun to play beyond a moment or two. So contrary to popular perception, most violent games are neither senseless nor pointless. In fact, those that are inevitably fail… unless some camera hungry but ill-informed politician parades them on the network news, at which point they become best sellers.

I'm paraphrasing: during the trial in Alice in Wonderland, it was the Mad Hatter, I think, who said, “I don't know how to begin.”

“Begin at the beginning,” replied the Queen of Hearts. “Carry on until you reach the end. Then stop.”

With few exceptions, consumptive media works this way. Games work this way too, but the definition of “end” is different. Even a game with no end in a classic sense has a natural conclusion, and reaching the conclusion of a linear game isn't necessarily the end. Instead, the end of a game is when you carry on until you stop and fail to return. The nebulous concept of beginning and ending in games, which is growing more nebulous as sandboxes and open worlds rise in prominence, calls for mechanisms within the play experience to provide a sense of advancement. Without such mechanisms, play would be a much more globular thing – amorphous; untidy, unwieldy and unsatisfying. Players need to feel like they're making progress, like they're “getting somewhere.” And design theory has evolved a selection of tools to accommodate that. New tools are being tested every day. So it's possible that violence, still by far the most reliable and most easily integrated proxy for advancement, will one day become an antiquated, uncommon mechanism. But until that day comes, remember that game violence has a legitimate place when it's used in this way, and that it can be defended as such.