Videogames And Violence
If there’s a language that videogames understand, it’s violence. It is where the medium excels, where it comes into its own. A game without death and destruction is as rare as a tabloid scare story with proper fact-checking, but what are the alternatives to violence, and are developers really doing all they can to exploit them?
As much as games are routinely mocked for their superficial plots and poor dialogue, trying to tell a compelling story in a game is a much more complicated affair than in a movie. Not only does the script have to be good, it has to be exponentially longer, and then there are technical limitations to overcome, such as those that currently leave non-player characters rooted to the spot for the whole game, spouting their few lines of dialogue – or following a purgatorial loop around the same small area.
“The work that Jeff Hawkins is doing at the moment is very interesting,” says Matthies. “He’s creating a theory around the neo-cortex that in the future should mean we can have proper artificially intelligent characters in a game. Although that won’t happen for some time.”
“There is a technological end of it, as there always will be due to the nature of our medium,” Hecker admits. “But I think it’s primarily a design intent problem, where we have to simply try hard to figure out how to do it, and not just fall back on the ‘easy’ stuff like canned cut-scenes splitting up interactive action sequences. I think the very concepts of ‘story’ and ‘character’ are problematic when interactivity is in the mix, but we have to dive headlong into figuring out how interactivity works at an emotional level so we can suss out our strengths and weaknesses. We’re very conservative as an industry from a design standpoint, which is frustrating, given that I think we can be the pre-eminent art and entertainment form of the 21st century if we figure this stuff out.”
The problem with violence in videogames isn’t its mythical ability to corrupt the nation’s youth, but that for so long it has been the only meaningful interaction with the game world. Alternatives have always existed, but only in the last few years have they begun to permeate into the major blockbusters. When they become as much a part of the language of game design as 20-hit combos, the medium will become richer, and offer rewards to those people who see no merit in it now.
“I don’t think it’s a problem, insofar as it is really just a symptom of the immaturity of our form,” says Hecker. “I think violence is a tool that will be in the toolbox, but it will be joined by other actions and emotions, hopefully including love, jealousy, betrayal, and all the other characteristics that make art great and are meaningful to people.
“Violence is meaningful and powerful, except when you use it to the exclusion of all other dramatic and emotional tools; then it just becomes gratuitous and meaningless. Killing your hundredth orc is no different from killing your tenth orc, but killing your spouse in a jealous rage and then having to deal with the consequences is completely different and is the stuff of great art… Uh, fictionally speaking, that is.”
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