Published: April 11, 2024
Alternate opening sentence: It’s challenging to phrase my thoughts into concise sentences and though I’m tempted to just write like I speak, it would defeat the point of writing down my ideas in an understandable manner. Over the last few years I’ve been moving away from consuming as much violent media as I used to. There’s plenty of reasons for that: I play less video games in general so naturally I play less violent ones, I tend to seek out more completable stories and many violent games tend to be endlessly replayable, and I’m just older now and less hormone-addled than my teenage self was. It’s hard for me to articulate a clear reason for this behavior to other people. This isn’t necessarily a fault of my own, human motivations are rarely as straightforward as I’d like to believe, but it can be frustrating to explain to someone why I’ve become disillusioned with Dungeons and Dragons, a game I’ve played for half(?) my life, when the only words my monkey-brain can gurgle are “game bad because violence bad”. This is all preamble to say that while considering picking up video game development again (always a bad idea) and pondering what flavor of bloodlust I’d like to bring into the world while still making something “artsy”, I had the following thought. “Why do these people deserve to die?”
Hold onto that thought, dear Reader, for it serves as an anchor point for the madness that follows.
It seems to me like most games offer a similar solution to my perceived problem of “I want to do violence but even simulated violence against innocent people makes me feel bad!”. Think of the generic enemy types of your favorite game that lets you hold a weapon and use it: was it some variation of skeletons, demons, aliens, robots, zombies, or plain old “monster”? If not think of something else, sorry. Point being, this swath of digital baddie looks generally person-shaped, has stuff you need (whether that’s owning or defending loot, or containing wonderful wonderful experience points), and most importantly, they aren’t actually people so it’s okay to kill them. But I do get it, my brain releases the fun chemicals when I get to blow things up with no consequence or guilt! But sometimes even that water gets muddy when you look at it for too long. My favorite example of this is Orcs in old-school DnD (I’m not about to join the “are Orcs problematic” argument here, but for what its worth, yes.) Point being, in the early dungeon crawling days of roleplaying games, Orcs are a fully fledged culture: they have community, they make art and tools, have a language, families, religion, homes, everything that should make you say “yep these are people but green”, BUT every single Orc is evil without fail and they are monsters, not people. You can tell who the monsters are because they have a little health bar above their head. Monsters make their homes underground which is why its okay to take their belongings.
Maybe the question I should be asking myself is “When is violence justified?”, like what games let you cut down hordes of enemies that are explicitly free-willed human beings? Most examples that come to my mind are a mix between titles where all the violence is abstract/cartoony/everyone-is-crazy such as Borderlands, or “your character is an Evil Dude so we the game devs know that this is ‘bad’ “ like [I’ll add an example later but you know the type]. Only “realistic” game I can think of where doing violence is cool and good is Wolfenstein because shooting nazis is badass. Global politics is complicated and any other realistic or “historical” game about killing usually has to smooth out a few edges to maintain the illusion that your character and their cause is totally justified in their conflict and not at all motivated by taking the cool shit their enemy has (even if this is the motivation for the player to continue the game).
To address the original thought of “why do these people deserve to die?” the answer has always been and will continue to be “they don’t”. The heart of the power fantasy/wish fuffillment isn’t (just) that you can kill people, take their stuff, and grow stronger. It’s that you can do all that and it will be okay, that it was the right thing to do all along. It’s like wanting ice cream that is delicious, has no calories, and contains all the vitamins you’d normally get from eating vegetables. I don’t expect that you’ll read this and suddenly hate all of your favorite media, nor is this a “video games cause violence” argument. Being rasied on violent media influences your perception of violence the same way that going to church every sunday since you were born influences your opinion on religion. Be critical of the world around you, ask yourself why you like things. Do something unexpected