Violence Revisited
The good guy is the one who isn't getting choked to death.
Video games’ stories – and the characters who drive them –
have changed a lot in the past ten years. When I was in middle and high school,
many popular video game protagonists were basically anonymous. Probably three
quarters of the first person shooters that came out during my adolescence
featured gruff, stereotypically angry space marines as their protagonists –
characters who amounted to little more than an empty vessel to hold a gun and
appear in cutscenes, most of which involved helicopter crashes.*
*For those of you who don’t know, a tried and true rule of
video gaming is that when your character gets on a helicopter, that
motherfucker is going to crash. I have probably boarded 100,000 virtual
helicopters in 16 years of gaming; maybe four of them have landed safely.
Video games’ stories have changed a lot since then. The core
audience for video games has grown up, and games have with them. In the past
year alone I’ve played several video games that have had stronger stories and greater
emotional impact than a number of movies I’ve seen, along with bar none some of
the finest helicopter crashes yet.
The Last Of Us is
one such game. It’s a tightly written, emotionally complex story, equal parts Children of Men and The Road, in which you play a middle aged smuggler with a shady
past who is forced to escort a teenaged girl across the postapocalyptic United
States. Along the way you’ll have to contend with hideous monsters – the
mutated remains of humans infected with a parasitic fungus that caused the
apocalypse 20 years before – as well as predatory human scavengers.
The "violence is not the answer" crowd doesn't have an answer for this situation.
The story of the smuggler and the girl, as well as the
people they meet along the way, is powerful and heart wrenching. The
performances are incredible and the atmosphere is spot on. It’s the sort of
experience that leaves you emotionally exhausted when you stop playing for the
day. After the credits rolled, I took a look at the statistics the game had
recorded for me and discovered that my aging, emotionally conflicted smuggler
had killed 716 people over the course of his trip across the country.
Tomb Raider is a
story about a young woman empowering herself by killing several hundred heavily
armed pirates. In Red Dead Redemption
you play as a former outlaw who kills several hundred people in a quest to
clear his name and leave his violent past behind. Bioshock Infinite is a game about love, loss, redemption, power,
and self determination where it’s possible to sic a bunch of bloodthirsty crows
on someone, set him on fire as they peck at his flesh, and chop his flaming
head off.
We’ve reached the point where video games have the power to
create protagonists that are every bit as compelling, believable, and
empathetic as their onscreen counterparts. Recently, though, members of the
gaming media have begun to point out that this newfound emotional complexity is
undercut by the fact that video game protagonists, as a rule, tend to kill hundreds and hundreds of people in their adventures. It creates a sort of
cognitive dissonance, because you’re basically playing as a really empathetic
mass murderer.
Before you feel too sorry for these guys, remember that the enemies in BioShock Infinite are like Sean Hannity-level racist, so it's kind of okay.
In its defense, The
Last Of Us is a game about survival at all costs. Every one of the 716
brutal stranglings, beatings, stabbings, and shootings I committed was an act
of desperation where the only alternative was the death of my character and the
young girl he was tasked to protect. Because of that it was easy for me to
forget that I had killed the equivalent of my high school graduating class two
times over.
The concern I’m seeing from gaming journalists isn’t that violence
is present in games; it’s that gaming as a medium is being held back by a
20-year-old game mechanic which dictates that your progress through the story
is governed by how many people you can kill. They feel that video games’ sheer
body count is the only thing keeping them from becoming more like movies and
achieving that level of legitimacy. That's a valid concern, and I really love that this is a discussion people are having.
The thing is, while video games have taken a lot of
storytelling and thematic cues from movies for practically the entirety of the
industry’s existence, they’re still video games – and video games have their
own unique set of tropes and conventions to abide by.
Not all tropes are good tropes.
No critic complained that Goodfellas wasn’t split up into a few dozen chapters, nobody said The Catcher In The Rye should have been
written in rhythmic, rhyming verse, and nobody but me thinks that the collected works of Emily Dickenson could be improved by a helicopter crash. This
is because these are all different storytelling mediums, each of which plays by
its own distinct set of rules.
Video games are the only storytelling medium (short of the well respected “choose your own adventure” literary genre) that you can interact with.
To keep players interested, developers have to give them a constant stream of
problems to solve as they work through the story. Based on sales figures,
the most popular problem to solve is, “Here are people. Kill them.”
If we’re going to compare modern video games to movies, why don’t
we compare them to musicals? Because that’s their closest relative, if you ask
me. Musicals tell a story with frequent breaks for everybody to start singing
and dancing; video games tell a story with frequent breaks for everybody to start
killing each other. That doesn’t make Singin’
In The Rain any less legitimate a work of art than Slaughterhouse-Five, and it doesn’t make The Last Of Us any less legitimate than any Academy Award-caliber movie.
For better or for worse, people killing each other is good entertainment. You
personally might not agree, but the vast majority of people who have lived
certainly do. Odysseus killed more people in his adventures than Lara Croft, Bioshock's Booker DeWitt, or Joel the smuggler in The Last Of Us – and he
did it without the help of guns, crows, or a single crashing helicopter.
Truman Capps almost exclusively plays big budget shooters, which is why there is no mention here of the scores of indie and Nintendo games that have been extremely successful without violence.