Why We're Wrong About Violence In Games

for almost as long as videogames have existed there's been an ongoing conversation about the nature of violence as it relates to the art form is Call of Duty turning your child into a serial killer are you a bad person for getting all your chumps killed in Douglass dungeon and is it ethically wrong to simulate large-scale murder for fun the answer to these questions is probably not and that's a little bit annoying because the neverending debate about the effects of violence in video games overshadows are much more interesting and much less clear-cut question what's the difference between violent and nonviolent games now don't get me wrong I love gory high-octane murder fests like battle Royales genocide all strategy games RPGs or your murder piles of goblins the works but even though these games often differ mechanically and are played very differently there's something about violent games that feels I don't know a little bit samey it seems like triple-a devs in particular are really obsessed with getting place to experience that adrenaline rush of conquest in any way they can and over time I found myself becoming less and less receptive to that feeling even in otherwise really good games there's only so many times I could annihilate my enemies because I'm just so amazing at video games before I get bored you know and that's why it's so great to switch gears and play totally nonviolent peaceful chill games is a nice change of pace stuff like Minecraft stardew valley or maybe a puzzle game like return to the o'biden or even visual novels like Phoenix right hang on a sec you you see in this all these games have significant elements of violence or killing minecraft has Zomba 'ls stardew hazards board line mandatory monster mines and the O burden and Phoenix Wright might not have combat mechanics but they're still centered around grisly murders all of these games have appeared on several top non violent games lists even though that's evidently not true and yet even excepting that these games are totally and to a degree inherently violent that doesn't stop them from feeling like significantly different experiences from what we normally consider violent games even if they deal with all of the same concepts which of course begs the question if it's not violence that makes violent games feel curse say me then what the hell does it took me months to finally figure out some sort of answers to that question and it wasn't until I replayed a very special game called Wonder song that I finally managed to work it out and my conclusion is that we shouldn't be talking about the difference between violent and nonviolent games at all because the distinction is basically pretty arbitrary and it distracts through a much more important issue but before I can explain myself we've got to go right down to conceptual bedrock and figure out how a story works and why violence seems to pop up all over the place trust me it'll make sense in a bit as literally any literature course will teach you the foundational element of any and all stories is some sort of conflict now for reasons that will become apparent later I'm not gonna use that word going forwards instead we'll say that all stories need some sort of central struggle in most if not all narratives both the characters within the story and the audience outside it are confronted with new situations and ideas they'll have to reconcile with or overcome causing them to grow as a person or look at the world differently it's this interplay between people beliefs and concepts the drives change and ultimately creates tension a dramatic arc external and internal dialogue as well as basically anything else to constitutes our idea of a narrative to use a boring example Luke Skywalker's journey to become a Jedi Knight over three movies wouldn't be interesting to the viewer nor would it carry any emotional weight if he didn't have to undergo some sort of difficulty and change as a person to get there if he was just always talented and heroic and a great leader then it would have been much more difficult to get invested in and enjoy his story the same is true for video games games are built around giving players opportunities to confront and learn from new systems and ideas before having our knowledge and skills tested you start off as a fresh-faced noob you get challenged by the game learn to overcome those obstacles and come out the other side better in the game and having had fun doing so this is a cycle that repeats over and over in basically all games from mastering the specifics of gunplay and some of our apex legends the leveling up in an RPG by killing tougher and tougher baddies or even by learning how to build your army in an RTS the best destroy your enemies what you might have noticed here is that all these pretty classic examples are inherently violent why well that's because violence is somewhat unsurprisingly a very easy and very useful way to express a struggle in a way that all players can immediately understand and empathize with doom doesn't need to go through the effort of explaining what these imps want why you're supposed to hate them or how you're gonna deal with them because it doesn't have to you've got a shotgun these weird-looking dudes are trying to kill you you don't want to die and the only way together to not kill you is they get them first it's a really easy struggle that feels good to triumph over and also teach you what doom is all about even wonder song a game all about fixing people's problems with music that I'll get back to you later uses violent themes in this tutorial very early on you get to pick up this cool sword and you'll quickly realize that you can use your mouse to swing it around it isn't until the bard messes up and drops the sword that you realize you've inadvertently learned how to sing a control scheme that would have been much harder to convey without the more obvious physicality of swordplay okay so you probably get the violence is a common theme in media from Hamlet to the Avengers because it's an easy conflict to portray and everyone's gonna empathize with it because no one likes dying but why go through the effort of explaining why violence is so popular if I don't think violence is what's making a lot of mainstream games feel the same well that's because I don't want to give the impression that we should just make all games violent because it's easy game should absolutely get it to a variety of tastes but I also need to make it clear the games containing violet themes and games that feel violet to play aren't always the same as we've seen violence can be used in games that feel quite chill down relaxing and adrenaline pumping combative games can be entirely pacifistic we need to be able to distinguish aesthetic from how we approach and engage with games if we're gonna get to the bottom of this burnout feeling the gory doom and the lovely lovely planet both focus on fast-paced stressful shooting action the brutal Viking battles of north guard see you driving your enemies off an uncharted island with force but the nonviolent offshore trading company's economic walls on no less cutthroat and end with the same result iconic lasts might make a really big point of using non-lethal weaponry but it still plays like an inferior cloud of metroid of violets and all the way we approach and play these games often feels much more similar than their mechanics would imply they all have a central struggle that focuses on you the players battle for supremacy the desire to crush your enemies see them driven before you and hear the lamentations of people complaining about outdated gender stereotypes whilst violence is a huge and inescapable feature of storytelling in general this aggressive combative focus in games is unique and stems back to a variety of sources from Nintendo marketing exclusively to boys in the 80s to high school chasing and tabletop judging crawlers being a foundational element of the earliest games to the simple capitalistic reason that people like power trips where the violent or nonviolent the supremacist approach defines too many games that count particularly among triple-a developers and it leads that feeling of emotional burnout I was talking about earlier as well as more worryingly giving the impression that this is all games have to offer even as the big shots of wised up to the demand for less gory games this focus on winning and enforcing your will over others still remains the pacifist debate gameplay in say Grif lands a roguelike cult game is very clearly nonviolent in nature however it still built around a fight and a conquering Victor you're still using attacks reduce the HP and trying to counter your enemies moves it's just that the cards now have different names and a little picture of an alien shouting instead of like a fist or something the underlying mechanics and more importantly the thought processes of play goes through when playing both the diplomatic combat and the regular combat are fundamentally the same even when what you're doing isn't always violent this phenomenon actually reminds me of a really obscure game I once got the chance to play as a lava called Super 3d Noah's Ark it was essentially a reskin of Wolfenstein 3d made by a Christian company to act as an alternative to Wolfenstein gory Nazi bashing by replacing the killing with slingshots that knock enemies out and the subhuman fascist animals with regular grumpy animals the game is obviously a little bit lame but at the end of the day you're still basically playing Wolfenstein and Wolfenstein is still a really fun adrenaline pounding shooter the coating on top doesn't change that this of course isn't to say the combative games are bad they're not I love me some Dark Souls some apex legends and I've even been known to dabble in a bit of ex-con these kinds of games are great at testing on low-level tactical decision-making the struggle for victory itself could be really fun and the high levels of tension and action these games operate under leads to some great cathartic experiences however games have more to offer and to reduce an entire medium down into a single kind of fun that really isn't good for anyone I'd argue that instead of judging games by whether they have bloodshed or not we should instead judge them by what kind of play experience they're creating conflict a word that naturally implies violence and isn't really conducive to my point here which is why I use the word struggle in the first place isn't the only thing you can build the game's internal narrative around and much like how combat focus games excel in particular areas games with the different source of struggle also bring their own unique advantages that feel much fresher and more interesting to play than the same systems of the different coat of paint by building games around sources of struggle that don't involve a need to beat your enemies it allows us to create experiences that feel completely different to engage with for example take the abstract puzzle game good nog which sees you trying to fix and reactivate these giant Robo heads by fiddling around with their weird mechanisms Kanak struggle is at its core an informational one to begin with each giant head seems impossibly complex with a bunch of different strange little levers dials and displays they don't seem to be organized logically or working the way you'd expect like this weird sonar fish and this crap thing and this wheel you can't spin it's really daunting slowly but surely they're experimenting and playing around you'll discover and piece together the robot systems this crab thing is a pump this fish is needed to show an image of what your little diver friend is looking at and the life ring is a key part of the final activation stage each head is this amazingly tactile journey from complete confusion to total understanding and this sort of experience just wouldn't be possible in a game built around combative gameplay combat strengths lie in the fact that it's physical and intuitive and so actions without obvious consequences and a lack of immediate objectives would lead to unsatisfying frustrating gameplay but here if Tony works another example of a different kind of struggle would be one that's spatial in nature there's something you need to go be done' where it is how to get there or what kind of obstacles you'll need to overcome a great recent example with this would be celeste a platformer that tells the story of Madeline a young woman suffering for anxiety and depression and her journey to climb this big old mountain Celeste is a very tricky game burn like other super hard stuff there focuses on conquest the world here isn't your opponent the key to success is to understand and master how the mechanics work and how mad and fits into them with skilled service players which is to say not me dancing through the levels in perfect harmony where everything is going on even in the few levels with enemies the goal isn't to kill them but to use them to your advantage by focusing the challenge of platformers or exploration focus games like Abzu internally on the players own sense of mastery and understanding rather than externally onto the world in the form of something to compete with they create much more collaborative almost of Zen experiences that can be relaxing and energizing to play sometimes in spite of their difficulty even in many games with much more of a combat focus like Metroid failures or Zelda the fund of mentally mapping the dungeons and areas you find yourself in is often much more compelling than the combat encounters they contain many games with a logistical source of struggle where the fun comes from massing understanding of many interlocking systems and mechanics before making a plan to capitalize on this knowledge or explicitly violent but that doesn't really matter anno 1800 or in fact any V anno games have their fair share of piracy player versus player warfare and hand-wavy reasons while the slaughter of indigenous people happens off screen but ultimately these themes are there to compromise the city building a nose gameplay is much more focused on the constant challenge of placing buildings correctly planning out your expansions and making sure all the results you need are getting produced in the right quantities to make people happy the military stuff is just there to add some extra pressure and opportunity for risk-taking into the equation so you can't follow the exact same blueprint every time the key here is that I think violence itself and even combat based gameplay aren't wants stifling mainstream games but instead the focus on a combative style of play that brings me on to wonder song the game that inspired this whole video on the song a game I hadn't finished and kind of under sold in my best games of 2018 list is a really special game that's fundamentally a meta analysis of how video games approach conflict you play as this cube bard guy who really wants to be a legendary hero but he hates violence and everyone thinks he's weird however rather than just having you fight monsters with the power of music or avoiding the issue of bad guys entirely wander song come is to the theme it's structured like a real adventure game it has boss fights baddies and theme dungeons all classic video game situations that be resolved with a good old-fashioned fight except here that's not the case instead of solving these problems at the tip of a sword you use your voice you talk to people you translate for those who can't speak for themselves and you connect with the world and get it to help you instead of treating the environment like an oppositional force playing one a song is such a wicked experience it takes played out tropi scenarios and puts a totally fresh spin on them opening your eyes to the fact that we've been trained to interact with and think about game worlds in a very narrow way small spoiler warning here I'm not going to go into any plot details but the character I want to talk about appears like 40% of the way through the game and could kind of be considered a spoiler in of herself so just a heads up they're highly recommend playing the game first and if you don't to see anything I'm about to talk about then skip to this timestamp all right see you in like a minute this is reflected in the character of Audrey who I won't go into too much detail on for spoilery reasons but she's a real hero she has the magic sword you couldn't wield at the starter game she slays bad guys people love her and she's fighting for the greater good of the world not some silly personal quest normally she'd be the good guy but in want a song by changing almost nothing about her characterization relative to how she'd be betrayed in other games Audrey becomes a villain she sees the world simplistically as us-versus-them uses force to solve her problems when she can't immediately get what she wants and has been rewarded and praised for fighting so much that she literally can't comprehend any other way of looking at the world when all you've got is a magic sword everything starts to look like a monster undertale a game I've already covered at length also does this you can play the game like a normal RPG and have a bad time slowly narrowing your perspective down until other points of view stop being an option or you can find a different empathetic source oh struggle with the real challenges in understanding what each of the monsters want and helping them to be a piece of themselves as part of a much more fun game both of these titles use cosmetically violent gameplay with enemies bosses and battles to make a much more nuanced point about how we perceive the games were playing and what effect that can have over time and really that's the important point here whether you prefer violent games or non violent ones that doesn't really matter and to be honest neither does your preference for what struggle you like seeing in video games combative logistical empathetic whatever it doesn't matter however we need to be aware of what aren't you focus on a particular kind of game does to our perception of the medium over time a singular focus and combative games has warped the industry's discourse to focus on violence when really there's far more interesting and important things to be talking about the more different kinds of games that get made and the more different kinds of games that get played the more balanced of a viewpoint will have and will be better able to appreciate new and interesting stuff the difficulty is gonna be in breaking out the kind of rut we're in right now and that work has got to start with you so that next time you're feeling burnt out and like you've seen all games have to offer it might actually just be because you've been playing games with the same source of struggle without really realizing and if you have a felt this way I highly recommend going and playing something weird and new with a different perspective to shake things up and make you appreciate games all over again because that is what works for me alternatively that feeling might be lupus you never know you can't be sure it's probably not it's probably that video game thing I was on about but it might be it might be lupus go and see a doctor just in case hello hello and thanks for watching I have a lot of stuff to talk about in this little credit sections so I'm gonna go super fast okay first up sorry for this video being a little bit late relative to my usual slowness but as you can see it's a pretty long one so unfortunately that means it's gonna take longer to make but I did want to do this kind of complicated topic just this so there you go next my recommendation for a cool YouTube channel you should subscribe to is rush Garcia a very talented remix channel that is gaming and anime tunes in this epic orchestral style it's awesome please go and give them a listen and hopefully enjoy it as much as I do also I've got to give a very special thank you to my top ten Donna mysterious benefactors on patreon who are Alex the launch a siren al no 94 Baxter he'll bryan atari ani calvin han colin her man chill daniel matches dirk a jam karen bailed evey feat salaat Jessi Rhine Jonathan Kristen's Joshua Binswanger Lieberman Lucas Lac lunar Eagle 1986 mace window 54 Madhu ki Patrick Romberg Philby the bill be raised dad Samuel Vander Plaats strategy in Ultima yerin mirin and Chao but wait a minute it turns out that I've got to $10 patrons who've been on the list for like four months each who somehow have slipped through the cracks I could just plain patreon here but instead I'll make it up to you by saying your names like eight times each which is like roughly the amount of videos you're probably missed okay there's our sound good all right phony homeless phony homeless phony homeless 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Channel: Adam Millard - The Architect of Games

Views: 624,517

Rating: 4.9027624 out of 5

Keywords: Architect, Adam, Adam Millard, Architect of Games, AoG, Review, Analysis, Critique, Video Essay, Games, Gaming, Video Games, PC Gaming, Gamer, Wandersong, Gnog, Apex Legends, Anno 1800, DOOM, metroid, Wolfenstein, Steamworld Quest, Undertale, Griftlands, Epic Store

Id: cYnylXvk65s

Length: 19min 19sec (1159 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 28 2019