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No Comments There was such a guy – Jack Thompson, who, like our “beloved” State Duma, was guided in everything by only two principles – “prohibit” and “keep out”. Everyone knows that this symbol of puritanical hope butted heads with GTA, Doom, Mortal Kombat for a long time, trying to ban these games for, in his opinion, excessive violence.
What if Thompson was right?? Not in terms of the fact that all children turn into maniacs after Doom, but in terms of the fact that there is really a lot of violence in games, to which there is practically no alternative? Don’t get me wrong, I don’t support the idea of banning everything that doesn’t fit moral standards. Banning is generally idiotic, forget this word! At best, bans create the Streisand effect; they simply don’t work. I’m talking about the fact that we kill people in games and sometimes we don’t even think that there is another way.
Breathedeep1y’s blog prompted me to think about this, for which I thank him very much.
And let’s get one thing straight right away. I don’t think violence in games is something terrible. This is a tool that most often helps achieve some goal. Scare the player, as in Dead Space. Or give him a feeling of incredible cool, as in Doom. Or make him feel the protagonist’s despair, like in that very scene in Heavy Rain. Or stick it in a samurai’s skin Ghost of Tsushima, for whom the sword is an integral part of his life and culture.
And in Mortal Kombat violence is a way to piss off a friend who couldn’t knock out a kombucha as quickly as you. Moreover, what is important, the violence there is exaggerated and cartoonish, so you don’t take it seriously. How we don’t take it seriously when something like this happened to Tom:
We all understand that Tom is a cartoon, for him this is an ordinary Tuesday. And in MK the perception of violence is all the same, plus or minus.
I take such things calmly. I consider violence unjustified in cases where the authors show it naturalistically and revel in cruelty. A striking example is Manhunt. A game about a fanatic who extremely cruelly kills the same fanatics. Even as a child, I didn’t understand the joke of these bloodthirsty dances.
I often heard that everyone loved GTA as a child because they could cause mayhem in the streets. Even Bob Kelso in my favorite TV series "Scrubs" describes GTA as a game where "you can steal cars and run over whores".
And the funny thing is that this is not an exaggeration. That’s pretty much how people perceive it. Here is the post in "Mail Replies".ru", which I came across while preparing this blog. The girl describes GTA as a game where you can "steal cars, beat people and do whatever you want".
I think that the reason for the wild popularity of GTA was precisely because people were freed from the shackles of morality and criminal law.
However, when playing GTA, I always tried to avoid cars and passers-by and not kill in vain. What probably played a role here is that I, in principle, love simulation (within reason, of course) and it’s more interesting for me to immerse myself in the world rather than cause chaos. But in fact, many gamers in games try not to kill where possible. And the developers see it.
One of the first to see this was Hideo Kojima, who is considered to have invented the genre of stealth games. Yes, today stealth comes down to the same murders, but no longer in open confrontation, but through secrecy. But the original idea of the first Metal Gears was to outflank the enemy, not kill them. And many games today, one way or another, consciously or unconsciously, try to set the player on the path of a pacifist.
Let’s look at examples and ways to encourage a player to show mercy.
As I already said, “ban” is the dumbest tool for manipulating human behavior, so it almost never works in games and causes irritation. The most striking example – Dishonored. The authors of this series of games introduced punishment for murder, explaining this by the fact that the world changes depending on the actions of the player. The more murders, the more corpses. More corpses – more corpse rats. More corpse rats – more mourners (local equivalent of zombies). And this system would work if not for two but.
Firstly, the punishment for murder looks like a form of mockery, since the developers themselves have given us a large set of abilities and tools that allow us to beautifully, effectively and inventively destroy enemies. It’s like giving a child a marshmallow but not eating it. Secondly, this will sound cruel, but many enemies in Dishonored deserve to die.
Dishonored 2 in the first mission in Karnak you can hear the sermon of the caretakers on the street. They say that they found a girl who was playing in the basement with the Alien amulets they found (according to the lore of the game, superstitious sailors whittled runes and amulets from whale bone, considering them protective amulets; the Abbey of Everyman considered this to be heresy). As a result, the child was interrogated with passion and forced to admit that she worshiped the Abyss, and then they put her in a steel cage and drowned her in the river. This is how, pray tell, one can empathize with such scum? In principle, I can’t stand fanatics, but here they also show me how frostbitten they are, and then the game pretends to be a Buddhist and begins to teach the player mercy.
As a result, the ban system in Dishonored doesn’t work in the sense that it doesn’t make the player realize the value of life.
The moral system works in much the same way Metro Last Light. If we spare enemies, we gain conditional morality points, thanks to which we can get a good ending. I never got the good ending because there is a Fourth Reich station in the game. The first thing you see when you get there is the Nazis executing a prisoner with a shot in the head because his skull shape is wrong. And then you see them forcing people into cages and turning on poison gas that kills all the prisoners if any of them try to escape. And these are the people you offer me to spare, game?
Another game also uses the method of punishment for murder, but it works better there. In Death Stranding killing a person leads to a big explosion and the appearance of new creatures. However, the game has enough non-lethal weapons that act exactly the same as lethal ones, but do not kill. So the punishment for murder is not at all annoying.
By and large, this is still the same punishment for murder, but I still decided to highlight it in a separate paragraph. The world reacts to your actions Dishonored – this is too abstract an idea. But the direct cause-and-effect relationship between the player’s actions and their results is more interesting. A scene from the same thing comes to mind Metro Last Light. So, we have a small room where the enemy is located. There is also a telephone on which they constantly call him, checking whether he is there or not. If you kill or knock out an enemy, he will not be able to answer the call, and then the enemies will send a patrol to check what happened. Therefore, it is more profitable for the player to simply bypass the enemy and not touch him.
IN Desperados 3 And Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun some opponents interact with each other. And if you kill one of them, the second will start looking for the missing partner, which makes killing unprofitable.
Well, in principle, this tactic works in any game where there is a very strong opponent. For example Librarians in Metro 2033 or night hunters in Dying light. It’s easier for you not to mess with these ghouls, since it’s far from certain that you will defeat them.
A series Deus Ex directly rewarded the player for being a pacifist. In the very first part, opponents appeared – men in black. If you knock them out, you can pick up valuable loot from them, and if you kill them, their bodies explode, and you are left with nothing. In restart Deus Ex: Human Revolution you were very generously given exp for the “Ghost”.
Perhaps one of the most effective ways to teach a player to love his neighbor is to touch his ego. In the series Hitman we are encouraged not to kill anyone other than the target. The cleaner your work, the higher the rating. A high rating means extra money (Blood Money) and + 500 to HR. If a player receives a lower rating, he immediately has the thought: “That is, how come I’m not a silent assassin?! I will now restart the mission and prove to all of you that I am a true professional!".
Something similar could be observed in the special forces simulator SWAT or its indie clone Police Stories. Killing civilians caught in the crosshairs lowered the rating. And in principle, there is nothing wrong with this, but the player will constantly be bothered by the thought that he did not approach the task professionally enough. And in principle, this is also a completely working way to teach humanism. If not through conscience, then at least through ego.
Most of us have some degree of empathy. Almost all of us are capable of compassion – and this is perhaps the most valuable quality of a person. Making the killer see the victim not just as a piece of meat, but as a person is one way to stop him. Remember the scene from The Silence of the Lambs when Senator Ruth Martin recorded a video appeal to Buffalo Bill to let her daughter go?? In this recording, she showed Catherine’s childhood photographs and told stories from her childhood. All this was done so that the maniac would stop seeing the girl he kidnapped only as prey.
Something similar could be noticed in Max https://betcasinoonline.uk/ Payne 2. There, if you don’t burst into the room with weapons drawn, you can hear funny dialogues of the bandits. Some people discuss their personal lives. Some admit that they do not want death at the hands of Max and are ready to escape, but they are afraid that their “superiors” will later find them and kill them for desertion. Some people watch porn. And one of the cleaners demonstrates good piano playing skills. Vinnie Gogniti, a dangerous gangster, turns out to be a big fan of the TV series "Captain Baseball Bat". At his home you can find a bunch of posters and toys from his favorite TV series, and he himself loves to cosplay the main character of this show, which ultimately plays a cruel joke on Vinnie. And I wouldn’t want to kill all these weirdos, but the problem is that the game leaves me no choice. That is, the creators Max Payne 2 took a step towards humanizing enemies, but did not take the second step towards providing the opportunity to bypass them. It’s still a shooter, no matter how you look at it.
Last of us 2 tried to pull off the same trick, but it didn’t turn out great. Yes, our opponents, when they find their dead comrades, shout “Oh my God, they killed Kenny!", but what does it matter to the player if he doesn’t know anything about this Kenny? Okay, Kenny is Kenny.
In the first part The Division everyone was suffering because of Alex’s death. Seriously, it felt like at some point the entire male population of New York decided to become Alex. I don’t know if the authors of Divizhin were counting on drama, but after the death of yet another Alex, my friend and I already started laughing out loud.
In addition, the Last of us 2 writers tried to humanize Abby. First we are shown her as a cold-blooded and cruel killer, and then we are shown as a loyal friend and caring person, and her motives are also revealed. But the problem is that Abby as a character is poorly written. All her dialogues are strained, there is practically no interaction with friends. Looking at Ellie and Joel, we see real people who react very naturally to everything. Looking at Abby I see a plot function. No wonder so many players couldn’t accept it. But this is my personal opinion, I do not pretend to be the ultimate truth here.
On the other hand, I liked the way the writers made Abby friends with the scar children. The hatred disappeared after Yara and Lev saved Abby and showed that they were people just like her. Yes, in the comments of my last blog Abby was criticized for starting to kill her own people for the sake of two scars, but this only shows how conditional the concepts of “friend” and “stranger” can be in our world.
In general, I noticed that there are two main motives for killing opponents in games. The first is a feeling of revenge. When the game deliberately tries to make us hate the enemy. For example, in the first Assassin’s Creed, before each murder we were shown a scene in which our victim gestures fiercely. Arms dealer Tamir in Damascus brutally kills his henchman with a dagger in front of everyone. And the head of the Order of Hospitallers, Garnier de Naplouse in Acre, breaks the legs of a patient so that he does not escape. You want to kill such monsters and you get pleasure from their death. Hatred is generally a very strong feeling, any Sith will confirm this to you. I saw videos on YouTube of how streamers deliberately exposed Abby to bullets and zombie paws in Last of us 2 in order to see her death. And they sincerely rejoiced when she was brutally killed. That’s how much they hated this character.
Therefore, we remove the personal motive, and now we no longer have to kill our enemies. Here we return to Hitman, where all the enemies were just obstacles on the way to the goal. And 47 had no reason to kill them.
The second motive is fear. The enemy has his back in front of us. We feel the danger emanating from him and understand that killing him is a much safer option for us than bypassing him. What if he turns around? What if he calls for help?? What if we slip through and then he shoots us in the back?? This problem can be solved by creating more understandable enemy patterns. If the enemy is predictable, if he is 100% likely to be distracted by a thrown stone and do exactly what the player wants, then the option to bypass will also become quite valid.
In general, this is a separate and complex topic, but since we are talking here about ways not to kill, it would be wrong not to touch on it at least briefly. My friend believes that all players are pacifists at heart. And he’s partly right. And if you don’t play a game that is entirely about meat, like Doom, for example, then you will still be secretly looking for a way to solve everything peacefully. I think most of us, when resolving conflicts in RPGs, try to reconcile warring factions, rather than exterminate one of them. I’m pretty sure that if a player is given a knife and thrown into a room with sleeping enemies, he will choose to sneak past them rather than kill them. I’m almost 100% sure that the majority of players in the Dishonored expansion Blade of Dunwall spared Daud. Why kill someone who is no longer a danger to you??
Yes, I gave an example with GTA above, but my peers and I discovered this game when we were children. Children, while they are small and stupid, have fun driving around a virtual city, crushing people with tanks. For the same reason everyone loved Carmageddon and Postal. Today, such games would no longer suit me, because violence for the sake of violence is some kind of nonsense.
Now let’s try to create our own dream game, in which you don’t have to kill. Firstly, I wouldn’t punish the player for violence, but I would try to influence his emotions.
For example, you see a guy and a girl on patrol who have gone to a secluded place to be with each other. Are you going to kill them?? Hardly. They are real people and they are happy, it is better to bypass them.
In addition, you can make the player understand that after killing a character, he will have to look his relatives in the eyes. This will not affect the gameplay in any way, this is not a penalty for murder in the usual sense, but the player will most likely feel ashamed.
For example, I was ashamed in front of the residents of the Bazaar in Daying Light 2 after I gave the water tower to the Peacekeepers. My character entered the territory of the Bazaar and caught contemptuous glances at himself. People shouted the word "traitor" at their backs and it was super unpleasant.
Although I had every reason to side with the Peacekeepers. When we first meet the main character, the residents of the Bazaar try to hang him, and when we first meet the peacekeepers, we see how they save a girl from zombies. It’s clear which side I’ll be on.
Now imagine that we are not talking about a water tower, but about the death of a person whom you yourself killed. What will it be like to communicate with his family?? The Nemesis system will come in very handy here, which allows characters to remember the player’s actions.
I would also make the enemies more predictable to reduce the player’s fear of them, and give generous rewards for a peaceful solution to the problem. This is what the authors did Bioshock. If you spare the little sisters, then you will be provided with free adam in large quantities. This is a good alternative to pulling Adam out of the sisters.
I would also create alternative routes to get around opponents. They will be longer and more complex, but it will be possible to do without blood. This was sorely missing from Last of us 2. In open spaces, opponents moved too unpredictably and were, in principle, too attentive, and the detection of a player aggravated the entire location. That is, the danger of enemies and the cost of error were too high, so most preferred to kill opponents rather than bypass them. In addition, location designers often placed the enemy in the only place where there was a transition to another location, so killing became uncontested.
Overall, I like that we have more and more games that give the player the choice to kill or not. Even in the recent addition to my favorite Shadow Tactics: Aiko Choice a choice appears – what to do with the main antagonist. All world literature teaches us that conflict is a path to nowhere. And it’s very good that they try to instill this idea in us from childhood. But, unfortunately, not everyone listens to her.
If I’m watching an action movie, I need John Wick to kill people, and not justify what they do and forgive them. It’s the same story with an action movie.
If I’m playing a strategy game, I want to see how two armies converge and what comes out of it, and not how they sign a peace treaty standing in a field.
Well t.e. I’m talking about the fact that the artistic path of The Last of Us: Part II, which in this context is completely worn out, is about violence, including.h. – over the player, to force him to do something he doesn’t want. If you add workarounds to the game, non-lethal ways, and allow the player to decide whether Ellie should forgive Abby or not, it will be a radically different game.
I was waiting for this comment) No, killing in games is not bad. But not killing is even better.
The author did not take into account one more and, as for me, the main motive for killing in games is just fun.
I’m not sure that it’s even possible to do something so “colorful” and diverse in the game mechanics of shooters so that it fully replaces violence in this genre. And he doesn’t need it.
There are many fairly pacifist games without killing, but making a shooter without classic “ultra-violence” is like drinking tea with sweetener.
P.S. It’s also a pity that you can’t conduct polls on blogs – it would be interesting to look at the ratio of readers with one or another point of view on this matter.
I recently played through GTA4 for the first time and was really surprised that only in this GTA (and in a sense only in this game at this level) can enemies quite often be disabled without killing them. If you shoot at the limbs, then often they will simply fall and writhe in pain, and sometimes even get up and desperately try to get away from the player shouting “fuck all this!", and most importantly – at the same time, they almost always stopped resisting and being a threat (in the same GTA5, even if you deliberately shoot at the hands and knock out weapons from them, some gangster will fall, pull out a second barrel from his bosom and shoot at the GG until the last, leaving no choice). And not to say that this turned GTA4 into some kind of pacifistic game, rather, on the contrary, it only added to the horror, especially when it accidentally flew into the wounded or I got used to the image of the avenging Niko (although it’s worth answering that for once I didn’t feel like complete shit, mowing down dozens of police officers in the next robbery, thanks to the self-deception that these pixels this time could “only” remain crippled for life, and not just die from a well-aimed headshot).
But why am I all this – in the vast majority of games the enemy has only two states – threat and corpse. In stealth games, the “disabled” status is added, usually during some kind of stealth takedown or the use of special means. But very few games allow you to reliably remove someone from a combat-ready state using “lethal” force and, most importantly, let the player know about it. In addition to GTA4, I remember SWAT4 (where this was still a less preferable option than pure detention), MGS5 (however, the wounded man still bled to death in a minute or two and even an urgent fulton might not have survived) and Cyberpunk 2077 (where, in the remarkable brokenness of this game, you can put a special upgrade on some large-caliber sniper or incendiary shotgun and every shot becomes non-lethal, even from a sniper to the face, until the player himself begins to “finish off” the prone person)
Here, of course, one can again argue that maiming on a massive scale and the opportunity to mock the wounded are not much better than simple murder, that in realistic conditions all these characters would simply die for a long time and painfully for several hours, etc., etc., but still, indeed, shooters of the corresponding mood would not hurt to go a little deeper in this regard and, most importantly, give feedback to the player. After all, if you think about it, many games give the opportunity to hit you in the face with a fist or butt in a shootout, but almost never the game lets you know that from its point of view this makes any difference from a bullet or blade
Interesting thoughts. But still, abstaining from violence in most genres is not entirely possible. Imagine a DMC where Dante doesn’t want to chop up his enemies))) In Dishonored, no one refuses violence, the player is simply advised not to kill too many people. Although, some stealths can be completed without killing anyone. Some RPGs also provide this opportunity (Torment, Age Of Decadance if I remember the name correctly). It would also be interesting to look at MMOs where you can lead a peaceful life next to constantly fighting players 🙂 Well, there are games that do not involve a violent solution to the issue at all. Nowadays there is a lot of this in the indie segment)
In the Hitman series we are told not to kill anyone other than the target. The cleaner your work, the higher the rating. A high rating means extra money (Blood Money) and + 500 to HR. If a player receives a lower rating, he immediately has the thought: “That is, how come I’m not a silent assassin?! I will now restart the mission and prove to all of you that I am a true professional!».
It seems to me that the percentage of players who are actually affected by the rating is very low. Although I wasn’t interested.
What if he calls for help?? What if we slip through and then he shoots us in the back?? This problem can be solved by creating more understandable enemy patterns. If the enemy is predictable, if he is 100% likely to be distracted by a thrown stone and do exactly what the player wants, then the option to bypass will also become quite valid.
And everyone will complain about the stupid AI that is not fun to play with 🙂
Actually, no one associates the bloody mess of ordinary enemies with any real violence, dummies are just dummies, but the moment in games when the principle of selective humanization is applied is terribly boring. For example, when on the way to the boss you have to destroy dozens of ordinary opponents, who are game-mechanically the same people as the boss, we don’t take zombies/robots and other “soulless” things here, but it is the boss himself that the game insistently offers to spare (and perhaps even punishes if you do not succumb to its provocations). And if he doesn’t give me a choice and the GG himself decides to take pity on the goal, this just drives me into a stupor every time and leaves me feeling like some kind of deception.
In our age of soulless jerks, giving the player a choice and squeezing a tear out of the player is more than relevant.
Well, in a crazy masturbation game, no one will humanize the enemies – it is important for the game that the player clicks on the enemies as quickly as possible and moves on to the next skirmish.
And in Frostpunk this is appropriate and cool, because limited human resources are built into the mechanics of the game itself.
T.e. I’m not talking about the fact that we don’t need moral choice at all, let’s have a bloodbath in EVERY GAME, but about the fact that “a spoon is good for dinner”: moral dilemmas are good when they work correctly from the standpoint of game mechanics and universal human logic, as was the case in Thief and MGS, for example. But this will never work in CoD.
Something similar could be seen in the special forces simulator SWAT or its indie clone Police Stories. Killing civilians caught in the crosshairs lowered the rating. And in principle, there is nothing wrong with this, but the player will constantly be bothered by the thought that he did not approach the task professionally enough.
In SWAT 4, every mission had something like “ensure the safety of the hostages”, which failed after the death of at least one hostage, which led to complete failure of the mission. And it didn’t matter who killed him. And if we are talking about killing opponents, then, as far as I remember, points were deducted for the unreasonable use of weapons, and not for murder. You could shoot the enemy in the arm so that he drops the weapon, and then arrest him, but if before that he did not point his weapon at you, then you will have an unreasonable use of a weapon, and points will be deducted for this. Namely, points are not deducted for killing a person with a weapon. And if you are not playing on the lowest difficulty level, then you will not be allowed to the next mission if you get a score below the passing score.
There’s no point. The result cannot be calculated. There is a possibility that both topics will be downvoted for clogging blogs. It’s better to create a questionnaire somewhere among Google tools or on another site that allows you to do this and put a link in the blog. In general, if I remember well, once upon a time it was possible to do surveys. True, I don’t know if this feature was removed, or just hidden so that it’s difficult to find.
As a microcodile, I’ll add that killing is certainly interesting, but for this the enemy must first be dehumanized. Well, or don’t try to humanize. Let him be either an inveterate scumbag, or a monster from hell, or a weak-willed unit. There was also an episode in “Black Mirror” where soldiers are shown images of monster enemies so that they don’t suffer from moral suffering when pulling the trigger.
The above is, as I understand it, more about humanization. When viewed as a game design tool, it allows you to add depth and layers to your game. Of course, this is not needed everywhere. It’s a pleasure to slaughter devils in style in DMC, but to suffer the agony of moral choice in some PRG is completely different. And as a true Witcher fan, I prefer not to choose at all.
But. In our age of soulless jerks, giving the player a choice and squeezing a tear out of the player is more than relevant. I want more games like this. The same Frostpunk is a strategy, but I feel sorry for the people there. One of my favorite games.
By the way, an unusual example of an alternative to violence was in Debriefing. That game about Judge Dredd. Enemies who threw down their weapons could be spared. Moreover, if you intimidate the enemy before he gets angry, he will not be sentenced to life, but will be given a random sentence (it looks funny when in a crowd of bandits two were killed, two received life sentences, and one received 15 days). There was some excitement in it. And even some gameplay depth – if you kill a cultist officer, the rank and file immediately surrender.
All that remains is to understand whether there was any meaning?
What is the ray of light?? Ellie spared the enemy and ended up with nothing. Dina is gone, the pain from losing Joel has not gone away (this is a video of the very last scene with the guitar), there is emptiness in my soul.
Ummm… The game literally shows Abby to make it clear what would happen to Ellie if she decided to kill her in the end. And that this would not solve anything, absolutely.
This option takes up too much space in the blog feed. It would be more reasonable to simply invite developers to add a similar tool to the site.
For some reason I remembered the period of my gaming life when I (at that time an impressionable young man) in strategies based on real events experienced the death of my fighters too vividly. Therefore, I literally ruined some games through a save scam so that all my fighters would definitely reach the end of the mission)
Respect for mentioning The Witcher and Frostpunk)
It’s true. The experience of former samurai, especially those involved in maintaining order, must have been useful to the new government. I believe that in order to feed the family they could sacrifice their samurai principles, or maybe many of them never perceived their service to the Bakufu as something sacred, but rather as just work.