When you look at what was announced during this year’s E3, you can see how much each developers and publishers try to push their next big franchise. Good portions of those new, or returning, franchises are first-person shooters. Halo: Reach, Medal of Honor, Call of Duty: Black Ops, Killzone 3 and Crysis 2 are making their way toward our consoles and personal computers with their big guns, big (space) boots and their big wars. Those damn commies/aliens/Talibans/ better watch out!
Cool right?
Not always.
Look, there is nothing wrong with violence for entertainment, but can we start to wonder why it is the only kind of violence our industry is capable of tackling? Could a video game shock me with its violence not by its amount or gruesomeness (see: Manhunt 2), but by its impact on the characters and the world? Let’s look at an other medium for inspiration.
Gus Van Sant’s movie Elephant is shocking not because the violence is plentiful, quite the opposite. The violence is short and brutal. One second you're alive and enjoying life (or not) and the next you are bleeding to death in a corridor.
Van Sant lets his characters live their life on screen for a short period of time. He gives the viewer time to get to know these people: their dreams, hopes, strength and weaknesses. He does not discriminate between the victims and killers. They both get time to live before they are pulled out of their world in a brutal way. Each death is affecting because Van Sant never lets you forget that the people being killed are not anonymous members of a mass, they are individuals.
What about games?
You kill so many people and get killed so many times in first-person shooters that violence and death start to loose their meaning. Your enemies are plentiful and anonymous; you are often a one-man army blessed by the power of spawning. Violence is the currency and death (yours or theirs) is what’s being traded. You never feel like something is taken out of the game. At worse, death is about as annoying in game as traffic is in real life.
One effective way video games made death matter is by making it permanent. Sadly, there are quite few examples of such uses of death and they are often removed from gameplay and placed within the embedded narrative. The game will kill someone permanently for you but won’t let you kill or get killed in the same fashion. Aeris died not because you didn’t have any potions left, she died because the game decided to remove her from the game to create dramatic tension. Still, games have been getting better at creating permanent deaths that matter because you caused them or are affected by them.
A good example of a first-person shooter that made death and violence matter more than your average war simulator is Far Cry 2. Not so much because of the unlimited number of mercenaries waiting to be shot, set on fire or rolled over but because of your “buddies”. You meet them, do some small talk, and even though they could have been developed a bit more as characters, learn about them. At the exception of one or two sequences in the game, their life or death relies entirely in your hands. Play with fire by accepting their little offer and you will put their life in danger. If you fail to save them, they will die in your arms, and sometimes by your hands. Once they are dead, they’re not coming back.
Another good look at permanent death in this game was the self-imposed “permadeath” challenge Ben Abraham took last December. The constant threat of death makes you appreciate the little details of the world and makes you question the use of violence as an effective approach to every given situation.
What do I want? I’m not even sure. It's not about "banning violent games" like some over-reacting hormones-fuelled gamer might say. It's just about having a balance between entertaining violence and affecting violence. Maybe I just want more developers to think about violence in other terms than number of enemies on screen or cooler explosions. Maybe I just don't want 14 first-person shooters with 14 different ways of showing us how cool their fictional (or non-fictional) war is. Maybe I just want people to be able to talk about violence, games and what is between them without being called an alarmist or worse, being told it’s “just a game”.
It won't cause gamers to go into the streets and shoot people up, but maybe it causes them to be strangely apathetic to such stories. Violence, war and death is not only about sick graphics and kill streaks, it’s about the Human experience.
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