Devcom perspectives: The uncomfortable and familiar topic of video game violence

Question: We’re talking about the way games should be in terms of violence. We’ve had examples of games that go against the grain, This War of Mine being one. Timo’s game Spec Ops was a rare example of what we call a triple-A game that actually did something interesting in terms of the way it messaged around violence. But obviously This War of Mine was a small game.

Right now we have this ongoing trend in the media where all of the big companies are trying to distance themselves from the messaging in their games. “Our games are not political.” You have the new Call of Duty game that’s going to have a child soldier level, but they’re saying it’s not a political game. Ubisoft is another example. They’ve done games set in Washington taken over by rebels, games set in a radicalized American state, but they don’t deal with politics. It seems self-evident that they’re dealing with political ideas, but they’re not willing to engage. Does that harm the ability to get to these places you’re going when you have these massive companies with huge reach that can send these messages, but aren’t willing to engage with them?

Portnow: Frankly the answer is just “yes.” Which is very strange to me, because by trying to distance themselves, they create openings for toxic communities who come in and politicize these games in the way that they desire. We’ve seen the negative monetary impact that having toxic communities has in games. But as an industry, we’re all afraid to come out and say anything.

I think that time is near. I don’t think it’s much longer until it’s no longer sustainable to sit back and say that a game that starts out in front of a burnt-out White House is not political. I think we can’t do that, and that as a gaming community we have to start speaking up about it. We have to encourage and reward companies that speak up about it. There are plenty of people out there who want to punish any company that says, “Our game is political.” Those of us who don’t feel that have to write in and say, “This is great. I’m glad you acknowledge that this is political.”

GamesBeat: It would be a bit like Arthur Miller writing The Crucible and saying, “This is not a political statement about McCarthyism, even though that happened just before I wrote this.”

Question: We’ve said that in many cases we want to portray the enemy, to show them with a backstory, to show how we impact them. But when you get into — Doom is maybe a bad example. But that’s a game about glorifying violence, a very over-the-top violence, with heavy metal playing the background. That’s what it’s about. When you have something like that that’s not meant to be narrative-driven, what would you say about that?

Ullman: There’s a big separation there. Context is what matters. I think the commentary wasn’t so much about what we should or shouldn’t be doing, but what you can do. From that perspective, to my mind it’s absolutely okay, it’s great to have a game like Doom that’s just mindless shooting. And on the other hand you can have games like This War of Mine or Spec Ops that try to put violence into a different context. All these things are out there ready to be entertaining or to be explored.

Coming back to what Matthew said, when Spec Ops came out it wasn’t a commercial success. It did all right, but we had much bigger expectations. But by giving the audience more choices, more options, they’ll slowly pick these things up once they’re ready. It paves the way for other games to work in that space. I have to say, kudos to 2K for following through and funding the development of Spec Ops. It wasn’t an easy decision for them back then.

GamesBeat: I’m also interested in what our tolerance levels are for certain kinds of violence. You brought up Doom, and I never had a problem with shooting things in Doom, because it’s a pure fantasy. When it gets more realistic in terms of settings and storyline, that’s when I want it to be more respectful and less exploitative. I wonder if everyone has the same sensibility about this.

There were games I would not play before. The Grand Theft Auto series, for example, I chose not to play for a while because I thought all you could do was be evil. By the time I got to Grand Theft Auto IV and V, though, I felt it was some of the most authentic and artistic storytelling I’d seen in games. I thought it was worth playing even if I was playing an evil person in the game. I could project that. I’m not Trevor. I could pretend that he was doing these bad things, and not myself. There’s a certain kind of tricking my own mind that I can do when playing these kinds of games, and I’m curious what you think about that.

Bøhler: For me it’s a bit difficult, because I don’t play that many shooters. I’m really bad at aiming. [laughs] I only do paint ball and laser tag.  But I find this topic is difficult in general because I think most games are good. They mean something to someone. People love them. I feel like you should be able to make things. But at the same time, you can affect people. It’s difficult to know. There’s only one game I thought it shouldn’t be made. Maybe it was Postal. Something like Grand Theft Auto, that’s fine. My only problem I ever had with Grand Theft Auto was, why don’t you have male prostitutes and strippers? But general I’m for it.

I work a bit with education and game development, in Norway. And what we’re not educating students around is an ethical mindset. At least be aware before you start doing something. I think people should be awarded for doing good things. We can make games that improve the world. But it’s a very difficult thing to punish people who don’t make games we think are good.

Koop: I find Grand Theft Auto is a really interesting example, because in Grand Theft Auto, the ethical implications are in some way lessened because you’re signing up for being an asshole. You know it. Everybody knows it. It’s taking a conscious, clear step outside of the norms and values we normally sign on to.

GamesBeat: Which is fantasy.

Koop: Yes, it’s fantasy. There’s a real conscious detachment from your own actions, from your own sense-making process.

Where it becomes a lot more difficult is when you play in a situation, even one that’s detached from your experience — say you’re playing a soldier in a special ops team. This is something that very few people have had as an experience. But because of the narrative that’s built around it, the context that’s given, there is a value judgment between good and bad that’s going on continuously. In that kind of environment, you have to position yourself and relate yourself continuously to the story you’re exposed to. It’s not just a matter of saying, “Okay, now I’ll just go for it.”

There the ice gets much thinner. It eats itself into your sense-making processes. It’s a very sneaky kind of experience, and that’s why there, the duty of care in design is so much more critical. It all goes back to framing. It goes back to, “Why am I here? Who am I? What am I doing? Who are the people I am dealing with in the situation of this game?” The degree to which we show graphic violence is an additional issue in that mix.

GamesBeat: There’s another direction we can go with this, which is the degree of realism and the technology that’s making it easier to build extremely realistic games. I’ve heard people say that you should never make a first-person shooter in a VR game, because it’s that much more immersive. It goes to that sense of agency you have in video games. You are doing things, as opposed to watching a movie where you see other people doing things. How much do you think this matters?

Portnow: There is some question to me about this idea that “I” do a thing. If I’m going to a movie, I’m watching an actor on a screen. They’re doing this thing, and I’m reflecting on what they do. In a game, I’m doing it for myself, which opens up two sides. There is a sort of insidious side to that, where you can bring people to believe they’re making choices, when as a game designer I’m really making those choices for them.

On the other hand, it allows us to reflect on our own morality. There is something to a space — and as you said, context is everything — that allows a person in a safe space to explore what their moral system is and what they believe in, even if that means testing out heinous actions. But it has to have that context. For me, perhaps even more than other media, that context is key.

Ullman: To your point about technology, at least in my mind, it’s enabling us more to present realistic things. It’s a vehicle, and it’s getting better and better every day. It’s helping us tell new stories and create more content. I’d be curious to explore a first-person shooter in VR within the realms of how we approach games. But in general technology has advanced so much that it’s really boiling down to the ideas we’re going to explore, the stories that we want to tell, the experiences we want players to have.

Portnow: We use all this technology to create a better and better verisimilitude relative to whatever the experience is. But at the same time, within our community and within our games, we’ll allow for an experience where if you’re playing with a real human being, that person is actively dehumanized. We’re removed from the sense of them actually being a person relative to the people playing with them or against them. It’s why we have people saying things to people in games and online that they’d never say to another human being face-to-face. One of the things we can do is maybe use some of that technology to humanize each other a little bit more.

Koop: I had a conversation with an army that was using to train its soldiers in close-quarters combat using VR. There was a lot of money sunk into the project. It was basically soldiers wearing full VR gear for free movement shooting each other in a VR environment where every other person in the exercise was visible.

They’ve stopped that now, and the reason was not because it wasn’t working, but because it was working too well. The problem was that when you talk to soldiers, any soldier will tell you it’s easy to train to shoot. You learn how to use a gun, learn how to aim, and hit the target. The difficult thing to train into people is when to shoot and when not to shoot. Now, using VR was putting such a level of dehumanization into the mix — of de-realitizing the situation, if you will — that they realized their soldiers were becoming too trigger-happy. They were so desensitized after short sequences of training, because everyone they shot was just another animated character. They said, “We can’t do this. We have to stop it.”

Question: One thing you’ve talked about is that detachment from a game matters a lot. Doom is one thing because we know it’s a fantasy. You talked about how when we play Grand Theft Auto, we’re signing up to be the asshole. My thought is, we’re playing a role there. What’s important to keep in mind is that the player should be aware of the role they are playing.

I had an interesting discussion with Antonia earlier about how you cannot control what your player is doing inside a game. In some games, especially those that allow you a lot of freedom, you can be certain that at some point or another, one of your players is going to try to massacre every NPC there is, just for fun. Why are they doing it? Well, because they want to role-play the sadist. Why do people kill their family in the Sims? They get something out of that. Does that make them bad people? No, because they have a detachment from it. They’ll probably still feel some kind of regret at killing the family that they’ve put a lot of emotion into, building up those relationships. But at some point they’ll back up their saved game, kill everyone for kicks, load the old saved game, and play with a happy family again.

I guess what I’m trying to say is, it’s okay to allow the player to take on different masks — to play the Nazi and feel the full force of Nazi propaganda, for example — if they’re aware that they’re experiencing propaganda, and they’re made aware in hindsight of what that makes them do. It’s not okay to shove them into a situation where they experience that kind of propaganda and don’t become aware that they’re manipulated.

Liberman: I’d agree. It’s our responsibility as creators to show consequences in our games, depending on the role that we decide to take. If I decide to be a sadist, there’s something that I’ve created as a game designer, a narrative designer, to allow this storyline or side quest to open up for you and for you to understand this role and how it affects your surroundings. In Baldur’s Gate I used to kill everyone for the fun of it, but it has consequences. It affects your surroundings, how the NPCs treat you. People won’t sell you stuff. They’ll pursue you and try to kill you. Changing a role creates consequences, and for me that’s our responsibility.

GamesBeat: There’s a quotation that I like that addresses this in some ways, although I don’t entirely agree with it anymore. Kurt Vonnegut wrote a novel called Mother Night, about an American spy in World War II who became too good at his cover job of being a Nazi propagandist. He was eventually executed for it. The moral of the story is that “we are what we pretend to be, so we have to be careful what we pretend to be.”

I think that applies not only to game developers, but to game players as well. So long as you think about what you’re playing, that’s the best thing to do. You can decide what you will or won’t do, but you should understand what it will do to you if you’re desensitizing yourself, or whatever else results.

Bøhler: Can I just mention one thing about the Sims? I always kill off my family. But it’s more when I’ve gotten to a point when I can’t do anything else in the game. Then I just have to see what happens. But what they do is, if your whole family is dead, it actually gets kind of depressing. There are all these tombstones there, and then time just moves forward very quickly.

The first time that happened, when I was a kid, it kind of freaked me out. But really, the interest was just in finding out what happens. It’s testing out the mechanics. “I wonder if…” They put in mechanics where bad things can happen if you’re not careful. I’m not sure they intended for you to work out that drowning a character in the swimming pool is the most effective way of killing them, but that’s what most players learn.