Videogames are infinitely more than just interactive-audio-visual trips and they have more than proved themselves as an equally capable medium with much meaning and impact as all the rest of the entertainment mediums out there. But there’s also another side to videogames that gets rarely highlighted and as gamers, we’ve somewhat grown to almost gloss over it completely. Yes we’re talking about the darker aspect of videogames, the part about it’s gratifying and unnecessarily-excessive mechanics of violence and over-indulgence in all kinds of moral deviations.
Videogames, from the sole viewpoint of the player, are psychological experiences. Simply because in a videogame, we play with our minds. And even though they are interactive in nature and have a complex inner structure, but what videogames ultimately affect us on, is on a purely mental level, and from there, they also leave a deep footprint that stays with us long after we’re out of it.
So yes, videogames do ‘invade’ and influence our minds on a subconscious level. But why? Do they purposefully train our minds in a specific direction? Do they sensitize or desensitize us towards something that happens in the real world? What is the deeper purpose of the boundless and clearly intentional presence of violence in most videogames that dominate the world today? This article will attempt to look into it from an unbiased viewpoint, and here’s hoping that it’ll be interesting enough to provide an engaging reading experience as well.
As we’ve learned in the 3rd part of the Anatomy of Videogames series of articles (Anatomy of Videogames: The Ties that Bind), the design philosophies of videogames are directly responsible for the particular type (s) of experience that is going to affect the player with during a game. What this means is that all the wanton display of violence that we experience in videogames, they’re there completely on purpose. The intention to make the player experience those within the game is as much integral as the level designs, gameplay, narrative or any other key mechanisms. So yes, the games deliberately want you to experience all the chaotic destruction and endless violence, and it’s far from inconsequential.
So now the question becomes: what is really the purpose for videogames (most of them, atleast) to shower the player with these kinds of particularly brutal and heavily immoral brand of experiences? To simply conclude that they are anything other than intentional or just inconsequential is naive, cause the degree to which they are present in most videogames, are proof enough that they are there for a reason.
So what is or can be that reason? Now it is very unlikely that we’ll ever get to know an honest answer regarding this from the developers themselves. So in this article, we’ll just examine the violence present in videogames and how it affects the players’ psyche on a subconscious level.
It’s not any stretch of imagination to say that most videogames are based around the theme of violence, whether it’s the sprawling, dense open world of GTA or the futuristic horror Universe of Gears of War—what you, the player is ultimately required to do in the game, is rain down acts of violence on whomever the game points you to. The story of most videogames, the activities that the games require the players to perform, are mostly based around violence. The narrative of a game progresses through the player committing various acts of violence (from petty theft to mass murder) and the majority of games are simply built in a way where engaging the A.I violently is the only way to interact with them. Some of the primary functions of the player in a videogame are punching and shooting, that’s the basic, default mode of interaction with the A.I in most videogames.
From that perspective, most open world games, from Farcry 5 to GTA 5, are more violence-boxes (or chaos boxes) than what they claim themselves to be (‘sand-boxes’). Simply cause how easy it is to just engage on a spree of random violence or just wreak havoc in the game world, and most of the times these super-violent actions are mandatory directives from the game itself, in the guise of ‘missions’ and other in-game activities. Sure you can spend your time being awed at the insanely detailed worlds, but when it all comes down to, it’s just the game requiring you to perform activities such as gunning down groups of A.I’s (you get rewarded if you do the gunning with more precision or style), blowing up stuff and similar flavor of (violent) actions.
It’s also remarkable how unbelievably easy it is to ‘kill’ or murder someone in a videogame. In the world of GTA’s, Assassin’s Creed’s and Farcry’s, you can kill a person (or NPC’s, as the games like to call them) with just the press of a single button, and in some cases, downright accidentally, even without any deliberate intention on your part. And any methods of penalty for that in the game is also minimum and extremely easy to avoid or just ‘get away’ with.
It’s downright baffling that despite touting themselves as complex and multi-layered experiences, most videogames, when it really comes down to it, only require the player to perform violent activities with the press of a few buttons. This has been the primary skeleton of these experiences, beneath all their technological advancements and narrative strength.
Another aspect of videogames’ darker side is how they present all of their in-game violence to us, and this farther adds to the fact that just how much they influence the psyche of the players on a subconscious level. Most games do a great job of ‘masking’ the violent aspect of your in-game behavior by simply shifting your focus away from the on-screen brutality and instead, to the degree of perfection and precision that you need to perform those actions with, by giving you in-game incentives for those. For example, when we perform headshots in an FPS, the first thing that comes to our minds is how accurately we can land our shots instead of the sheer brutality of what the game is actually making us doing. Simply cause there’s incentives of landing ‘clean’, perfect one shot kills in the game. So that is what occupies in our minds when we perform those actions, and the aspect of immorality and brutality is perfectly ‘masked’.
How videogames portray their on-screen violence is also part of their ‘darker’ nature. While games such as the Half Life series have always been somewhat ‘mellow’ when it came to the display of the on-screen ‘killings’, most games however, have come to prefer the most visceral, grotesque and sometimes downright offensive ways to portray their on-screen violence.
Take Max Payne 3 for example, sure the Max Payne series has never shied away from their exaggerated display of gunfights and gore, but the 3rd installment just takes things to another level. The game doesn’t just portray violence, it kind of celebrates them. Every gunshot wound, every tiny bit of bloody bodily damage is showcased with such painstakingly detailed ways that it almost makes you wonder about the game’s actual purpose behind showing you all that. The ‘killcam’ after each round of gunfight just makes you slowly desensitized and get used to the sheer brutality of the violence on display. The question arises that does the game want to consciously remind us just how dangerously lethal it’s protagonist is or does it actually want us to enjoy our own acts of in-game violence and revel in them in glorious slow-mo?
It’s as if that videogames don’t want us to think that the acts of violence we get to perform in-game is fundamentally, objectively, ‘wrong’ and we just need to accept them as any other in-game actions. This normalization of extreme violence is an undertone that’s found in many, many AAA titles and it’s all presented in such a plain and subdued way that it kind of begs the question—where exactly do they want to take our minds with these virtual experiences?
Morality has always been something that videogames have a particularly vague, loose attitude towards. Most game protagonists, even the supposedly ‘noble’ ones (that the game wants you to think, at least), have to go through killing hundreds of ‘people’ during the course of an entire game without ever questioning the moral implications of their own actions. In fact, we can say that most videogame protagonists, whose shoes the games put us in, are fundamentally killers and mass murderers (although the games don’t want us to see them that way), without any moral judgement about their own actions.
In any videogame, the number of ‘people’ the protagonist ‘needs’ to kill in each level to get to the next one, are simply astounding, they are just too too many. The games reward different, more creative ways of carrying out it’s brand of violence, but killing is something that most games simply require you to do, with as few inputs as possible (often a single click).
Videogames have evolved a lot in technical standards and public perception (how they advertise themselves to their audience), but if you look at them purely on the basis of what they actually make you do in their pixelated, fictional worlds, it all comes down to this one overused sequence—kill A.I’s, interact with environments, kill different A.I’s, rinse and repeat. Like, the violence doesn’t just feel as a mere option but simply a core aspect of the games themselves that you just can’t do without.
As you can see, after examining all the clearly obvious traits, it’s not really any stretch to declare that videogames lean on the side of violence a bit too much. Sure there are tons of games that replace violence with exploration and other, more innovative themes, but for the majority of videogames that dominate the world, what they really offer are virtual experiences of fundamentally violent and immoral actions in the guise of escapist entertainment.
This article will continue in another part, with a different viewpoint on the subject. Hope to see you there, and till then, happy gaming.
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