A Thousand Deaths Is A Statistic
During the RapeLay fiasco a while back, I read a forum post that got me thinking. On the subject of whether or not it’s acceptable to release a game about sexually abusing women, one person noted that we have no objection whatsoever to pouring bullets into a vast amount of digitised human beings. Are we saying rape is worse than taking someone’s life?
I sat down to type my instinctive response: that no, it’s not necessarily, but we’re at least given a context in which killing is acceptable based on the rules of videogame narrative. Action games are largely centred around the concept of self-defence - if you don’t shoot the enemies, they’ll still shoot you - and that’s not something you can apply to the sexual abuse of innocent bystanders.
But then, perhaps that’s only something I accept as obvious because I grew up playing Doom and Quake and Duke Nukem 3D. But as videogames strive ever more towards their twisted notion of realism, they seem to be leaving this important issue behind. We shoot to kill, and think nothing of it. We see comrades fall and say nothing more than “bugger, this next bit will be harder now.” We wilfully ignore the fact that you can’t quickload when you die in real life. The issue here isn’t really the age-old debate about whether videogames desensitise us towards violence, but that they perhaps fail to acknowledge the seriousness of their common subject matter. And if the medium is going to be considered mature, something it so desperately wants to be, is this not something that’s going to severely hinder its claim?
Michaël Samyn - one half of Tale of Tales, a developer whose two most significant releases have tackled the issue head-on - is worried. “Our society is so focused on eternal youth that that ageing and dying has become a taboo subject. The way in which videogames try to pretend that death is simply a meaningless game mechanic could be interpreted as a refusal of dealing with the issue.”
Of course, the counterpoint is that “it’s only a game,” something we play with, something to entertain us. But Samyn notes a flaw in the argument. “Play has always been an important tool for learning to cope with things you do not fully understand. As such, games should be dealing with death and ageing all the time, because it’s such a big issue in our contemporary society. So this rampant murdering of enemies is a serious problem. Ever gamer knows that, in essence, the first-person shooter is basically a game of ‘pop the bubbles’. But the fact that these bubbles are skinned as different life forms - often humans - is problematic. It’s not hard to imagine how such kind of play would desensitise players to the value of human life - or at least the life of everyone considered an enemy.”
This all comes down to whether we consider the term “game” a misnomer, particularly with new indie houses like Tale of Tales springing to the fore, producing games that eschew traditional gameplay mechanics in favour of something more artistic and expressionistic. It’s a term that, three decades years after the medium’s inception, has clearly stuck and is usually applicable, but perhaps our reading of it will change if more of these non-games that get people so worked up start to appear. It’s worth pointing to Tale of Tales’ own The Graveyard as an example of death being given real weight: when you die in that, you can’t even bring up the menu, and have to ctrl-alt-delete to the task manager to quit.
Rock, Paper, Shotgun’s Kieron Gillen agrees that the treatment of death in games is often trivial, but is unsure whether it’s necessarily a bad thing. “Why not?” he asks. “It supposes an aesthetic purpose for the developer - that death should be treated like it is when your gran dies or whatever. A serious treatment of death can be powerful and moving, but it’s certainly not the only way to view it, and never has been throughout the history of human art and expression across all media. It’s like saying that being bankrupted in Monopoly trivialises the world’s financial downturn.”
“Pretend is safely pretend,” adds fellow Rock, Paper, Shotgun editor John Walker. “I’d want to see some convincing data before I believed anyone would react to the death of a loved one with less emotion because they’d watched Lara fall off 40,000 cliffs.” It rings true. And surely, if anything can be said towards the age-old violent games debate, it’s that this opportunity for artificial gunplay is in some sense beneficial. Surely the appeal of something like, say, Manhunt lies in its ability to tap into the masochistic side of our psyches, without us having to live out our disgusting fantasies? It certainly wasn’t adored because of its ingenious game design…
Of course, someone predisposed through psychological issues to brutally slaying another human being may be given ideas by a videogame. But equally, this person might get those ideas from the news - that’s arguably far more likely. For the overwhelming majority, there’s a barrier of fantasy, which allows us to experience another world where crazed destruction is fun, not tragic - and the barrier prevents any crossover, because we know what’s real, and what is not.
“Humans like fantasising about killing people,” says Gillen. “There are parts of us which are forever wanton boys, killing for our sport. Violent entertainment serves this purpose. I recall Warren Ellis’ lovely quote about videogame narrative and Soldier of Fortune: ‘No-one’s playing Soldier of Fortune for the plot. They’re playing it so they can stick knives in people’s dicks’.”
Is this ignoring a wider issue, though? Are there more subtle layers of this debate that tie videogame content in with the broader picture of society? Michaël Samyn has noticed what he considers to be a worrying trend. “Videogames basically subscribe to the ideology of the ruling classes of the world,” he muses. “The idea of a single monstrous enemy that needs to be utterly destroyed is an all too painfully familiar one with respect to the foreign policy of the previous regime in the United States. Of course, there’s a chicken or the egg question here: was Bush able to get away with his simplistic rhetoric because we were all comfortable with such ideas thanks to videogames, or are videogames imitating life and as such supporting such extreme policies?”
Tying these two threads together so closely does seem a little tenuous, particularly when the majority of the gaming community - and particularly the specialist press - appears vehemently left-wing. But this oversimplification of ‘the enemy’ is something that’s apparent over a wide range of entertainment media. You have the goodies, and you have the baddies, but this neglects to truly identify how humanity works. As the saying goes, one man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist.
But this doesn’t explain the clinical reaction to our own death in videogames. Joystiq’s Ludwig Keitzmann considers why this may be. “Modern games, which often aim to incorporate an involving narrative and cinematic gameplay, don’t really have a place for traditional death. With most stories presented in a linear manner, it simply doesn’t make sense for the main character to die and then suddenly reappear without any explanation. With the exception of games like Metal Gear Solid, games tend to treat death - and reloading of saves, for instance - as something that occurs outside the game’s world, which is why it doesn’t have much impact.”
It certainly seems, though, that regularly removing the player from the game world leads to a shocking disruption of the immersion that so many titles strive towards. Keitzmann points to Prince of Persia as a title that embraces the issue and works it into the game’s own universe, removing the necessity of fourth-wall breaking. I’ve long heralded the Grand Theft Auto series as a fine example of how to punish the player without resorting to a nonsensical portrayal of death: when your health runs out, you’re taken to hospital, and have to pay your medical fees - resulting in a harsher punishment than any quicksave / quickload combination could ever demand.
“If you assume immersion equals what life is,” says Kieron Gillen, “yeah, it’s totally immersion-breaking. But immersion can also be an accepting of a game’s - and its world’s - rules. If it’s a world which makes player death seem natural through various techniques, immersion can totally keep ticking over.”
“Coming back to life after death is jarring,” adds John Walker. “However, we save before death, and then restore that moment. It’s going back in time rather than coming back to life, and that makes more reasonable sense. I know where it does bother me: multiplayer gaming. I cannot rationalise respawning players on any level, and I think it might be an element of what puts me off such games.”
This is interesting, as it’s a case that doesn’t bother me. Playing a deathmatch game is so obviously submitting to another reality that respawning doesn’t seem to grate. Plus, if death were to be given any gravitas in this genre, it would be extremely troubling. After all, where’s the fun in inflicting actual death on an abundance of other characters? If these characters can pop back into existence after a few seconds, the notion of death becomes more akin a quick ‘time out’ session in sport. It’s not really “death” in the usual sense, so there’s no need for moral constraint.
So maybe it’s just the terminology that’s a little skewed. Not that I have a suggestion for the medium-wide renaming of an intrinsic gameplay feature, but still. Something doesn’t seem quite right.
Indeed, there’s a big gap between the emotional response to death in a multiplayer shooter - complete indifference, essentially - to that evoked by The Graveyard. Obviously, games like this and Jason Rohrer’s thought-provoking Passage take the idea and run with it, but this more serious treatment of death is seeping its way into more mainstream releases as well, which I can only see as a move forward for the industry. “Far Cry 2 had an interesting buddy system,” recalls Ludwig Keitzmann, “where NPCs would rush to your aid but run the risk of being killed - permanently. Their unique characterisations made them quite endearing, and the manner of their passing can be quite an affecting thing to watch.”
It’s an example I certainly identify with. For all Far Cry 2’s quirks, there was something eminently real about its characters, even shining through some questionable acting. But did we feel strongly about our buddies’ deaths because of our connection with them, or simply because it would make the rest of the game more difficult?
“Maybe it’s both,” suggests Keitzmann, “but either way, it’s clearly one of the rare cases where death actually has a real consequence for you.”
I’d want to see some convincing data before I believed anyone would react to the death of a loved one with less emotion because they’d watched Lara fall off 40,000 cliffs.
I have my doubts as well. But why always look at the potential for negative impact in games? I think games can have a very positive impact. And if anything my criticism of current games is that they do not embrace this powerful aspect of the medium.
Several of our own games deal with death. Probably because we want to learn more about the subject, and especially about our own attitudes and emotions towards it, as a player, as a person. To some extent, we are the ones trying to desensitize players by making them see that death is a part of life. And if you have experienced a small aspect of it in a game, perhaps you will be better prepared to deal with it when it happens in reality.
Death does not need to come as a shock. Games could teach us how to embrace it as an essential part of life. But they won’t do that by trivializing death. They’re not making a difference. Not for better or for worse. But they _could be doing a lot of good.
Very good article. I would like to see more of this kind of thing. On the negative side there are too many issues and ideas for any of them to be properly explored in such a short piece.
I’m inclined to agree with John that there’s room for safe pretend in videogames. They’re an escapist pursuit primarily, aren’t they? Maybe that’s just me.
Michael:
There’s the argument that games don’t have to try to make a difference. They’re not obliged to, in the same way that film isn’t, and music isn’t. Games are totally a pop culture, and pulp fiction doesn’t subscribe to emotional affect - it’s instant gratification, and it’s not necessarily lesser work for that.
What I would like to see, though, is more people taking the risk to produce something deeper. I wouldn’t like to see games become exclusively serious. But at the moment, if I fancy playing a game that’s going to make me *feel* something, I’m not exactly spoiled for choice.
I think this is a great article, which begins to scrape the surface of some issues that I’m sure Resolution will approach again in the future. Dr Eru is right in saying that there’s a lot of different concepts at play.
For my part, I agree very much with what Kieron and John have said about the significance of game death to people’s perceptions of it in the real world - by contrast, I think that Michael’s argument comes across as quite prescriptive. I’d agree with Lewis in that the best we can hope for - the best we ought to hope for - is that some game developers aspire to create emotionally affecting games with affecting portrayals of death; but it shouldn’t be that all games shift towards that. To advocate the latter would be to say that action films should be discouraged and only films that make some attempt at chipping off layers of the human condition be encouraged… the truth is that both are as legitimate as one another, but a medium which has one and not the other is poorer because of it. Mark Lawson said “high culture and low culture are equally fascinating, but you can’t do just one or the other, you have to do both”. I think there’s an element of the same logic here.
We’ve referred to games as a “juvenile medium” before, and I think that’s quite a fair label if we compare games to film or books, for example. With that in mind, it’s likely that we can expect games to broaden their horizons and in so doing, also broaden the toolbox they use to affect us - and death is just one of the arena in which I think we’re going to observe that, along with things like narrative, perspective, and so on.
Re-read what I said in my comment before, which was written in a beer-haze after a lunch time barbeque. Ack.
What I *meant* was pulp fiction evokes only visceral emotion. This instinctive reaction is often fear, or sadness. But it’s not really a *thoughtful* emotional response, if that makes any sense. Games are great at pulp fiction, but less good at higher-brow stuff.
Generally. Clearly there are exceptions.
Yes. A related question that all this brings up though, is whether more “affecting” games are as fun/enjoyable as their “mindless” counterparts, let alone the issues as to the current publishing treadmill status quo where the more thoughtful games we might like to see more of are possibly being stifled by the fear that they won’t sell.
“A related question that all this brings up though, is whether more “affecting” games are as fun/enjoyable as their “mindless” counterparts”
Depends what turns you on, really. For the most part, though, no. But then, watching Schindler’s List is absolutely no fun, either. Making something enjoyable means making the audience feel comfortable - but it’s often outside this comfort zone where life’s most important lessons are learned.
“the more thoughtful games we might like to see more of are possibly being stifled by the fear that they won’t sell”
Probably. That’s why it’s interesting to see Tale of Tales charging (an admittedly small amount of) money for their games. I’d be fascinated to see The Path’s sales figures. I’d imagine the controversy over that (and I don’t just mean the “is it a rape game?” stuff, but the fact it exists at all) would have boosted things, but it still won’t be anywhere near the big guys.
The two link together, because not many people (comparatively) want to spend money on a game that they aren’t going to enjoy playing, as we still perceive gaming as being an instant-gratification medium. One of the reasons I think Braid’s so significant is that it has something particularly poignant to say, while still delivering a traditional, “fun” videogame over the top of it. This is the logical first step, and it’ll be interesting to see what follows.
[...] Denby writes about the problem of Death in videogames over at Resolution, interviewing Mr The Path, Mr Joystiq. Plus Walker and I, in a particularly prickly demi-aggressive [...]
Whenever I read a piece like this (fascinating and enjoyable by the way), I always think of a title I believe has not had the influence it deserves: Indigo Prophecy. When you die, that is how the story ends. There is a clever sort of closure that is given. Then you may reload to the previously auto-saved place. Among the countless other innovations, such as Guitar Hero segments tied fluidly to the gameplay and narrative, the notion of death as a final event was strong.
While on the subject of Indigo, I also have to praise the ability to switch characters with different impact to the narrative, and also the heart-pounding action sequences. True, many might be put off by the ‘Simon Says’ mechanic, but really, all games employ this mechanic in a veiled way: “see an event, trigger a response”.
I, too, love The Path, in an unexplainable way. I find playing it tedious at times, but I still look forward to my next sitting when I will select another little girl from the sunlight-flooded room. I wonder what will happen when all the little girls have made their way to Grandma’s house. Will the game shut down and automatically uninstall, leaving us to wonder whether we’d ever actually played it?
Thanks again for offering a thoughtful analysis of the state of video games. We need more of this type of feedback in order to raise the standards of the industry.
I think the move to realism, to human enemies, and to involving narrative has shifted the way death plays. Some devs are dealing with this in a very consciously “arty” way, by making it a major theme and wrapping the game around it, and while some of the big commercial guns (like Fallout 3) have attempted to tie it to a goodbadbar, I haven’t seen a developer try to just work it in there.
I used to shoot people in the groin in Perfect Dark et al, because they’d act like you just kicked them in the nuts. It was fucking hilarious, to be frank. They aren’t people, and I didn’t think they were, but when you play something like Far Cry 2, for example, you are fighting people. They chat about things, they panic and fire madly, and if you snake through their camp and take down every one, there is complete silence but for the noises of the wilderness, and the odd exploding car.
On the subject of FC2, I felt the ‘death’ mechanic was weird - you take a million bullets then suddenly faint. It’s enough to make you think that injecting yourself with skag every few minutes and occasionally pulling a bullet out of your wrist is enough to survive any gunfight.
The all-time game where death matters is, for me, Counterstrike Source. There’s no character armour here, just BOOM headshot!!!1s, careful planning, cautious creeping, and explosive swearing followed by a black mood and dark thoughts. The punishment is only a couple of minutes, but you can’t ask gamers to crawl into a box and lie down for eternity, can you?
The abstraction of ‘death’ in gaming means that the word has gained connotations far removed from those in the real world. You already discussed the way in which respawning in multi-player shooters treats death as a mechanic somewhat removed from its real life conterpart, indeed, if I’m recalling it all correctly, this was pretty much enshrined in the Q3A manual. However, the concept of death in games stretches even further in games, such that it has become analogous with a number of abstract failures. I’ve heard players claim that they ‘died’ in Tetris or Guitar Hero, neither of which features anything in realation to real world death. (Although the phrase ‘dying on stage’ is not one reserved exclusively for Guitar Hero)
James G:
Funnily enough, that sort of crosses over into my “other” field.
I’m all for shifting language. It’s totally natural. But I don’t know if what you’re suggesting is really the case. That said, you’re right about “dying on stage”. Maybe if games were calling *any* failure “death” it might ring truer, but as it is, I just think it’s a shallow depiction. The only place I think your argument really applies is in deathmatch, where I completely agree.
“I’ve heard players claim that they ‘died’ in Tetris or Guitar Hero”
This. “Death” in games is just a condition under the rules of the game. The fact that it shares the same word as the deceased state of a living creature is almost irrelevant.
I’m not sure I’m *entirely* convinced by that, Jim. Certainly, in the Tetris and Guitar Hero context, that’s the case. But what about - just off the top of my head - a third person action game with gruesome death animations? This isn’t merely a state of play; it has connotations much more rooted in the state of existence. That’s where it becomes more troublesome.
An action game with the gruesome death animations is an interesting example, I think. Visually, it mimics death as a state of existence - but that’s about as far as the similarity extends. Game death is so different in all other ways that it’s not really clear to me whether it would be best understood as a shallow depiction of death or just not dealing with actual death at all.
Part of the disconnect is the fact that a game model, on its own, has little to no emotional value. Making the player care about it is something that requires the narrative to show him why he should care - and most games don’t consider it worth it to do that for enemies. Even in the cases where they do try, it’s simply not possible to do that for every enemy and NPC in a game with a medium or large scope due to lack of resources. Finding a way to gain empathy procedurally through gameplay mechanics would help solve the resource problem, but a system of reward and punishment almost seems to be the antithesis of emotional engagement.
So, I don’t think the way games treat death is an accident. On the other hand, I don’t think it means all that much - film and books run into the same limitations, after all.
I think we have several different issues to deal with. They appear, to me, to be
1) Why games trivialise death and violence (I assume we mostly agree they do)
2) Whether this is specfic to games or just a reflection of our culture
3) Whether this is a good or bad thing i.e. does it affect us negatively
4) Can we ‘better’ present deat or replace it by a different game mechanic.
although I am sure we can each create our own subtly (or very) different versions.
At some point I will probably try to answer some of these, but at the moment I am not really sure where to start. For instance, we are tossing terms like ‘games’ and ‘players’ around as if we share a common understanding and they are, as groups, homogeneous.
If we start by considering the games themselves, many include little or no violence at all (puzzle games, sports games, rhythm games etc.). Games attempt to invoke immersion in different ways, with multiplayer shooters shutting down higher brain function via sensory overload and MMOs emphasising the social.
Speaking of MMO’s, people take (player) death very, very seriously there. You can get murdered (in real) for that sort of thing. Why? Because people invest so much in the game that they really do care.
And when it comes to people we play games for different reasons. Not everyone designs a (shooter) level to look like their school, complete with naked teachers and spends 8 hours a night chainsawing their genitals.
In short I believe there are unsettling games, just as there are unsettling films, but for the most part they reflect more about our culture than they contribute to it. I do feel that intellectually insubstantial games are over-represented in the market, but it is a market. If we keep buying crap, expect more to follow.
The only way people are going to start treating death more seriously in games is when you replace all the polygon and AI characters with real living entities, which will never happen and if it does then that is surely a sign of the apocalypse and its all game over anyway.
Fire Emblem.
I had great time playing this game. Try to beat me at sigizz.mybrute.com
[...] an interesting article here about the treatment of death in games, but I’ve played enough online multiplayer to know [...]