Game Theory: Caring About Make-Believe Body Counts

Brendan Hoffman for The New York TimesWayne LaPierre, vice president of the National Rifle Association, blamed violent video games, among other things, for the shootings in Newtown, Conn.

Dear Chris, Kirk and the rest,

Let's talk about violent video games and the year's most surprising backlash against them.

I'm not referring to the recent argument by Wayne LaPierre of the National Rifle Association about the “dirty little truth” of a gaming “shadow industry” that “sows violence against its own people.” In the same speech, in which he said adding more armed guards in schools could stop m assacres like the one in Connecticut, his main attack on games involved showing a scene from a crude, obscure Web game called Kindergarten Killer that was apparently made by a teenager 10 years ago. Mr. LaPierre scolded the news media for either not discovering it or for suppressing knowledge of its existence.

Though Mr. LaPierre railed against violent games and movies, he found himself with few allies. Even State Senator Leland Yee, a California Democrat who took his fight against the legality of selling children violent video games to the Supreme Court (where he lost on First Amendment grounds), called Mr. LaPierre's move against games “mind-boggling.”

It's not that everyone but leaders of the N.R.A. suddenly loves violent games. Many, includin g Mr. Yee, remain troubled by the abundance of violence and cite disputed studies that claim violent, Mature-rated games might make children more aggressive. That there are tens of millions of violent games sold in America each year and yet a blessed paucity of mass shootings ruins just about any argument that the games inspired the shootings, yet the more general concerns persist that games are often coarse and part of a culture that ignores real violence while casually championing lurid fake violence.

The N.R.A.'s attack on games wasn't the surprise.

In June, however, it was a shock to see those who play them or make them rail against them. The occasion was E3, the annual showcase of the biggest Xbox, PlayStation and Wii games. The loudest voice yet from the industry's mainstream was the respected veteran game designer Warren Spector, who cast his gaze across the show and told GamesIndusty.biz: “The ultraviolence has to stop. We have to stop loving it. I just don't believe in the effects argument at all, but I do believe that we are fetishizing violence, and now in some cases actually combining it with an adolescent approach to sexuality. I just think it's in bad taste. Ultimately I think it will cause us trouble.”

Mr. Spector's allies were abundant, as critics tabulated the body counts in the game trailers that ran at E3 and wondered whether ultraviolence in games was, if not the enemy of peaceful society, at least an obstruction to sophisticated artistic expression.

It helps to remember that video games are forever evolving, and that few people who make or play games consider the medium to be mature or even far past the zygote stage. While the critics who write overviews of the year in movies or music can casually measure offerings to canons of classics, people who appreciate video games live with both the woe and the excitement that most of humanity's best games have yet to be made. This allows creators, critics and players to wonder if any new gaming development or tired cliché is actually a useful part of the form's evolution or a Neanderthalic dead end. Some debates, like whether it is beneficial for characters to talk - for them to emit sound rather than express themselves through on-screen text - may be familiar to aficionados of other forms of entertainment.

Those familiar with games who debate the medium's violence now commonly assume that games may have become too violent. But they don't assume that games should be free of violence. That is because of fake violence's relationship with interactivity, which is a defining element of video games.

Simulated violence is, arguably and perversely, an efficient means to generating fun through interactiv ity. Nongamers may be horrified by that statement, but those who have tried Pac-Man, Tetris, Angry Birds or Super Mario Bros. will recognize that a player's agency in an interactive game is best conveyed through the act of obliteration.

To put it in the terms of a nonvideo game: There is clear satisfaction in figuring out how to get my chess piece to wipe your chess piece from the table. A problem with violent video games, and the thing I think Mr. Spector was reacting to, is that many are created in such a manner that the chess piece is programmed to scream and bleed and explode and entertain its player through some sort of punctuation of gore.

The game is created with the assumption that the interaction alone won't please the player, and therefore the interaction must end with a gruesome thrill. Even a video game with guns and soldiers can and often is strategically interesting to play. But at E3 and afterward I heard a rare chorus of creators, critics and fans wondering, more or less, if too many chess pieces were bleeding and if it was not really helping games be any more fun or tasteful. I expect that query to have more impact on the nature of violence in future games than any pressure from the outside.

A screen image from Letterpress.

There may well be people, however, who simply wish to play games that don't contain violence. For them I'd say 2012's best games include:

¶Super Hexagon, a hypnotic phone or computer puzzle game that more or less charges the player with weaving a triangle through an ever-constricting spinning drain of psychedelic colors.

¶Letterpress, a multiplayer word game played on phones that turns Boggle-like rules into a competitive land grab.

¶Journey, a video game version of a hike through a dreamscape, rendered exclusively on the PlayStation 3.

¶Dys4ia, a brief and, unusually, autobiographical Web game about a game designer's experience starting hormone replacement therapy.

¶Professor Layton and the Miracle Mask, a mystery story for the Nintendo 3DS that is advanced by completing brain teasers; it packs oddball side games, including one that charges you with teaching a rabbit to act in stage plays.

But if you want to play a 2012 game that has something to say about violence this year or that at least treats violence as something we should have a reaction to, one of Chris's standouts, the Walking Dead, is the no-brainer. In this game, guns are as horrif ying as they are useful. All life is treated with reverence. And killing, in a rare but healthy turn for video games, is no amusement.

Stephen