Game Theory: Shooter Games Get Easier, and That Makes Change Harder

Square EnixSleeping Dogs, published by Square Enix is about an undercover detective infiltrating a Hong Kong gang and finding his loyalties divided.

Dear Stephen, Chris, assorted friends and frenemies,

Like you, Chris, I have a strong stomach for violence. But at times, as I blew the head off my hundredth pirate of the week, I began to wonder: Why shooting in particular?

If the terrific martial-arts-theme game Sleeping Dogs (think of Grand Theft Auto in Hong Kong) showed us anything this year, it's that even violent games can be a lot more fun if they don't always involve gunplay. So why do so many big-budget games still revolve around firearms?

A big part of the reason, I sense, is simple: Games feature a lot of shooting because the industry has gotten very good at making games that feature a lot of shooting.

Much of, if not most, game design is still about problem solving. Not big, high-level problems like “What are we really saying about the human-alien conflict here?” but more practical problems like “Every time this character tries to open that door, he falls through the floor, and the game crashes.” Making realistic gunfire in a game is a relatively easy programming problem to solve, if only because it has been solved so many times before.

On the flip side longtime players have gotten good at using guns. We've all learned how to aim, how to fire, when to flank and when to reload. It's easy to embrace our respective roles , because we've been embracing them for so long.

It can be difficult for some to imagine change.

This year some forum posters dug up an old interview with the BioWare writer Jennifer Hepler in which she mentioned how she would be interested in seeing her employer's Mass Effect games include an option to skip combat sections and focus exclusively on story. What a fine idea. The strength of the Mass Effect games has always been their believable characters and dramatic story lines. For merely suggesting the option to remove violence Ms. Hepler was met with a hysterical, coordinated online hate campaign.

Despite the mainstream games industry's tentative steps toward alternatives, shooting games continue to get incrementally better, and critics - myself included - often laud them for that. The assault ri fles in this game “feel good”; the shotguns in that game are “punchy and satisfying.” This year Rockstar's Max Payne 3 was the go-to example of a well-made shooter, regularly spitting out slow-motion action sequences so balletic and brutal they inspired in me potent feelings of awe and revulsion.

Yet 2012 also gave us a wealth of outstanding nonviolent games. Stephen, I'll second the recommendations on your list, particularly the life-affirming, wondrous Journey and add a call-out to Thirty Flights of Loving, a fascinating little thing from Blendo Games that crams more story and intrigue into its 15-minute running time than an action game like Far Cry 3 manages in 25 hours. I also enjoyed < a href="http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/tag/ftl-faster-than-light/">FTL (Faster Than Light), an addictive starship-management simulator that is perhaps best described as “Star Trek” meets Oregon Trail.

And then there's the game you both have already mentioned: The Walking Dead, from Telltale. (And might I add, referring to a game about zombies as a “no-brainer?” Well done, Mr. Totilo.)

Rarely have I been so affected by a video game story or so haunted by the consequences of my own lackluster decision-making skills. Stephen, you mention the reverence with which The Walking Dead treats life. I think that ties in with something crucial to the game's success: it's violent, but the violence feels consequential.

Not all video game violence is created equal. It's a concept that the game designer Steve Gaynor calls “specific violence,” and it can be instructive in understanding why some game deaths affect us more than others.

In so many games enemies are dehumanized. They charge at us, copy-pasted zombies, pirates and zombie-pirates, dying at our feet by the dozen. They're not really people; they're obstacles to overcome. (This happens in movies too. Think of the countless anonymous dudes offed by, say, Rambo.) But the moment we put a name and a face to a character, violence against him or her becomes specific, more meaningful.

The Walking Dead never resorts to the sorts of killing sprees that undead hordes can make so palatable. The zombies here are never faceless cannon fodder. They exist at the periphery, a framework for a more interesting human story.

What violence there is in The Walking Dead is certainly specific, often heartbreakingly so. Every character has a name and a back story, and over the course of the game's five epis odes I grew to like or loathe them all as they supported, failed, relied on and betrayed me. Each time one of them died, I felt real loss.

It seems fair to concede that violence in games is, if not a problem, certainly an issue worth discussing. But is the issue video game violence in general, or the nature of that violence? Is the problem that our chess pieces bleed and cry out, or that we're being conditioned not to mind when they do? And if more game makers find a way to move beyond the shooting galleries of the present, won't the games of the future be stronger for it?

Kirk

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