Valve’s new “Meet The Pyro” video reminds me of a theory someone told me once about Half-Life. It went like this: Gordon Freeman is an insane psychopath who wanders the streets heartlessly murdering everyone he meets, and the game is all just his hallucination. Makes sense, doesn’t it? This “it was all a dream” type of explanation seems almost preferable to the completely loony actual plot of Half-Life when taken at face value. For one thing, there’s this nonsense about aliens, other dimensions, giant bugs, and zombies. For another thing, there’s the fact that the only thing Gordon ever does, aside from jumping and picking up boxes, is shoot people. How else could you explain that?
Games don’t have to make sense. In fact, most of the time they probably shouldn’t make sense. Games are about alternate worlds, which are as appealing to us as they are different from our own lives. It’s an old joke by now that a completely “realistic” game about daily life, cleaning the house, going to the office, and so on would be an immense bore. But games are more than just alternate worlds, they’re alternate realities. In the world (or perhaps a better term would be the fiction) of Half-Life, an alien race has enslaved Earth. In the reality of Half-Life, you progress by shooting and solving physics puzzles.
It’s tempting to criticize games by how their own realities stack up against our own (is it significant that you can only win the game by killing thousands of people?), but we can’t forget that within game worlds, all of the shooting and killing is not (as) horrific as in real life. It’s actually fairly normal, just as commonplace as daily housework is here. After all, who are we to impose our preconceptions of “reality” onto this other world?
Think about that next time you joke about how silly it is that Mario eats mushrooms to grow bigger, or that the dragonborn can put buckets on people’s heads and steal their goods, or how honey on cat hair makes a mustache. To them, your life is just as strange. When visiting a videogame world, we have to remember that we’re guests in their culture and in their laws of nature.
This post was written by John on the blog Games Aren't Numbers. You can read more on the Home page and the Archive. Feel free to share your thoughts about this post using the commenting tools below!
Comment by Grayson Davis on June 29, 2012 04:29 AM UTC #
"we can’t forget that within game worlds, all of the shooting and killing is not (as) horrific as in real life."
I don't really think this is true, at least not how you present it. You draw a comparison between the cartoon fantasy of the Mario world and the ubiquitous murder of a first-person shooter, but don't bridge those two concepts outside of connecting them under the very broad umbrella of 'video games.'
Rather, this seems like a circular argument. If you create an extremely violent game, then you can justify it by saying, "Look at all of this violence - it is obviously less meaningful in this world than in the real world." It's a cop-out, in other words. We do not judge video game violence on a graph, where quantity negatively correlates with horror. Similarly, just because Skyrim is a video game does not mean it is necessarily okay that you can put buckets on people's heads. Games, like any other medium, need to create a world where these things are either acceptable or excusable. Sometimes games succeed, sometimes they do not.
Here are a few things I've written that I think are relevant to this:
http://beepsandboops.com/2011/11/skyrim-and-the-problem-of-audience/
http://beepsandboops.com/2010/08/kane-a-lynch-a-murder-simulators-3/
Comment by John (author) on June 29, 2012 05:38 PM UTC #
I don't necessarily think you're wrong (in case it wasn't obvious, my post was partially tongue-in-cheek), and I certainly did not mean to argue that we should not be critical of the "ultraviolence" in games. Games like Kane and Lynch (which I haven't played) or Madworld or others that glorify disgusting brutality certainly need to be held accountable for that fact. Violence itself is a whole can of worms I didn't intend to open, just the general absurdities of gaming.
Now, I do disagree with the points you make about Skyrim in particular. To me, all of the details like being able to collect buckets and steal people's clothing is exactly *why* I like that game so much. If the developers tried to mute all of those abilities, forcing everyone to play the game completely straight-faced, it would not be nearly as fun or interesting to me. I want to be able to creatively manipulate the rules of the game. In fact, I believe that being able to do so can be hugely beneficial. For example take rocket-jumping, which started out as an unintentional side effect of a physics engine but now there are games that encourage it as a skill.
Sure, watching someone play Skyrim (or virtually any game) often looks silly to the audience, but I don't see that as a bad thing. Letting us interpret the unexpected emergent events on the screen is one feature that only videogames can provide.
Comment by Grayson Davis on July 01, 2012 04:48 PM UTC #
I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing that Skyrim looks so silly to a spectator. It's very much a single-player game, and I think all of those absurdities fold into an engrossing first-person game and sort of disappear. But I think Skyrim *earns* that with its design. It is easy to imagine an open-world fantasy RPG that is blatantly silly, in a bad way, even to the player.
Anyway, I didn't mean to respond so strongly to your post, because I agree with the general point of it: that video games worlds operate according to different rules and expectations, even compared to other fictional media. I think my Skyrim post sort of bolsters that. But it's also a pet peeve of mine to see people dismiss video game violence as obviously silly because there's so much of it - something which you barely do here, but which still rubbed me the wrong way.
Comment by Dr. Bytes on July 03, 2012 02:29 PM UTC #
"It’s an old joke by now that a completely “realistic” game about daily life, cleaning the house, going to the office, and so on would be an immense bore."
I tend to agree, however, the ever-successful "The Sims" franchise players may argue.
I recall a time in the past, as I went over to visit a friend in his new house. Stereotypical bachelor, his sink was full of dirty dishes. The irony, as I watched him play a "new" game at the time on his PC (The Sims), that his comment was: "Look, I can improve my happiness by making my Sim do the dishes after eating!"