Stop Exploding at Me: Non-Violence in Video Games

One more second, you’re thinking. Just another damn second…

KABOOM.

The Spartan laser is finished charging and fires a blinding burst of plasma at a small gathering of new recruits. The lag’s been sticking its ugly head into the match today, so you have to wait a second or two before the primal screams of whoever was ignorant enough to pick an Elite avatar go soaring past your ear. “Triple Kill,” the announcer informs you, and the smirk crossing your face does little to hide the immense satisfaction of incinerating those who oppose you.

Violence! It’s the best.

Be honest with your gaming self. If you were at your angriest, your most wrathful, psychotic low, and you had the means and the will power to put a gun in your own hand, would you use it?

I can’t answer that for you, but Jack Thompson and the “violence in video games” brigade seem to think that they can. But just because you’re a Halo fanatic doesn’t mean that you are at all prepared to murder another person in real life.

Besides, if anyone saw a member of the Covenant running down a city street, the first thing they would think is “HOW DO WE KILL IT?!”

It’s true that a lot of video games use some form of violence, whether its plowing through a legion of the undead with an umbrella or jumping on a cartoon turtle. What do you expect? In video games, aliens are always burrowing up through the surface of the earth, or your princess is getting kidnapped, or you just woke up in a lab with a bloody stump for an arm while a group of scientists point and laugh at you from the other side of six inches of glass.

Violence is the only thing these warlords and werewolves and Koopa Troopas understand.

It’s become such a given in the industry that at least a little bit of carnage is expected for there to be even an ounce of fun. I was in a Halo Oddball match myself the other day while a guy on another team kept whining about how he wanted to play a match where “We just kill everybody!”

So don’t act like your eye isn’t snared when you’re cruising through a magazine and see a review for a game called “Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney,” or “Spore.” At this point, it’s jarring to think that a popular, mainstream game without violence could maintain success, when the first kind of game you thought of when you read “non-violent video games” in the title was this.

Interactive, gory, flaming violence doesn’t have a place in every game. In fact, many times, the absence of the concept is what makes a game revolutionary, interesting, or fun in a brand new way. In the past few years, we’ve seen more and more games pop up that want to engage you in the same way that violence always did…but without it.

Or at least…less of it.

In recent years, one of the most touted games to appear was Portal, a game in which you carry a gun for the entirety of the story, but don’t kill a single entity with it (companion cube notwithstanding). For once, your weapon is used to escape death, more often than dish it out.

“The game is designed to change the way players approach, manipulate, and surmise the possibilities in a given environment,” Valve writes on their web site. By its very nature, Portal isn’t meant to satisfy your blood lust, but make you think.

That’s what you get when MIT grads are designing your video games: Physics, but without the D+ like you remember.

But it doesn’t stop there.

When I first got my hands on Spore, it wasn’t even by choice. A buddy of mine had recently completed an update of my computer and left the game on there as a gift.

As you create a living organism, starting with the earliest stages of evolution, Spore plays more like an interactive lesson in biology or anatomy than something that belongs in the video game aisle. How many other games have an opening screen that says “Excreting gastrodermical system” as it loads?

If Spore were to be integrated into a classroom setting, it’s addictive and fun nature would no doubt be applied to the scientific applications in the game. Kids would be learning from something that appeared in the pages of Game Informer.

The Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney series brings back the somewhat dead genre of “point ‘n click” adventures, in which the protagonist moves the story along by a series of discoveries, rather than running through a level blasting terrorists.

Okay, yeah, you’re investigating a murder, but you’re doing it without putting a shotgun in anybody’s mouth. Using thought, connecting the dots, and putting a case together sound like office work; something that, if successfully emulated in a video game, doesn’t sound like it’d be a very high selling point.

Whether it’s the investigation mode, or the segments where you are actually in the courtroom, arguing your case, the game appeals to players. Phoenix Wright is quite famous, and has several spinoffs and sequels to prove it. Clearly, there is an interest maintained in this genre, and would-be lawyers the world over are putting this game into their Nintendo DS.

Speaking of Nintendo…

The Nintendo Wii has brought a plethora of games that haven’t relied on blowing people away. Wii Sports, Wii Fit, Wario Ware, and others like them seem more interested in getting the viewer off the couch and into the game, rather than tirelessly replaying a level because that damn sniper keeps putting a round through their eye.

This is, however, because that was the plan from the beginning. Before the Wii’s introduction to the world, Nintendo President Satoru Iwata had expressed his interest in not competing with the fellow seventh generation game consoles from Sony and Microsoft, but of bringing in a whole new generation of gamers entirely.

"We're not thinking about fighting Sony, but about how many people we can get to play games,” Iwata stated before the Wii’s release. “The thing we're thinking about most is not portable systems, consoles, and so forth, but that we want to get new people playing games."

This sense of purity gave Wii an even larger fan base before its initial release. Casting aside the educational or revolutionary benefits of throwing out violence, a staple of most games, Nintendo was taking a new angle: They just wanted everybody to play.

The double “ii” in the name “Wii” is even supposed to represent two people together, standing up. Nintendo was claiming that their loyalties lied with video games in general, in changing them, adapting them, and engaging those who had perhaps cast a judgmental eye on them prior to the Wii’s launch.

The scary part was how well it worked.

As a big corporation, it’s hard to trust if what Nintendo claimed to be their intentions were genuine. But even if it had all been a lie, more moms, dads, and technologically-impaired folks who’d never heard of Sephiroth, Albert Wesker, or GLaDOS were playing video games.

All it took was a little less bloodshed.

This isn’t to say we’ll see an end of violence in video games, or even a decline. It’s not to predict that these genre-busting affairs are going to shut up video games’ oldest critics.

But if the purpose behind the efforts of recent years is to introduce the world to a new kind of interactive fun, and go beyond the stereotype video games (and their fans) have garnered for themselves, so be it. Let’s get the nay-sayers in on the action.

I know video games are about fun (when they’re not about competition or just sheer rage). You know they are too, otherwise, you wouldn’t be reading this. It’s the same thing as critiquing a movie you haven’t seen; how can you really know you won’t like it just because Kevin Costner is on the poster?

Okay, bad example.

But the point remains valid; expand the fan base of video games and the acceptance of our hobby as an art will really start rolling.

If that means starting a revolution, which ironically will include less violence, then so be it. What harm could come from someone saying they play video games and not having the assumption be that they’re a friendless virgin?

Unless they are, of course. For some people, not even a revolution is going to change that.