Unreliable Narrator

Exploring stories in games and the art of telling tales

The silver lining of lockdown is that I have gone a whole 12 months without having to answer innocently phrased questions about my thoughts on “violent videogames”. These conversations are most difficult because I’m never quite sure what I actually think. Easy enough for me as Mr Indie Story Games to dump on Call Of Duty and take the moral high ground. But do I want to? With other media I’m the first to leap to the defence of violence, artistic or otherwise; I’ll quote David Cronenberg talking about A History Of Violence and how he needs to mediate his relationship to the violence that exists in much of the world. But are games different? In the absence of dinner-party chat to hash it out, this topic has been on my mind. I’ve just started work on a new game and it’s one that will let players fight and kill. It’s been a minute since I’ve had to wrestle with these ideas, and my mind is a jumble.

Yesterday I watched an old video of myself promoting my first professional game, Serious Sam: The Next Encounter. It was funny seeing my baby face earnestly pitch the game’s weapons and gory cartoon violence. “You have double-fisted Uzis! You can powerslide your jeep into enemies to make roadkill!” Bless that game and its underwhelming subtitle.

Before I joined the industry I made a text game that was born of my frustration that, even at the height of the genre’s literary ambitions, players would gleefully type narratively dissonant violent instructions as a way of kidding around inside a game’s simulation. The standard Infocom parser response was “Violence isn’t the answer to this one”. My game tried to make the player feel bad by taking those inputs at face value and actually acting on them. “OK, what if we do ‘attack woman’? This is probably a story about a psychopath.” As I tested the game, in attempting to support all the sociopathic commands, I ended up digging deeper to accommodate all possible commands, and the game became about looking for something deeper once violence was exhausted.

I remember a focus test for a motocross game that was dying because the kids didn’t care for the licence. We quickly improvised a new pitch that emphasised the violence and bloody crashes, and saw the kids’ faces light up. The resulting game would reward you for deliberately crashing your vehicle and causing dramatic accidents, but was not a homage to JG Ballard. (Justifying his violence, Ballard considered himself someone who stands in the road and waves to warn “danger ahead.”)

I remember feeling physically sick when I read that the curb-stomp move in Gears Of War’s multiplayer mode was inspired by a scene from American History X, a movie about white-supremacist violence.

I remember the disputes about removing the ability to fight in Silent Hill: Shattered Memories. We talked a lot about the redundancy of combat in most games. We analysed hundreds of horror movies to remind ourselves that the good ones identified with a vulnerable victim for whom fighting back was pointless. Facing death through their suffering was cathartic. The zombie films that inspired a lot of videogame violence were a product of the anger of the ’60s. Their trick was to show man’s violence to man with a conceit that had us identify with the killers. A zombie is a person it’s OK to shotgun in the head. To use that as our framework for our story was undesirable.

I worked on a game for a big publisher that had ‘visceral combat’ in its bulleted feature list. We sent team members down safe-search-disabled research rabbit holes to discover fresh ideas for contractually required kill animations. One day I saw some developers fighting through a test room full of clones of my favourite story NPC, pulverising them. Everyone was laughing at the sheer horrific spectacle of it. I was reminded of homicide detectives and the sick humour that they develop to deal with proximity to death.

I look at the game I’m making now. It’s a horror game and at its heart are various types of violence. Like all horror stories, it’s about reckoning with our mortality. Why do we fight and kill? To survive. To eat. For fun? I don’t really think it’s possible to make a game about violence if the core loop is violence. We know it’s hard to analyse a system while also existing within it. Can you really make a point about violence if you’ve balanced the shotgun so it feels really good? It’s a scam.

I think I had the right idea with my text game. The violence is there. But perhaps the point isn’t the violence itself but what comes after, once we’ve exhausted it?

Can you really make a point about violence if you’ve balanced the shotgun so it feels really good?