The older I get the more unnecessary all the violence in entertainment seems. Not unnecessary for entertainment, just unnecessary for the situation being portrayed.
Has anyone else grown weary of mindless killing being so prevalent in games?
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I usually have the opposite problem. In Dragon Age I wanted to be merciful but the game had a fixed amount of enemies, and I couldn't max level if I spared anyone. Gladly, I discovered I could level up by donating to allies.Paradoxrifts said:
Yes. I've been weary of it since I was about 15yo (12 years ago). It's the reason I don't play games like Grand Theft Auto, as I personally don't find it too fun running down pedestrians, and even feel a bit back about it sometimes when I do it by accident.
I do play shooters, but they are more akin to Panzer Dragoon, the old Resident Evils, Dino Crisis, etc.
On the rare occasion, when I play a game like, say, Army of Two, I don't feel so bad when I see how much the enemy REALLY wants to kill me. Then again, 40th Day also allows you to arrest some of the enemies also, which was a nice feature.
I do play shooters, but they are more akin to Panzer Dragoon, the old Resident Evils, Dino Crisis, etc.
On the rare occasion, when I play a game like, say, Army of Two, I don't feel so bad when I see how much the enemy REALLY wants to kill me. Then again, 40th Day also allows you to arrest some of the enemies also, which was a nice feature.
I don't know that I've grown weary of it. I do, however, wish for more diversity in that regard. There are some games where the violence, particularly the overdone overblown constant violence is at odds with whatever else the game is trying to do. Violence is just the unfortunate default and it ends up hurting games that clearly aspire to more.
This may sound odd, but Max Payne 3 actually sort of touched on this.
That's really weird, because I'm pretty sure you kill a couple of thousand people in a single play through, which is absurd. It is Kill Everyone: The Game. And yet, somehow, the game makes you feel those deaths. Everyone you're killing deserves it in some way or another, but it's just so exhausting. I reached the end of the game and felt emotionally drained by all the killing. It was very bizarre, because this is a Max Payne game.
That's really weird, because I'm pretty sure you kill a couple of thousand people in a single play through, which is absurd. It is Kill Everyone: The Game. And yet, somehow, the game makes you feel those deaths. Everyone you're killing deserves it in some way or another, but it's just so exhausting. I reached the end of the game and felt emotionally drained by all the killing. It was very bizarre, because this is a Max Payne game.
You couldn't have picked a worse example. First of all, The Walking Dead does EVERYTHING in it's power to make you care about the characters and a chance to bond with them, and deaths actually have an impact. And this shoot-out only occurred once in the game, and very briefly at that.GodzillaGuy92 said:
Secondly, in that particular situation it's in everyone's best interest to kill them. If faced with such a life threatening situation IRL, would you stop a second to think "hey, wait a tick! killing is wrong!" ? No, you definitely wouldn't. You'd have to make a split second decision; it's either them, or you. It's not mindlessly killing of hordes of faceless enemies for little to no reason (which is what this thread is about), you kill because you (and your group) have to survive. It's basic survival instinct, that fits in great with the rest of the game.
I agree with this. FC3 is a good example. Truly an astounding masterpiece, but when Jason goes from "baww I can't do this" when he and his brother kill guards to escape captivity, to wrestling tigers with one hand and mowing down pirates with the other, it comes across as a bit disingenuous, to say the least.StriderShinryu said:
Another example is the new Tomb Raider (which is a shitty excuse for a game to begin with, but let's put that aside). One moment Lara is tearfully apologizing to a deer for killing it, being scared and alone, and the next she is (quite literally) crawling over dead bodies, setting dudes on fire and visiting truly horrific altars for human sacrifice, and is completely unshakable by all of this. Any sensible person in these kinds of situations would go "OMG WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK! THAT IS MESSED UP!!"
In both cases it breaks any sense of progression in character development. Maybe it would be a good idea to add some kind of inner monologues? Like, where the protagonist criticizes his/her (your) actions that seem needlessly violent or point out ways of solving issues other than holding down the trigger until everything is dead (which wouldn't be considered just morally questionable, but also very dangerous and illogical by any sensible human being)? I'm not saying that killing in a video game is inherently wrong, I'm just saying that it would be nice to have some (optional) moderation of it, with reasons other than 'because the game tells you to', and the protagonist (and possibly any NPCs that witnessed your heinous act) to be visibly shaken by this
Seeing as both of these games are quite new, maybe we could see them as the first couple baby steps, of an industry venturing into the unknown? Perhaps there is hope for the future, only time can tell.
Absolutely this. I was really, really into the game, absolutely immersed into it like I haven't been in years, and then... I shredded a guy's face with my hook-thing and started gunning down cops five seconds later, and I'm left with this feeling like "oh, yeah... that's what this game is." Still enjoyed it, but I wasn't ever able to recapture the immersion I felt at the beginning. Matter of fact, for the next 45 minutes I was kinda hoping 'well it's gonna go back to the way it was... right?'Luca72 said:
Not to say I don't enjoy a speck o' the old ultra-violence here and there - I play borderlands 2 every other day and for awhile, prided myself on my zombie kill count across games that kept track, then stopped counting once it hit 100,000. It's just... why does every game need it? Far Cry 3 for example - you start out horrified at death and killing, and by the end of the game you're standing on such a giant pile of bodies you don't even recognize the emotions you felt at the start of the game.
It's a shame, a real shame that games rely so heavily on the mass of people you're killing and not the volume of what you've been doing.
Personally, no because I like mindless killing as long as it's intense enough and the combat system is good..
I like mindless violence in games. I find it actually sort of frees up my mind, and that's part of the reason I play.
I don't think I'll ever get weary of mindless killing.
However, I'd really like to see more than just mindless killing in the industry, so maybe the answer here is actually yes.
I'm confused.
I don't think I'll ever get weary of mindless killing.
However, I'd really like to see more than just mindless killing in the industry, so maybe the answer here is actually yes.
I'm confused.
No, because it's not remotely like killing an actual person. Hell, it's not even similar to killing an animal which you have no emotional attachment to (ie not a pet).
I can generally rationalize it and ignore it....until I can't. Like Bioshock Infinite. I can look at the story and characterization and think "yeah, that's pretty solid." And then I look behind me and realize I slaughtered 50 people to get through the last area alone. And when I realize I'm apparently the unstoppable avatar of death, I get taken out of the experience. "How does the narrative carry any weight," I ask myself, "if the protagonist can march against all these enemies and lay waste to them without issues? Booker is supposed to be dealing with crippling guilt from Wounded Knee, and then he just plows through the militia T-1000-style and he has no qualms?"
It becomes an example of storytelling and gameplay becoming separated, which is something people keep telling me Bioshock is good at. But if a character's actions conflict with his character that much, maybe we can lessen the amount of cannon fodder enemies, or maybe have Booker express his feelings about wholesale slaughter every once in a while. At least don't make him SAW PEOPLE'S FRIGGIN' HEADS OFF.
It becomes an example of storytelling and gameplay becoming separated, which is something people keep telling me Bioshock is good at. But if a character's actions conflict with his character that much, maybe we can lessen the amount of cannon fodder enemies, or maybe have Booker express his feelings about wholesale slaughter every once in a while. At least don't make him SAW PEOPLE'S FRIGGIN' HEADS OFF.
And that's exactly the problem. There's no immersion. The killing feels more like running a pest control service, rather than taking a person's life, something that is supposed to have deep impact on anyone that isn't completely psychotic.Christopher Fisher said:
Perhaps I should clarify: I'm not saying that the game is providing me with a group of baddies that it expects me to kill simply for the fun of it or because it's somehow a given that video games must involve you killing people - or, for that matter, that the depicted situation isn't harrowing or desperate. Moreover, I hold nothing but admir-/adoration for the extent to which The Walking Dead was able to make me emotionally invested in the story and characters, and as I mentioned, almost the entire rest of the game does indeed do a superb job of giving death the proper impact. The shootout was a brief, one-time event located in an amazing game, but that doesn't mean that said event wasn't detrimental, however slightly.NearLifeExperience said:
As for the rest, I've never been faced with such a situation in real life, so I have no way of knowing how I would respond. But that's irrelevant, because the game's job isn't to make me take a step back and consider how I might realistically respond to its events were they transposed to real life (if that were true, I wouldn't be able to enjoy the violence of Painkiller because, if I was actually in that situation, I'd almost certainly be too frightened for my life to have any fun fighting the demons); the game's job is to make me respond to them within the context of the game. In The Walking Dead's case, it failed to make me respond in such a way that I wasn't concerned with the morality of what it was making me do, which became problematic when it decided to forge on ahead with it anyway. Yes, from a survival standpoint, it was in everyone's best interest that I killed the bandits. But so was
me killing Danny, Andy, and especially Larry in Episode 2,
Nathan Drake isn't a sociopath, far from it, he's actually a fairly selfless individual (at least in the first two, I haven't played 3 and thus cannot judge it).j-e-f-f-e-r-s said:
When they're on the island in 1, Drake actually wants to leave because things are getting dangerous, the only reason he doesn't is because he wants to find out what happened to his mentor. The reason he's killing people is because they shot his plane down and are aggressively trying to kill him (with no provocation) while he tries to find Elena. When he decides to stop the villain, it's not because he wants the treasure, it's because he wants to save Elena (and potentially the world).
He's even more selfless in 2 when he carries a gunshot victim (who he only met a few in game hours before) even though they are being attacked by a gunship and the more self centered option of leaving him is brought up repeatedly by Drake's partner. When he decides to stop the villain it's not because he wants the treasure, it's so that he can save the world. Again, the option of just leaving is brought up, and again he turns it down. It should also be noted that during the Museum tutorial level, Drake refuses to even shoot any guards until he is reassured that his gun is loaded with tranquilizers.
While granted he is a grave robbing criminal, in almost every gun battle it is the people he's killing that were the aggressors.
I've only seen one legitimate examples of ludo-narrative dissonance in the series: In 2 during the Museum level, when Drake throws a guard off the roof to teach the player how to perform a stealth take-down, even though he had just refused to shoot anyone on the grounds that they might die.
The new Tomb Raider is an odd duckling... because the reason Lara goes from her first kill being emotionally difficult to becoming a coldblooded murderer is that she's player controlled. And we as players have all killed thousands if not hundreds of thousands. When I came upon enemies in Tomb Raider I crept up close, listened to them talking to their buddies, then silently stuck an arrow through the back of each of their necks. Those are the actions of a hardened killer, and the game couldn't keep the player actions and Lara's cutscenes in check with each other, Just like how Niko Bellic in cutscenes lamented wholesale slaughter before killing hundreds of people for fun while under the player's control.
