At the end of ‘Combat in Context’, Montfort asks three questions pertaining to the videogame Combat: Is it violent? Is it a narrative? What story does it tell? Though he comes to the conclusion that Combat lacks a narrative form and therefore does not tell a certain story, Montfort does believe Combat is violent. It was very interesting to read how Montfort chose to explain his beliefs. For example, Montfort talks of how Combat’s violence is not exactly visually stimulating, but rather holds the implication of violence. Though one is not actually seeing the blood and gore you might find in the Grand Theft Auto series, violence is implied in Combat as the goal of the game is to eliminate your opponent using ‘warfare’.
Combat made it’s debut in 1977, managing to offend certain audiences with it’s implied violence (as stated in Montfort’s essay). After I read Montfort’s article, I took into consideration the aspects of implied violence he mentioned in his essay while playing Pac-Man. I was wondering what people thought of Pac-Man when it first came out in 1980. Was/Is Pac-Man considered a violent game? It seems as though, in present day, it’s hard to find a videogame that’s not centered on violence. Even in most advanced sports games you can pick fights with the other athletes. What’s so appealing about violence, anyway? If we stripped videogames of all forms of implied violence, would there be anything left?
Katie Williams- First Reader
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Many games are starting to experiment with the notion that combat is not necessary for a good game. This can be seen in puzzle games dating back as far as tetris, to be sure. However, recently game developers have been actively trying to create games without combat. The effects of this can be seen in games like flower, which is made by thatgamecompany, the same studio responsible for flOW.
If you consider other aspects of pop culture and movies, it’s almost impossible to entirely avoid violence. Soap operas have violent murders, kids’ shows regularly kill main characters only to bring them back to life. And this isn’t just a recent trend. If you consider Disney movies, even back to the 1950’s, there has always done some level of violence, implied or otherwise, against the supposed villains. Our culture is one that is amused by violence, so it’s not exactly something you can just ignore. Judging by video game sales and blockbuster movies, people are not going to do away with violence any time soon. Sure, there are games and movies that don’t have violence in them, but they aren’t nearly as popular or well known as their compatriots on the shelves.
Henry Jenkins, whom I mentioned in class today, argues that videogames are not about violence so much as they are about contested space. A majority of games are really about controlling or mastering space. And what violence occurs is all in the name of eliminating obstacles that might prevent the player from controlling that screen space. It’s an intriguing theory, and moves us away from talking strictly about violence to the other less obvious “contests” that appear in games.
Rather then finding it easy to see examples of violence in video games, I have a hard time finding anything that I consider “violent.” To me violence implies an intentional act of harm against a feeling creature. When I play a video game without anyone else where is the feeling creature that I am harming? Video game designers have certainly gotten better at making me empathize with graphically generated animations. But as human as those animations look there is no brain behind them to feel pain or joy about how I treat them. At best there is a computer, and even if you think the computer is somehow alive what does it care if I am jumping around crushing boxes or kumbas?
To me, committing genocide in a single-player video game is less violent then stepping on someone’s toe in real life. I play games by attempting to master the mechanical challenges while advancing the story line. I tend to disconnect the storyline/narrative with the mechanical challenges. Even in some of the best AAA and indie titles out there I feel little connection between the narrative and the mechanics. The mechanics of Pandemic II involve gaining ‘research’ pts over time in order to ‘evolve’ your organism for a strategy that gets you the most points. If you win the game you have created a disease that has wiped out the entire human race. Its a fun game, and far from being happy to see the human race regularly survive, it is frustrating (whoever runs Madagascar is paranoid).
The best case for claiming that there is violence in video games involves competitive multiplayer games, where your victory means someone else’s defeat. But if these are violent then so are all sports which face the same dichotomy.
I don’t deny that there are narratives that address human violence, but they do not make the game mechanics violent. And no matter how good the narrative of a single player game is it will never be on par with the destructive nature of real world violence.
I don’t think that violence is necessary for games, but without something to help deter you from your goal, the game would just keep going. And going. And going.
If you think about games like Pitfall (for the Atari), it could be considered violent that if your little guy doesn’t quite make it all the way across the swamp, he’ll fall and an alligator will eat him. But then really, what’s the goal? What’s the adventure? If all you have to do is swing over swamps or holes, but nothing “bad” happens if you don’t, players will get very bored very quickly.
Not all games require violence to deter you from your goal. In board games (or even electronic board games), certain things can happen to keep you from winning within minutes. You take a “detour.” You “go to jail.” You “lose your turn.” You “go back three spaces.”
So, no, violence isn’t necessary in games, and I think that there are a handful of games out there that could (and do!) function without violence. But there has to be some kind of rule or some kind of constraint, and violence can sometimes provide that. Think about the “Every Day the Same Dream” game we’re playing for class tomorrow. This guy keeps doing the same exact thing, and after he sits at his cubicle, the game just restarts…and restarts…and restarts…until you walk him past his cubicle and you are given the option to let him “jump.” Violent? Yes. But you don’t see what happens after. The game just restarts. Interesting to think about!
On the topic of Every Day the Same Dream, I thought this was the whole game at first as well. It is not. Try to play it again, it’s not nearly as bleak of a game is it seems, although the rudimentary gameplay and monochromatic art style make it seem that way at first.