The Necessity of Violence
BADBLOOD is a 1 vs. 1 stealth-action game that focuses on the skill of outsmarting another player and deducing quickly and carefully their location. It’s a game about tricking and killing your opponent before they kill you.
At the end of every round I made these graphic kill-screens that detail the murder in a cartoonish and exaggerated way.
While developing this game, I was asked a couple times: “why does it have to be so violent?”
The question sat weird with me, because it questions the necessity of violence. The question isn’t about whether they like or dislike it. It’s asking: “Aren’t we better than this?” Are we not intelligent, compassionate people who have evolved past this barbarism?
I think this question stems not from the excess of violence in video games, but because the video game’s employment of violence is not convincing to us. It’s because usually, when we think about what violence is doing in video games, what generally comes to mind is this:
It’s easy to question the necessity of violence in the medium that is often associated with young children, because it’s so gratuitous. Must video games emulate so much violence? Do I really need to shoot that guy in the head ten times to get that high-end gear? Must I eviscerate this other guy to get points, or a key? Can’t the job be done without that?
It’s just as easy to tell those who do not enjoy violent video games: play something else. This response is also valid, but it is not very interesting.
Our relationship to violence in games is more complicated than the dialogue we’re having about it. Despite our natural repulsion to violence the majority of video games are built on the foundation of it — whether it is the beating, the caging, the killing, or some other form of eradication of “an other”.
As far as violent games go, BADBLOOD is not particularly bloody. It’s certainly not realistic in its bloodiness. But something about it makes players wince. Even those with iron stomachs devolve into yelps, struggling to keep composure.
This is because what violence is actually doing in video games is this:
I remember this game that came with our Windows 95, where you’re a mouse that pushes blocks around and you try not to get eaten by cats.
As a 5-year-old, this was traumatizing.
I remember perfectly my fear of the cat who was this deadly force, ever-moving towards you and able to travel DIAGONALLY through blocks. The panic I felt as the potential for violence drew near is still alive and well in me. I felt crazy coming back to it, over and over again, as though I reveled in that helplessness.
The violence here is low-res. It’s not a realistic simulation, there is no blood, no squeaks of horror — but it’s potent. Even today after years of FPS’s and parkouring over dead bodies, I’m on edge just looking at this.
Something I failed to realize at the time, however, was that the player is also an aggressor, and one with more advantages than the cat. The player can manipulate the environment, cage the cats in and turn them into cheese. The way to win is to come to terms with one’s own aggression, and to start using it effectively. It is to learn to be violent.
The thing about most of the violent games that I’ve played and have loved since, is that they’re not really about violence. They have violence in them, but it isn’t the focus.
They are more about exercises in tact, moderation, precision. They are tests of memory, spatial cognition, of my ability to manipulate software to gain advantage. The act of violence is down-played. It’s a second thought.
They are dart games wearing the mask of brutal carnage. I am shown these graphic, slow-mo shots of my bullet shattering this guy’s skull, and it’s cool and everything, but it fails to inspire the visceral reaction I have as even the mouse in Rodent’s Revenge. These guys are nothing to that cat I’m churning into cheese.
It’s difficult to feel at risk in this kind of one-way system. Acts of violence feel like wrestling with a rulebook. I am more affected by getting check-mated, or losing at Go.
The presence of violence in a video game is there to remind us of what we are capable of doing, and what can easily and in equal measure be done unto us. Games in which the player never feels at risk for being violent makes the violence meaningless: excessive when unrestricted, frustrating when it is. It leads to questions like: “Why does a game need that?” And the answer is: it shouldn’t.
Some games try to justify its violence through heavy-handed moral lessons. These are games about the consequences of violence, with mechanics and cutscenes that are there to show how bad violence is. They make me murder people thoughtlessly, and then remind me to feel bad about it.
But why admonish the player for violence that is hard-coded? I only did what the game empowered me to do. These games assume I cannot feel remorse for my own violent actions, and then take responsibility for them on my behalf.
Other games try to do away with moral consequences altogether. These games are about killing zombies and pandering to my bloodlust. They often have very graphic depiction of violence, modded with a moral loop-hole. Switching out humans for aliens or blood for oil, making violence a bit more consumable, easier to swallow. Like fast food, where we get the desired result (carnage) without having to suffer the unpleasant side effects (guilt, fear).
These games desensitize us to the sight of massacre at our hands. Of blood and guts and necks snapped backwards. They make our enemies brainless and heartless by accentuating their otherness, or less pitiable with alternatives to bullet and flesh. We’re not even thinking about what we’re doing, we’re just getting points.
It’s the game saying “It’s fine, they’re not alive and none of this is real”, and I should feel patronized, but I’m not even that. I care so little about the acts of violence I’m performing, I don’t need to take the mental effort to separate it from reality.
And even the games that are about violence spend a lot of time making excuses for it, making sure we don’t feel like we are being aggressive or a bad person. It assures us that our acts are justified.
But when is violence justified?
When I was making BADBLOOD I watched a lot of nature shows, with David Attenborough crooning the laws of the natural world, where the act of violence is held with the same necessity and dignity as playing and resting and caring for family.
I watched Tarantino movies, samurai comics, TV shows like Vikings where violence is both the foundation of society and also the show’s main aesthetic.
Biblically the first murder to have ever been performed by a human was fraternal. It was a determined, thoughtful act of one brother scorned by his father’s favoritism, killing the other.
Murder existed in media for as long as media existed, for as long as there were people on earth. Violence is as much a capacity in us as empathy is, as hunger is. It’s unnecessary for video games to compensate for its excess. They just need to be more convincing.
I wanted BADBLOOD’s main protagonist and narrator to be visceral and extravagant human violence. Humans are both passionate and vulnerable — and I wanted to inspire this behavior in players. I wanted them to play as characters that want to live just as much as they do, equally afflicted by the limitations of their physical ability and wits.
The murder in Badblood had to feel deliberate. To make a successful kill, most of the time, the player had to plan carefully. They had to read their opponent’s movements, watch and triangulate between the visible landmarks. They had to watch their own backs.
Most importantly, they had to be close. Every death is intimate in Badblood. You have to be so near that you can smell it. Every execution is a millisecond away from your own death.
And once a kill was made, the event had to take up the whole screen. It had to be visually obtrusive and effecting to the murderer as much as the victim.
What I found during developing this game was that the basis on which players find investment in ultimately simple systems is the visceral fear of violence.
Fear of “the other”. My intolerance of them, and their intolerance of me. The fear of that geometrical space between us shrinking, and as the proximity of that intolerance grows closer, the terrible things we both might be willing to do in the face of it.
Even just the threat of violence can drastically affect the way we behave in a game. The player stops thinking about the machinery they are playing on, the systems at work. They are too busy reacting to the fight-or-flight mechanism in themselves as their primal instincts take over.
This is the true purpose of violence in video games at its most effective: it convinces the player of the game’s charade, forces them to assume their role so completely that their lives become inseparable from that experience.
Violence is there to have players pick up the complex, incomprehensive rules of the game, its clunky controller, the layers of constraints and graphics, and have them react like it’s their own body. Have them live in that world like they were born into it.
There’s no mechanic better at making us forget about the video game and consider the wiring that’s within us.
Papers, Please, one of the most violent games I’ve played in recent years, has barely any visible violence in it. It communicates the potential through objects like a key, the closing of a door, people running.
A game doesn’t have to be explicit in its violence to be oppressively present. The absence of violence, the potential for blood to spill is often more affecting, and a much stronger mobilizing force.
Because the problem with violence in video games is not its excess. It’s the apology.
I’ve played violent games all my life, almost exclusively. Living with them have made me understand myself better, how my mind works to keep itself alive.
My favorite games have been the ones that ridicule the idea that I have any control over my own instincts, that I can act rationally in high-tension situations.
I live for the games that say, “no, no, this is what you are.” And what we are is violent.
“The games of a people reveal a great deal about them.” — Marshall McLuhan
We are violent creatures. We think about it every single day. The kindest, most well-meaning of us, once faced with danger or a threat, will do something. And that’s neither good nor bad, just a fact.
Aggressive behavior is human behavior. Violent games are a product of that, not the source.
Embracing violence in gameplay does not encourage and incite, but rather socialize and civilize. It allows for exploration of a fundamental wiring in our biology.
When I first started making games I had these grand ideas of what games should be able to do. I thought it meant building huge, faithful worlds and having fantastical journeys in them — but all of that doesn’t come close to how games like Zoombinis are capable of making my heart clench with a ten-frame animation.
Violence in video games incites a physiological reaction in us, and that is very real. So how do we come to terms with our own violence? How do we see it through?
Violence is incredibly personal. It changes our lives and affects our perception irretrievably, in a way nothing else can.
We live in an era saturated with violence, highly focused on the subjective (With a clearly identifiable agent, a monster.) acts of terrorism, domestic violence, school shootings, which live hand-in-hand with these brutal forms of social, systemic violence like police shootings and brutality, war, enforcement of the socio-economic order.
The act of violence against another is despicable and weak. I am allowed to make a game about killing your friends and also believe that killing is bad. The hypocrisy of a video game being violent, despite not advocating for violence in real-life, is a boring one.
What’s more interesting is the hypocrisy of a video game trying desperately not to make reference to or comment on the world we live in through its mechanics and visual representation, while also being interactive media that impacts all aspects of mass culture, with more influence than ever before in history.
Our in-game actions are allegorical to our actions against real-life fears: of crime, of acts of depravity, of the unknown. The politics of fear that rule our society, the obsessive need to eradicate the potential for violence drives every individual action. We all want to feel safe, unthreatened.
So how can we talk with objectivity about an act so personal and unforgivable as violence without participating in its horror?
Great news, we do it all the time. We talk about every other truths about our nature through games, we test our greed, gluttony, lust, pride — so why not violence?
Video games are the only medium where we can explore this inherent part of our biology with very little context, and just the space and time — to exercise the parts of us that we don’t think about or have the objectivity to look at straight-on.
Instead of simulating the full context of the act, we can simulate just the essence. We can access the feeling — in this case, the awareness of our own vulnerability and susceptibility to violence both as a perpetrator and a victim of it.
Violence in games can inspire incredibly thoughtful, careful gameplay. It can showcase great focus, self-reflection, genius empathy. Through games we encounter our own brilliance, thoughtlessness, prejudices. It amplifies the physical and mental understanding between opponents. I believe violence is where the concept of “the other” breaks.
The act of taking the virtual life of something is the moment we fully comprehend the intelligence, the vulnerability of the opponent and ourselves. And that is the point of violence, if one has to ask. It turns play into performance.
We may not perform perfectly, and panic or rage may not be the mindset we consider excellent or commendable — but we would be honest. We would be indulging in an activity that has us facing inward for the answers, not blaming the software.
It’s impossible to explore the violence in us without these other things: the politics of fear and power, things that make it fucked up to explore, enjoy or talk about violence in play. It’s difficult to look at it with blinders, but I believe it’s worthwhile to try.
I think instead of celebrating and advocating for the nonviolence of video games we should consider the language violence provides to talk about what makes us, us.
What violence can say about ourselves both as human beings — beings that are, as we’ve now established, violent by nature — and also as players who are smart enough to distinguish what precise part of violence gives us catharsis.
Games provide an interactive context in which we can exercise the acts that make us feel things like the thrill, the guilt, the regret. Acts of betrayal, self-condemnation; the invasion of privacy; violation of another person’s intolerance. Through play we can purge that part of us that revel in the outwitting, the charge, the hunt, the stealth, the killing.
BADBLOOD has to be violent because that’s what it’s about. I wanted to make a game about hiding, seeking, manipulating. I wanted to make the grounds on which players can be judged in only their ability to function under the threat of violence. Outsmarting and outliving another person requires intent and bloody-mindedness that could be only performed by a human with as much to lose as another.
Violence in video games can be a language of the viscera, and it is worth more than a question of its necessity. It deserves a question that is not truistic and dismissive. It doesn’t deserve measure by the amount of red on the screen.
It deserves questions like: How are we representing the violence? Who is performing it? Who is the victim? Is it physical, psychological? For how long does the violence last? What part of the body is inflicted? What does it sound like? From what angle is it seen? Will it bruise, scar, maim, kill?
What I’m trying to say is not necessarily that we should make more violent games, but to make games and to play games in order to learn about ourselves, the way makers and lovers of all art-forms do.
I didn’t intend to make a violent game with BADBLOOD, I intended to create a playable treatise of human nature.
What do I believe the human beings behind the controller are capable of? What do I want to say about them? How will they act in this situation? Will they choose their own safety over the killing of their opponent? Will they hide or will they fight? What is it about the world that I live in that I want to figure out?
I believe only once we accept our own biology, and embrace our nature unchanged in philosophy from 10 000 years ago, art is possible.
