Society and Video Games
What Can Video Games Teach Us About Violent Conflict?
Some of the most important lessons for our times might come from video games
Can you imagine yourself ending another human life? Not because they slighted you personally or because they were an immoral person, but because they happened to be on the other side of a conflict. For probably most readers, this sounds unfathomable. However, violent conflict, and the killing of others just because they are seen as the enemy, is endemic throughout human history. As you can find out by watching any world news segment, it continues to be a major issue across the world today, increasingly so in places like the U.S.
People don’t just kill in this way for no reason, though. There are factors that cause someone to go to war for their nation, region, religion, or other social groups. Interestingly, one way to understand these factors is by looking at how they are represented in video games. Probably the majority of video games deal with war or battle in some form. And at a minimum, almost every video game involves conflict. By looking at how violent conflict occurs in the narrative and gameplay of these games, we can get a better understanding of how people are willing to kill their enemies in real life. I also argue that greater attention from developers to these issues can make this educational effect even stronger.
Disclaimer: To be clear, I am not saying real-world violence is equivalent to video games. Killing someone in a game and killing someone in real life are obviously different. To say otherwise is not only disrespectful towards those that have suffered real-world violence, but it reinforces the idea that violent games create violent people. The point is to learn about what factors go into armed conflicts and how their representations in video games may have the potential to create a greater understanding of these causes such that we can reduce future violence. Many of the ideas in this piece are based on research and can be further studied in this examination by Case Western University, this resolution by the American Psychological Association, and this study published by Stanford University.
Make Them “Other” Then Make Them the Enemy
Probably the most critical factor that drives someone to kill or harm during a war is when they see their enemy as so “Other” they become essentially non-human. This involves two steps, creating a boundary between your group and the group of your enemy, then convincing people that the people of that other group are worthy of violence. Given the diversity of human life, the former isn’t too hard. Often obvious aspects of one’s identity like ethnicity, religion, culture, or class are used to emphasise the difference between groups. This tightens and strengthens the symbolic boundaries people have between themselves and the Other.
Convincing people that other social groups are worthy of death or war is somewhat more complicated and will involve many of the things I discuss throughout this article. To briefly summarise, though, it typically involves the usual avenues of learning about society, such as your parents, peers, the media, or your experience with the other group, simultaneously working towards constructing a particularly negative and non-human image of that group.
In video games, this feature is almost always baked into the fundamentals of gameplay. In most shooting games, your targeting reticule goes red when you aim at enemies and green for friendlies. Enemies tend to look and move differently from the player. Sometimes enemies are the only non-player characters (NPCs) you can actually harm. In games with a progression system, you might get experience points (XP) or some resource when you kill characters labelled as enemies. The enemies are very clearly defined differently to you, the player, and friendly NPCs, and they are also clearly made out as an entity needing to be defeated.
This is usually combined with some sort of narrative justification for seeing these characters as worthy of death. In more fantastical games, your opponents may be aliens, zombies, magical beasts, or other creatures literally non-human and, therefore, deserving of violence. In games with a more realistic style, the enemy will often fit a generic category like a terrorist, enemy soldier, criminal, cop, etc. Rarely do we gain an understanding as to who that NPC is and why they are fighting. When people are viewed this way in real life, they become someone worthy of going to war against.
A video game that wants to explore this topic explicitly might have these enemies humanised in some way later in the game to show how their initial portrayal was twisted to perpetuate the conflict. This is not to say every game needs to give names to each character and flesh out all of their backstories. But maybe overheard dialogue or even conversations with those characters (if genre-appropriate) would be a start to showing that the lines between friend and enemy are less fixed than initially portrayed. Allowing players to experience the conflict through the eyes of a previously adversarial character, as with the Arbiter missions in Halo 2 or playing as Abby in The Last of Us: Part II, is another option.
Nothing Fuels Violence Like Revenge and Justice
One of the most powerful ways to justify violence is under the guise of vengeance or justice. This is usually not so much a personal vendetta, but a collective one felt across the social group regardless of whether one was directly involved. For example, think about the effect the September 11 attacks had on justifying the United States’ war on terror. No matter whether someone or their loved ones were personally involved, many people in the U.S. considered it justification for retaliation. Events like these often become memorialised and continue to justify aggression even as the people directly involved are no longer around.
Of course, personal revenge can also be a factor, especially once the conflict has begun and people start to experience the horrors of war individually. Collective and personal revenge can also interact and reinforce each other. We can see this in a few ways with the protests and riots as part of the Black Lives Matter movement. Quite often, the family and friends of those killed by police end up becoming faces of the movement. Another way the personal and collective intertwine with this example is how being unjustly harassed or assaulted by the police, a common personal experience for many black Americans, reinforces a collective need for justice.
Revenge is very common in video game narratives, often being the driving force for the plot. In the Last of Us: Part II, personal revenge drives Ellie’s violent crusade throughout the entirety of the game. Anyone who reads through the various notes and other optional lore scattered throughout the game will find moments of collective and personal revenge between the game’s two warring factions, the Seraphites and the Washington Liberation Front (WLF). For example, the war between the Seraphites and WLF started when the former blew up a truck of WLF soldiers. As another example, the gate at which the WLF captured the Seraphite prophet has been memorialised and turned into a shrine.
However, revenge can also arise during gameplay. A straightforward example is taking vengeance for yourself. In most action games, when the player’s character dies, they will respawn a few moments back, generally being made to face the same situation again. This creates the perfect situation for the player to feel that unshakeable urge to kill the enemy that bested them on their last life. In fact, Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor and its sequel make this a primary mechanic, with the player and enemy NPC’s both constantly seeking vengeance upon each other. The same experience can occur when a co-op partner or friendly NPC dies at the enemy's hands.
Finding a way of communicating to players how revenge fuels violence can be tricky for developers. Often writers will cause the protagonist to have an epiphany when they are about to take vengeance and lay down their weapon instead. This may seem like a good message theoretically, but I find that it often comes off as moral preaching and tends to be an unsatisfying ending. A potentially better solution that is also commonly employed is showing the consequences of revenge for the protagonist and other characters. This often involves showing the players that the main character did not end their pain by taking vengeance but merely extended it.
I would argue that from a perspective of conflict, another important consequence to show is that the cycle will merely continue, perhaps with the protagonist being hunted down themselves in an epilogue scene. Another thing not always explored in games is collective revenge and how stories can cause people to seek retribution even if they never personally suffered.
It should be noted when discussing revenge fueling armed conflict that there is often a fine line between justice and retribution. Which side someone’s actions fall on will, of course, vary depending on who you ask, especially during armed conflicts. To be clear, I am certainly not suggesting people shouldn’t seek justice. Regardless of how just one’s actions are, the point is that they still contribute to conflict and violence and, therefore, are still relevant for this discussion.
Irreconcilable Differences
Conflict, violent or otherwise, tends to be fueled by differences in the beliefs and practices of the relevant social groups. Our thoughts and actions are strongly shaped by culture, which means that two groups with strongly diverging customs may tend to make decisions and behave in ways that cause conflict.
For example, in the Frontier Wars between European invaders and the Aboriginal people of Australia, cultural differences would exacerbate conflict. Aboriginal warfare tended to be more about seeking retribution compared to the European approach, which was more about conquering people and their lands. This was underlain by contrasting relationships to land, with Aboriginal Australians generally seeing themselves and the land as part of a holistic system. On the other hand, Europeans tended to see land as an object they could own and use for their own needs. The result of these cultural differences was more tension between the groups leading to more violence.
Beyond genuinely causing conflictual interactions between the groups, either side might also use cultural differences as justification for harm against those people. This often involves distorting the customs of the other group, taking them out of context, or applying them to the whole group of people when it’s actually only practised by a minority. The oppression of women in certain countries where Islam is the state religion is sometimes used to justify warfare in those regions. It is also often said to be a part of Muslim culture more broadly and justify violence or hatred against any Muslim, despite only being practised by some Muslims.
This is definitely something that appears in video game narratives. Video games with multiple races, such as fantasy and sci-fi games, often give each race a distinct culture that plays into the violent conflict. In The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, it makes sense that the civil war is between a group of rebellious Nords trying to separate from the Empire. Nords in the universe are portrayed as valuing independence, being ashamed of weakness, and often expressing discontent through violence.
However, the imperial peoples are seen to have a more cosmopolitan culture that values law and order through diplomacy and trade. Even the combat styles of each race make sense as Nords are depicted as fierce independent fighters with superior physical strength, while Imperials are supposedly physically weaker yet better able to work as a disciplined unit.
Broadly speaking, though, the role of culture in violent conflict is often presented in a one-dimensional way in gaming. Further, the complex ways that cultural differences shape conflict are not always explored. There could also be more examination of the use of those differences by either side to further reinforce narratives of Otherness. Once again, this would have to be done subtly. However, it could not only teach players about how conflict occurs but also make the world of the video more immersive or realistic.
The Classic: Resources
The quintessential cause of conflict between social groups would have to be over resources. This might include food, water, shelter, energy, labour, or land, with the latter usually being most important since it enables the rest. The reasoning behind this one is pretty simple, resources are needed to survive or maintain the luxuries one is accustomed to. There also tends to be a limit on how much one can wring out of the resources they already hold. This inevitably leads social groups to take from others.
Land, in particular, can also take on additional symbolic or cultural importance beyond being necessary for survival, and this often plays an important role in conflicts. For example, Indigenous peoples across the world are fighting for the return of their homelands, not because they want its resources, but due to the spiritual, cultural, and emotional significance it holds. Probably the majority of land disputes involve a combination of economic and symbolic motivations. A historical example can be found in World War II, where the war was justified by German leaders as being fought to gain “Lebensraum”, or living space, for their people.
An obvious video game representation of conflict due to resources can be seen with strategy games such as the Age of Empires or Civilisation series. Players, of course, work to gain control of more land and produce more resources to improve their civilisation such that they can best their opponents. While there are diplomatic options in many of these games, military action is usually the main approach for taking down opponents. We might see a more abstract example in role-playing games. After all, surely I’m not the only one who has started a fight with a group of enemies purely to gain that last bit of XP needed to level up. I know that I often make decisions in these games based on what will make my character stronger rather than what I think is morally right.
Fighting for resources can also be a cause of conflict narratively as well. In many games from the Far Cry series, for example, the player helps a group, usually some kind of rebels, take back land and other resources as part of an armed conflict. In many cases, there is also some demonstration that land has both economic or strategic purposes and symbolic meaning. In Far Cry 4, for example, it is communicated to the player character, Ajay, the importance of religion to the rebels when his father was in charge. As a result, several missions have you protect monasteries and statues not so much for their strategic benefit but the religious importance to the people you are fighting for.
Perhaps video games could treat resources less as a prerequisite to progress (both narratively and through gameplay) and instead have those resources contextualised more deeply in the world. The developer might better communicate the consequences for taking those resources, positive and negative, for all sides of the conflict to the player.
For example, taking an outpost in Far Cry might become more than just a way of unlocking fast travel points. You could see how it has helped the side you are fighting for as they now have better weapons, can spread their people out more, or have regained an important spiritual site. You might also see how it impacts the other side, as perhaps the enemy troops are more cramped into their territory or they start to experience hunger because they’ve lost a major route for transporting food.
Sometimes it is Personal
So far, I have been discussing social or group factors that can contribute to conflict. However, at the end of the day, real people are the one’s committing violence, ordering others to violence, or encouraging violence. In some cases, individual motivations may be something that shapes the conflict, especially when we include the motivations of those with power within the social group. The leader of a country or faction, for example, may portray certain communities as evil or try to exclude them from the group specifically because it is politically advantageous for them.
A group of politicians might support one side in a war not based on what is right but because that is the side where they as individuals have invested. Like corruption in general, these issues can be avoided when power is more equally distributed across the collection of people. However, it is not limited to extreme cases like this. Indeed, it is rare that someone will respond to conflict without considering how it may serve them personally. Individual combatants might fight in a war because it has good pay, better fulfills their self-image, or a host of other personal reasons.
In games, it is difficult for players not to make decisions and take actions relating to the conflict based on personal motivation. This is, I would imagine, mostly because the characters in the game are virtual, and so the consequences of their actions are quite limited. Ubisoft games fail the mission or respawn the player when they kill innocent civilian characters because they know people’s curiosity or sense of humour will get the better of them. I’m sure many readers choose to side with a specific faction in video games, not for moral reasons, but because of the items or abilities they reward you with.
Games also sometimes go too far with personal motivations. Sometimes, the plot's central conflict is made out to be one character’s solo crusade without there being any indication of the social factors that brought them to the place where they make those choices. Of course, the player need not be exposed to all the potential reasons a character is inciting conflict. That would likely be information overload and feel more like a character bio than organic storytelling. Nevertheless, learning something more can make the conflict and the characters involved less one-dimensional.
Conflict is Always Caused by a Multiplicity of Interacting Factors
When we look at armed conflicts of the past, we often identify specific things as the cause. We might say World War I started when Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated or that the war in Afghanistan kicked off due to 9/11. In reality, though, these tend to either be the most obvious cause, the one that escalated pre-existing tensions, or the thing used by one side to justify their involvement. There will always be a number of factors that contribute to sparking or maintaining violent conflict. This list provides a start, and while there will be certain aspects in common, each conflict will have its own diversity of causes.
It is also important to remember that these various causes frequently interact with each other. Collective feelings of revenge can be the thing that causes an “Other” to be deemed worthy of receiving violence. The people running a tech company might take actions that divide their users into tight groups because they are personally motivated by profit. Addressing conflict and encouraging a non-violent yet just course of action means tackling various factors at once, taking particular care to severe the feedback loops that can draw people towards war. For example, you might challenge and reduce a particular revenge narrative justifying violence. But if the groups remain divided, it will do little to prevent new narratives from forming in the future.
To some extent, video games inevitably have some interaction between these factors just because it is difficult to write conflict without it. However, there is also frequently an oversimplification. Quite often, the enemies in video games are written to have one specific motivation that every enemy seems to share, and that permeates the nature of that whole group. This obviously contrasts the reality I’ve discussed here, where personal motivations and social factors interact in complex ways. It is often the case where the portrayal of the enemy makes a big difference in who fighters are willing to harm or kill, and where people are driven by much more than simply gaining new resources.
This is not to say that characters should just list off the reasons for the war in an artificial way. However, if the player can see the perspective of various people involved in the conflict such that they understand the various complex causes of it, then that would allow the portrayal of the violence to be more realistic and, in my opinion, interesting. There are many ways to do this, and it can vary based on the genre and what the game is going for.
Playing as the Arbiter in Halo 2 was not only an interesting story decision, but it allowed the player to see the conflict from the other side. In particular, it allowed the player to get an insight into how the leaders of the so-called enemy operate. Another approach is to express various perspectives through collectibles. The notes written by Seraphites or WLF soldiers in The Last of Us: Part II are a good example of this. The player character might also be somewhat divorced from the conflict and, therefore, have the ability to interact with various characters from both sides. This is well-suited to role-playing games, with The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt standing out for this approach.
What Can We Learn From This?
At this point, you might be saying, “those are some interesting connections, Ryan, but what’s the point of this?” Well, there are two reasons I thought this article was important to write. From a broader perspective, I believe the more the general public understands what causes violent conflict, the better they can resist the influence of these factors and find less harmful pathways through contentious situations.
As I said at the start of this piece, the representations of violence we see in games are far from equivalent to the real world. However, I think there is enough similarity that when they are made explicit, people can gain enough empathy and understanding to take action towards peace. This is important because violent conflict seems to be a universal human outcome, occurring across cultures throughout time. In the Western world, it also seems to be flaring up at the moment, especially after the negative socioeconomic impacts of COVID-19.
Looking more specifically at game design and given that conflict is such a core part of most video game genres, understanding factors in violent conflict can result in more realistic and better-designed gameplay and narrative. As I mentioned in a previous article, The Last of Us: Part II portrays the broader conflict between the Seraphites and the WLF very well. And as a result, I found the world more believable and the overall game more interesting and immersive. Of course, this level of detail won’t be appropriate for every game, but it is definitely something that I think the industry as a whole could do better.
Video games can shape our world in various ways. What I’m trying to show with this article is that maybe teaching people about conflict is an underexplored avenue with a lot of potential, given that the theme is already near-ubiquitous in gaming. This can be particularly enhanced if the representations of violent conflict became more realistic and were more direct explorations of the theme.
But what do you think? Have games ever taught you about violent conflict? Did my explicit comparisons resonate with your gaming experience? Do you think video games have the ability to address this issue?
