What It's Like to Work on Ultra-Violent Games Like Mortal Kombat
kotaku.com.au
kotaku.com.au
For one game I worked on, I was instructed to get blood splatters for cuts and slicing off of body parts (in a cartoon character world) like the movie 300 which were over the top and very obviously particle effects (the producer loved referencing current popular culture...). It never occurred to me to go looking for what blood spurts look like in real life, as I was given an order for a style.
Most of the games I have worked on were not realistic looking, though I remember doing internal tiger team testing for Warcraft 3 and there was one mission where you have to kill villagers. These characters are tiny and cartoon like but the voices of them suffering in this made me feel so bad and similar to stuff happening the real world I thought we should take the mission out of the game - I think they toned it down a bit but it was in the final version. This is kind of similar to the mission in Call of Duty series where one has to participate in the slaughter of civilians in an airport - I didn't like that one either.
I still have trouble watching some of the fight scenes in TV/film/wrestling when they look too real or wince especially with blades, even though it's obviously stunts with props and probably CGI for the most gruesome bits - I have retained sensitivity to realistic violence.
Some scenes in games are too much for sure, but there are far more horror scenes that I think never should have been made and have no place as entertainment in civil society.
I do not understand how people watch that stuff.
Since then, I've seen countless on-screen deaths, many of them successfully pulling off romanticizing & glorification of killing. Both the "Private Ryan" scenes and the "romanticizing combat" scenes look superficially similar in terms of gore, but the context matters a lot. Upthread, 'stevenwoo mentions the "killing villagers" Warcraft 3 mission. I played that mission back in the days, and reading about it now reminded me of the feelings of disgust I had. The details of this mission cleanly communicated the killing as an immoral act - as opposed to the exact same animations being shown when you play the game against a computer or human player, outside campaign mode, and happen to attack your enemy's base (AFAIR those villagers in campaign used the same, or similar, model as Human Peon unit in the game).
IMO it's clear that it's the context which frames acts of violence that can make them a lesson in empathy or a glorification of brutality. It's not about the violent acts themselves.
(ETA: I also played the Modern Warfare's airport massacre mission. Didn't fire a single shot towards the civilians. Ended up being thoroughly shaken, disgusted, and wishing I didn't play it at all.)
But I think most violent art instead aims for that apparently very popular mixture of disgust and titillation. For example, there are various scenes (for which I've read descriptions, not watched) in Game of Thrones that make me seriously question the state of a culture where this is extremely popular entertainment. And I do not buy the idea that these scenes force people into sober contemplation of the way mortality yokes us all together.
But I strongly dislike violence more realistic than, say, the Avengers, so I'm biased here.
> For example, there are various scenes (for which I've read descriptions, not watched) in Game of Thrones that make me seriously question the state of a culture where this is extremely popular entertainment
> But I strongly dislike violence more realistic than, say, the Avengers, so I'm biased here.
Yes, I would say you have a much stronger than average aversion to violence, and that's ok! Just so long as you recognize that same freedom of choice in others.
It is possible to make war movie that feels bad, but generally they tend to be obscure (as you wont watch it for fun).
It's nothing like any movie.
Oh, meaningless new world, which holds such braves.
(There are also plenty of exceptions, where the violence isn't trivialized and the horror is central to the point; Watching a movie like _The Act of Killing_ is far from escapism)
> I do not understand how people watch that stuff.
Frankly, most people have a grossly stunted sense of empathy, with exceptions only for those things that they have firsthand life experience with. An instructive contrast is media depictions of sexual violence against women: for a couple of decades, there has been a concerted effort to decry media depictions of violence against women (sexual or otherwise) that are perceived as unnecessary or trivializing. The success of these campaigns is to be lauded, but what they reveal about how empathy-bankrupt monsters most people are is sort of chilling: people en masse can be taught to play-act empathy by rote if it's drilled into their head that a particular case is no longer socially acceptable, but they don't seem to be capable (en masse) of practicing the skill of empathy itself.
For anyone who watches Game of Thrones: Compare the huge outcry against the depiction of Sansa's marital rape to _an entire season_ of infinitely more gruesome torture porn by the same perpetrator against a male victim, which included genital mutilation. Despite being a far more egregious and lengthy display of gratuitous and stomach-turning violence, the latter caused no backlash whatsoever, and is in fact still fodder for jokes about Game of Thrones-themed foods ("Theon's Flayed Sausage"), including from publications like Huffington Post which were some of the loudest complainants about how unforgivable the former scene was.
TL;DR: It's not a particularly popular opinion, but most people are far more depraved and far less capable of basic human empathy than even their own ostensible moral standards would imply. Like you, I can't _relate_ to how people watch that stuff, but I can definitely _understand_ it.
As a kid I’d play violent video games and my mother would get upset, claiming that I was becoming desensitized to violence. But I think it might actually be the other way around: kids lack sensitivity to begin with because they don’t have any context for the violence they’re enacting. As you get older and death starts to feel more real, the idea of a WW2 combat simulator, for example, begins to feel a bit tasteless.
Nothing like having a bit of Mai-Lai re-enactment thrown in.
I definitely see your point. Though, I also think that mission was extremely memorable and effective in illustrating Arthas's "win at all costs" mentality, probably in part because of how brutal and potentially similar to real events it was.
That mission was definitely the turning point where I (and likely many other players) realized "oh, maybe Arthas isn't really a good person" and the whole descent into madness made a lot more sense.
It's still super exaggerated, but FWIW, the trailer is pretty mild compared to the actual content: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iynVeWhFqsw
I was 8 when the original MK came out. It was gross and extreme, but it all felt like a cartoon, it didn’t seem threatening. When it showed up on Genesis, I found the blood code and learned every fatality, knew the game inside and out. When MK II arrived on SNES, it was even better!
By comparison, my impression of modern MK games is that they aim to creat the experience of actual human suffering. I guess it’s unavoidable that the detail of the violence would have to grow with the technology, but it makes me uncomfortable, I find it too unpleasant. Watching it is the difference between the heart removal scene in Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom and a recent Saw movie.
Maybe I'm just getting older now, but when you start having life experiences of people you care about being involved in accidents and having their bodies destroyed, and all tolls that takes on someones life, it makes seeing senseless violence so much more pointless. There's really nothing to celebrate by glorifying the different ways a human body can be destroyed.
At the same time, I'm against legislating against this kind of expression, and I don't hide behind "think of the children." If we just made wiser decisions about the end results of our life's work, we wouldn't have to be having these kinds of conversations.
Even though these deaths are "photo realistic", the context is not. The clean limp bodies of the pets I've owned have haunted me a million times more than anything I've seen in MK. That's how I know death. Just a lifeless body. The spectacle of gory violence doesn't really connect with my experiences of death.
Sorry if your own experiences have been different.
Taking scorpio's head and spine with sub-zero is one of my most cherished childhood memories and bonding with my brother.
I'll reiterate a part of my comment I left in a different subthread:
If you have a problem with violence, Mortal Kombat should be near the bottom of the list because it's just pixels, without anyone getting killed or disabled in real life.
Just look at how popular UFC, MMA, WWE, boxing and other contact sports are. Billions of people watch them. Floyd Mayweather was paid hundreds of Millions of dollars for beating his opponents, imagine just how many people paid to watch that? And they really enjoyed it. This is infinitely more worrisome to me than people not handling gamedev well.
People have been maimed and killed in the (boxing) ring. Ali was diagnosed with Parkinson's syndrome as the result of all the head trauma he went through.
For those that don't know, Australia has censorship practices that America would consider absolutely absurd. Kotaku are similarly inclined in encouraging a kind of puritanical sensibility of their own variety.
I would find this article much more interesting if I didn't get the impression that its author would happily legislate away developer and consumer freedoms to make and/or play whatever games they'd like.
If your employer has you working on something that really bothers you, and they're not able or willing to place you on something else, then that doesn't sound like a good fit for employment. There are all kinds of things that make people not want to work in certain positions at certain places.
Why did you get that impression? I've seen nothing that would make me think of that. Is there something I don't know about the author? For example that they called for this kind of censorship in the past? That would put the article under another light, maybe.
ETA: I just remembered that the article even concedes that probably people who play the games could not have the same effects as those who worked on it, so I'm even more confused by the impression you got.
I think your mindset, that someone who is having an issue completing their work should just not do that job, is a really toxic mindset. Workers can adapt to their work, but companies also can adapt the workplace to the workforce. Your attitude, that hiring a more resilient worker is the solution to every breakdown, is not only inhumane it's probably inefficient. I hope you don't have any direct reports.
> If your employer has you working on something that really bothers you, and they're not able or willing to place you on something else, then that doesn't sound like a good fit for employment
You say:
> Workers can adapt to their work, but companies also can adapt the workplace to the workforce. Your attitude, that hiring a more resilient worker is the solution to every breakdown...
My initial statement suggested that the appropriate action was to seek an alternative employer, given that they are unwilling or unable to accommodate. If they're able and willing to accommodate, then there is no problem. You've completely mischaracterized my position.
As sibling commenters have pointed out, your worldview seems to be very naive. It's not that long ago on a historic scale that people routinely killed each other in wars/conquests every single day.
And they used very twisted, elaborate techniques to maximize suffering and the effect on other people in public executions.
If you have a problem with violence, Mortal Kombat should be near the bottom of the list because it's just pixels, without anyone getting killed or disabled in real life.
Just look at how popular UFC, MMA, WWE, boxing and other contact sports are. Billions of people watch them. Floyd Mayweather was paid hundreds of Millions of dollars for beating his opponents, imagine just how many people paid to watch that? And they really enjoyed it. This is infinitely more worrisome to me than people not handling gamedev well.
People have been maimed and killed in the (boxing) ring. Ali was diagnosed with Parkinson's syndrome as the result of all the head trauma he went through.
I've found that over time, the type of violence that disturbs me is the one that is the most realistic. I had friends growing up who joined the military because they _loved_ games like Call of Duty and Counter-Strike. Many of those friends came back with severe cases of PTSD.
Mortal Kombat 11, Doom (the reboot), are not for everyone. But It's much harder for me to associate that kind of violence with reality.
Unfortunately, whenever I ask around for recommendations or research on this topic online, people assume that I'm anti-violence.
If there were any evidence of a correlation between violent entertainment and actual violence, or that all "violent entertainment" was somehow being created by "powerful people" with some organized agenda, you might at least have a rational premise upon which to base this conspiracy theory.
Human societies have been violent, and their entertainment has been violent, since the dawn of language. If anything, there's far less violence in modern entertainment... there just happens to also be more of everything as well.
>Ever wonder why this stuff is considered ok, but a glimpse of a woman’s nipple is not?
Christianity.
In western civilisation most people can get through life and never even come close to having to make decisions about directly committing violence.
The answer of: just don't is in fact entirely adequate - not necessarily complete but almost always the right answer.
Whereas almost everyone "does" sex at some point. But in depicting it the exact same act takes on a huge number of implications depending on context - including violence.
Ergo it's not actually so surprising it's rated the way it is - conversely I still agree the blanket R or whatever is not really helping overall.
But also, I am not sure how much your explanation makes sense. Germany has more censorship on violence and less on sex or naked things and their experience with sex is pretty much similar.
I do agree with the points that there should be policies around working with violent material and having the chance to step back or work on other projects. That was not something I saw at the time, and while Mortal Kombat stands out in terms of violence, I think it would be a useful consideration with most video games.
There was an article on here not long ago about a guy who was in charge of one of the Civilization franchise releases and he drove himself nearly nuts doing it. There'll always be people who are at the wrong place, at the wrong time - that's hardly newsworthy.
Some of it is environment, some of it is their own make-up and circumstance.
Thankfully, we live in a free market - if people find violence and gore unattractive, they can work on and/or play many other games with similar budgets poured into them! Let the free market decide what people want - it's very good at it.
This idea of moralizing/categorizing things into right and wrong for society is a dead end. Alcohol prohibition in the USA being the go-to example for anyone who has any doubt. People want to do things that are on some level self destructive. It is not anyone's place to tell them otherwise - simply because it doesn't work. You prohibit one thing, they find a way around it or find a different outlet, resulting in consequences that are difficult to predict.
Edit: I previously wrote something here that was meant for another comment, sorry.
At some point someone did tell me something that helped though: think of and describe what you're looking at using food terms instead of anatomy ones - talk about a blood fluid sim as being "too much like tomato juice not enough like gravy", textures in terms of mince/steak etc rather than human tissue types. I also labelled render passes like that, made conversations sound a lot less gross and more removed from reality, particularly to passers-by working on other shots...
Just like in Farenheit 451
I think of soccer mom in relatively neutral terms, but my feeling tends to be that it means "she's merely someone with no life for well-meaning but misguided ideas and not because she's outright depraved." Like it's an attempt to say "full time moms: not as bad as we usually think they are."
As for feminism, yes, I know a lot of people who use "feminism" as epithet and justifiably so, though one usually tries to attach some word to distinguish the crazies from those actually helping women; people I know in meatspace usually call it "belligerent feminism". A lot of those people are women! They prefer someone advocating for their rights instead of the people who use it as a pretext to destroy others or win spotlight for themselves; since the latter kind essentially appropriated the word "feminism" in public consciousness, these women decided to disassociate themselves from the movement.
Personally I don't let cranks define words for me. That includes feminist cranks and conservative cranks alike.
"Public consciousness" is worth paying attention to, but I'm not rewriting my dictionary based on it.
Well it’s because that slippery slope that everyone says doesn’t exist actually does. Recall that the original Mortal Kombat caused all sorts of controversy when it was first released (Doom as well). Compare the relatively tame violence in MK1 to what we have now in MK11, it’s what happens when society collectively shrugs their shoulders and says “it’s just a [game|movie]”.
That nudity is still taboo in games and other media is more a reflection of no one bothering to push the envelope like they did with violence.
Right now, fighting game fans are spoiled for choice with well-designed interfaces and competitive, balanced character design.
Plug for my personal favorite:https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/...
What are others good fighting games that run on PC and support couch co-op with joysticks?
Guilty Gear is generally recommended in my circles, but I dont play it.
One day when I was logging in to test something a player used the only sound that could be interpreted as hostile (the lynx hissing sound) and was backing away from me repeating it for as long as I stayed, I was hypnotized by the time this poor soul was going through to try and make others feel uncomfortable.
To me that was enlightening, there must be some story about something positive with working with the most violent game ever, I wish Kotaku would try and dig that story out instead.
https://www.cracked.com/blog/the-7-most-elaborate-dick-moves...
Their whole "dick moves in online gaming" series is pretty awesome, too.
Work has a habit of sneaking into dreams. I have dreamed of shifting computer commands around, too.
From the trailer, MK is absolutely not appealing to me. I also don't like horror movies. So I wouldn't be keen to work on such games or on horror movies. Other people might feel differently.
I think people who don't enjoy the work should just quit and look for another job. That goes not just for MK, but for any kind of job.
I grew up with these games, too, but if you have internally normalized that which is inherently abnormal, it may manifest in subtle ways.
Started with Duke Nukem 3D, Doom, Quake and Mortal Kombat 2/3.
I think I'm a bit more messed up than I would be without it, but nothing too serious.
I played Carmageddon and Mk 3 when I was like 7. In my teens I watched videos of middle-east decapitations, limb mutilation by the narcos, etc. just out of curiosity.
I'm not proud of it, but I don't think it has made me a violent person or anything.
Oh man that was a tough mission to play through... great game though.. definitely compelling and one of the most memorable. I wonder if something like that could ever pass today.
Funny story - I broke my leg in half a while back. Soon after I could walk again I went to a buddies and we got high and played MK10. The cutscenes where it xrayed and showed bones breaking in half shocked the hell out of my senses. But I didn't get stressed or stop playing. The feeling desensitized relatively quickly and it was one of my favorite games.
It's not traumatizing to everyone and everyone reacts to things differently.
I've spent almost two years of my life in combat zones, seen some pretty fucked up shit and can sit down and watch a war movie with no problem. Other people, not so much.
Though I did watch the trailer in TFA and do think it is surprisingly violent for no real reason.
We're talking about it, that's pretty much the reason. MK have never been good fighting games and have relied totally on the "edge"/shock factor to market themselves. There are probably people who read this thread and think "wow this game is shocking people! I need to check it out".
Depression, anxiety, PTSD and even suicide rates are some of the highest among these professions, FWIW.
Just the trailers for the last of us were enough to leave me extremely unsettled.
Not saying the line should be drawn here necessarily, but I don't think chalking it up to everyone being different is acceptable.
You've described maybe what, 100 people in the country at this moment? Vs. the 11 million sales of the previous version of Mortal Kombat, and will likely buy this one. So sure, 100 folks remove from the equation, but you do NOT get to take the 11 million who found it entertaining out of the equation.
So, were all those societies of the past being harmed and corrupted by their entertainment in a broad-sce way? In a way we can see in retrospect, that caused them to become worse than they already were?
There are hints of really gruesome things regarding joint dislocation in the trailer but it doesn't come anywhere to the discomfort I have experienced watching certain movies.
I am not talking about over the top, blood everywhere, fake and grossly exaggerated gore movies. Think of scenes involving cutting tendons in one, eye gouging and the eye hanging in another one... That kind of things, which were only glimpsed at in those movies, upping the discomfort level way higher than a 2 minutes brawl between an electric god and a razor man throwing each other 12 feet up in the air.
edit: Now, I am not saying setting up and producing these scenes has no impact on the people working on it for months but spectators experience something different: the end result, not the process.
When the first two or three MK games came out they were indeed a big part of a culture of its time, being both controversial and a kind of (trashy, commercial) statement against the puritanical/hypocritical mores of the time. The limits of videogames as media were being tested. That side of the controversy won.
Nowadays? Meh. They dialed up the stupid gore in an attempt to remain relevant. Nobody cares. I only hear about Mortal Kombat once in a while when someone writes some piece about its violence when a new game comes out. A couple of weeks later they are selling it at some budget price. Nobody cares anymore. Never heard from anyone I know actually playing the new games. Who knows what were the innovations in Mortal Kombat 8? Me neither.
R.I.P.. Mortal Kombat. (We still play you in DOSBox!)
Do you recall the first FPS that id software produced? It's a game ostensibly set during a certain war in which you shoot at decidedly human figures.
Doom benefits from moving away from human figures, because projectile weapons are much more interesting to dodge and make more sense when wide varieties of demons emit them (rather than the hitscan and more or less single enemy type in Wolfenstein 3D). Heck, the remade Wolfenstein games are significantly more detailed in their violence, and their scenarios much less out of the realm of disbelief than Doom is, even though it occurs less often.
I'm not convinced that more realistic violence wouldn't have been added to such games had the technology been available to do so early on. Of course, games that are solely about inflicting highly graphic violence without an explicit purpose are few and generally not as well-received as (for example) the remade id games are; and it isn't a moral panic that the ability to portray violence in that way exists.