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Comment by fulafel | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if mainstream games will at some point evolve out of the shooting-and-killing focus.

FIFA, Mario Kart, Pokémon? Mainstream is a lot more than just shooters...

(I don't really feel like Pokemon is the best counterexample? The bulk of the game mechanics are still about applying violence to an opponent, it's just mediated by cutesy animals instead of guns and the game stops short of calling the victory condition "killing" because it's for kids.)

> the game stops short of calling the victory condition "killing" because it's for kids.

There is death in the series, end-of-battle fainting is explicitly a different thing (probably better thought of as "knocked unconscious").

The first generation even had the tower in Lavender Town, filled with the graves of dead pokemon.

In any case, GP's comment stands: Pokemon is neither a shooter nor focused on killing.

Only about half are shooting/killing games. But pretend-killing games are a major part of our mammalian brains, going back millions of years, as seen in your local house cat.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/venturebeat.com/2019/01/22/npd-...

Games allow people to try out things that are not possible for most people in real life.

It includes doing a medieval quest, becoming an action mercenary, becoming a ninja, managing a top football team, building a city, building a theme park, participating in World Wars, building a space program, rescuing hostages etc.

The focus on violence means that such violence is percieved as beyond the reach of most in real life, which is good news.

That's a bit like saying "I wonder if movies will evolve out of the defeating the villain focus". Sure there's plenty of that but the medium is so massive you can find something to suit any taste. I like shooters and they were still only about a third of the games I played this year.

Movie action scenes are typically equal ingredients vs other scenes, but in games they are typically the dominant way of exercising player agency, big difference.

Besides shooters, combat dominates adventure and open world games, which could be done differently too.

> Movie action scenes are typically equal ingredients vs other scenes, but in games they are typically the dominant way of exercising player agency, big difference.

> Besides shooters, combat dominates adventure and open world games, which could be done differently too.

Could you elaborate on this a bit? To contrast, I think of Fallout 3. Sure, there is a lot of violence out in the wasteland and it kind of stinks that I can't, say, reason with mutants. But at the same time, I would not characterize the dominant expression of agency being mediated through violence, but dialog. Are there any games specifically (besides those with a shooting focus like Battlefield, Call of Duty, etc) that capture your sentiments?

In the way books and films have evolved out of shooting and killing?

They never had that focus in the same degree. Count the percentage of time that's violent action in novels/films vs mainstream games, it's nowhere close. Or count the percent of nonviolent titles in yearly critically acclaimed works.

Novels and films are comparatively passive media. It's hard to gamify a stream of consciousness, the dance of a camera around a scene, or a conversation in quite the same way; conversation trees get tedious, cutscenes drag on too long and the game risks turning into an interactive movie, or end up with a walking simulator etc.

There's a place for those things but there's a different balance of pacing and tension. Most games more closely resemble thrillers because there's more intense experiences packed in.

I enjoy a lot of videogames that are all about shooting and killing. I also enjoy a bunch that aren't. Yet it makes me sad that in so many games, across genres, the application of violence is the primary lever with which the player can apply their intent to the game world, and a lot of game design revolves around increasingly elaborate systems determining just how deadly that violence is.

I'm not gonna stop enjoying my murder sprees through hordes of monsters powered by a google-maps-worthy talent tree and several spreadsheets worth of magic sword optimization out of some moral objection to violence, but I'd be very happy to see the same degree of sophistication and mechanical depth applied to other game mechanics as well, and probably feel better about that hobby of mine as a whole then.

It's hard to engagingly gamify conversations, working on your slide deck / spreadsheets, elevator pitches etc. as routes to apply agency into the world.

Tense situations are generally dangerous, and games tend to thrive on tension. Beyond abstract puzzles, simulations tend towards activities which are actually dangerous and discouraged in the real world; if it's not violence, it might be theft (Thief / Dishonored), high wire acrobatics (Mirror's Edge), high speed driving, etc.

Yeah, I don't really disagree. Though, I do feel like a lot of videogame violence is so detached from trying to simulate real-life combat (because it's building on decades worth of genre conventions more than anything) that it's abstract enough that you might as well use it to model just about any other kind of conflict or interaction in a game.

Because escapism involves leaving the norms, and most people are fortunate enough that violence is outside their normal life experience.

You can always play simulation games like Kerbal Space program or Cities Skylines. Those still have a tech tree although it may not be as complicated as the skill trees in Path of Exile or the class tree in Trees of Savior.

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