Why So Few Violent Games?
ludusnovus.net
ludusnovus.net
Right -- you can replace all of the humans with mechs, and the ak-47 with some sort of power-sapping stun beam (that disables, rather than destroying, the mech) and many AAA games would play just as well.
There are people who seem to really like "ultra-realistic" gore instead of exploding robots or de-summoned cartoons, but that doesn't change the fundamental basis: most AAA games are about scoring hits against hitpoints, not really about violence.
Or with paint! (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splatoon)
The same goes for movies. Most people will watch movies with some violence, but movies like Saw don't have mainstream appeal.
This is of course fairly different than something like your average game where death isn't permanent or particularly impactful, especially when killing nameless/faceless opponents.
I'm not sure what about the game creates that feeling, but I think the game is much better because of it. Some of my best moments in the game were during rescue missions (one time I had a lander on the Mun with no docking ports and only enough fuel for a short sub-orbital hop; I managed to rendezvous with the lander mid-hop, then EVA the kerbal into the rescue craft.)
Not too far off topic: my brother and my grandson absolutely love violent games. I don't understand the appeal. What I do like are driving games and strategy games.
Why he has trouble inventing the same stories with robotic team mates and opponents I am not sure, but he seems to find value in the shared experience.
Some of my strongest gaming memories are of the first (?) level of Rogue Spear (one of the Rainbow Six games), where I was hunting terrorists in the Met. It was fifteen years ago, but I still remember how upset I felt when I saw a virtual character fall down after being shot, and I can still remember the intense despair that crushing my elation when a hostage panicked and ran in between me and the terrorist (and I shot him). I played that level so many times that I can probably still sketch the map. I remember nothing else about the game, but the experience of playing that one map stays with me.
This is a completely different kind of "story" or memory than one's going to get from a game like Borderlands.
I do watch a few fairly violent movies a year, it is just the violent games that I don't enjoy.
You can Restrict dialog choices while still giving the player real choices.
A bit different than mindless violence as in e.g., GTA, Call of Duty, Battlefield, etc.
The "point", or motivation, isn't all that relevant. You're still shooting things in the face and getting your throat torn out while you writhe in pain, so let's keep the goalposts in place.
In fighting games, competitive players tend to concentrate on the structure behind punches and suffering. They see a game of anticipation, dexterity, and timing. They talk about hit boxes, priorities, frame advantage… Those players would probably enjoy an abstract version of those fighting games.
Hmm… we could even test that: could we make a game that have a similar structure to Mortal Kombat, only it doesn't even look like 2 characters punching each other to death?
I would have liked to select another name for its underlying mechanics, but I'm not knowledgeable enough.
The essay you're referring to is written by a man named David Sirlin, and he runs a website where he talks about his ideas on game design[1]. He's perhaps most known in the community for helping to bring to light the concept of "yomi," (lit. "reading"), the process of taking actions specifically to get a grasp on your opponent's thought process and be able to predict it. To him, that's the one pure essence of fighting games (though this view is not universally held).
In fact, he's already done something like you describe. He designed a card game named, appropriately enough, Yomi[2], that attempts to bring the core of a fighting game into a card game format. Much like in fighting games, attacking beats throws, throws beat blocking, and blocking beats attacks. Hitting a player allows you to attempt to combo them, but the opponent can play cards (that may be bluffs) which can break the combo.
He did something similar with chess, calling it Chess 2, though it's much less popular than Yomi.
That has a lot less appeal than fast paced, cool looking ninjas kicking each other - hence why video games are an art form and not just intellectual exercise.
You only have two moves - jump and divekick.
What's the appeal of action movies?
It's fun. Haven't you ever tried blowing something up when you were a kid?
And generally, in my experience, it comes from a place of arrogance on the part of the person doing the asking, because the next phase is talking down about how the "reasons" aren't valid.
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/129948/the_chemistry_o...
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131802/glory_and_shame...
Off the top of my head.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trust_%26_Betrayal:_The_Legacy_...
[edit] The source code for it is available still on his homepage, but You'll need paschal and assemblers for MacOS to build it I imagine.
This isn't sarcasm. This is a parody.
Every line is one that game designers who advocate for games about social dynamics have heard in response. That modeling a gunshot or a sword stroke is much easier than trying to capture the nuance of a conversation. The "Gorytron" reference refers to "Erasmatron", a computer system that tried to model story more abstractly than interactive fiction games.
It's basically just one long in-joke for those of us who are tired of the sheer quantity of games easily reducible to violent conflict resolutions.
I think that's really kind of true, though. If you look at the kinds of movies we export successfully, spectacle sells overseas a lot better than movies about conversation. Is it because mass audiences are dumb? I don't think so. Are the Chinese less sophisticated than us? No. So why is "Transformers Age of Extinction" a cash rake outside of the U.S., with 78% of its box office take coming from foreign markets, while something like "The Fault In Our Stars" only gets 19% of its money from overseas?
Because spectacle is easy, and more importantly, spectacle needs very little translation. A giant truck robot riding an even gianter dinosaur robot and wielding a giant sword speaks for itself. Movies about human interaction require a lot more translation. You need subtitles for all the text, and a good translation is difficult -- for one, film is a visual medium, and having to read subtitles distracts your visual attention more than being able to hear the dialogue and understand it. And even if you understand the words, that's not the same as understanding the context -- subtle nuances of wordplay can be lost in translation, and translation doesn't help with allusions to things that audiences may not be familiar with.
So what does that have to do with video games? Well, video games have always been rather limited in what they can convey. Early videogames especially, and since the author mentions Doom in passing, let's focus on Doom's level of technical sophistication. So much of what makes for conversation wasn't possible with Doom's level of technology. Forget anything but text -- Doom's audio was limited to a bunch of nearly-MIDI files and a handful of WAV files for sound effects. We didn't have MP3s yet, bandwidth and storage were both in short supply, and text to speech was rather eerie and easily identifiable as synthetic. You couldn't have inflection or tone to your dialogue.
At the same time, facial expression, body language -- all of those things are very difficult to convey in graphics that were 320x200 pixels with 256 colors. (They're also difficult to convey on modern high-res polygons; there's a reason we have the term uncanny valley.)
When Doom came out, I have absolutely no doubt it was easier to meaningfully convey violence against creatures from hell on Mars than it was to convey social interaction between people in the medium of video games. And in a lot of ways, I think that's still true.
He denounced the hack-and-slash genre in the 80s. The Dragon Speech happened in 1992.
It's not a friendly, fun social discussion, but it is a social discussion, and it's very well done. It manages to use the spectacle as a tool to tell a heartbreaking story, and is all the more impressive due to the contrast with the rest of the series.
I mean, if you had cited Deus Ex or Witcher, you might have something, but... what you described doesn't sound like anything more than a slightly non-linear book to read.
The games that try to juxtapose conflict with stretches of non-action are usually the most successful at conveying the experience of combat. The new Tomb Raider comes to mind. You can travel awhile without fighting because there's a lot to see and do in the environment. When you do encounter adversaries, they're usually in small numbers. They'll speak to each other and respond to your attacks with unique dialogue.
On the other hand, games like Call of Duty, which overwhelm the player with hundreds of enemies at all times, fail to convey the experience of war. The key is to provide contrast between action and non-action, and to provoke suspense by limiting the scope of the conflicts so they can be felt and comprehended more easily.
Maybe a similarly crude level of simulation could work for social games, if the artwork allows players to get immersed in the game and fill in details with their imagination. Japanese relationship games and dating sims get part of the way there; since they're "visual novels," they can convey subtleties of character through narration, instead of having to come up with game mechanics for everything. The actual mechanics are little more than a single love/hate score for each girl, with the player successfully dating one when their score gets high enough (and getting a "bad end" if all are low -- or if too many are high).
Chris Crawford on Game Design mentioned that for the game Gossip, he simulated relationships as a network of springs. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gossip_%28computer_game%29) The closer Alice is to Bob, the more she can influence his opinion of (distance from) Carol. Another spring-based AI by Michael Heasell (Wizard Dude) won CodeCombat's programming tournament. (http://blog.codecombat.com/a-31-trillion-390-billion-stateme...) This "system of springs" could be the core of a social game the way "collision detection" is the core of shooters.
I suspect that one could create a relationship simulator with an emergent storyline by modeling the characters' relations towards each other (not just having a love/hate counter for their relations with the protagonist), and by having a skilled writer create dramatic scenarios triggered on certain conditions and "everyday" scenarios to move the plot along and provide chances to adjust the relationships. The standard plot tree of a dating sim would become a plot graph. It's still a far cry from real human interaction, but Call of Duty is far from real warfare and it sells anyway. The hard part is modeling just the interesting parts and making an entire playthrough be "fun."
> Think about it. When modelling a conversation between two people, there’s a limited number of variables in play. How much do they like each other, and in what way? Given a few basic ways of manipulating the interaction, how does that change the relationship? These are all simple systems to simulate, so much so that we have a long history of unimaginative, sappy romance games made by genre-obsessed, cookie-cutter developers. Physical positioning can be pre-scripted, movements can be automated, and emotions are a well-understood programming domain.
Indeed. Just so.
But since we have social interactions every day, we have sophisticated intuitive expectations about what's a reasonable reaction in a given situation. So social simulations are judged very harshly, because they have a lot more to live up to.
i don't think we have violent games dominating for some random fluke of what was made first and what the creators wanted.
its just supply and demand. although this is also why other, much more popular, casual games have completely eclipsed the 'core gamer' focused 'AAA' industry with their reach and money making power... now that computing has become ubiquitous demand is coming from everywhere and not just the traditional early adopters.
Note the sarcasm here:
> In a sense, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. We know how to make games about the human heart, but struggle to deal with fists, swords, and guns.
> I believe his point is that we have violent games because it's a no-brainer. You don't have to be creative, you don't have to sweat to find an appealing game mechanic, and it sells.
AND
> All of the things mentioned in the article have been justifications used to explain why games about social dynamics haven't happened.
Is the author's premise that games focused on social dynamics are just as easy to make as games focused on violence, and that we have to back-fit justifications to fit it? Or is it that games focused on social dynamics really are harder?
But beyond that, every way of simulating human interaction short of advanced AI will feel awkward because it's too fundamental a part of human nature. Games like _Long Live the Queen_ feel like spreadsheets and dating sims are just a genre of point and click adventure. The best game focused on human interaction that I can think of is the recent _Papers Please_ (disclaimer: I haven't played it, but it's on my list). Its modes of interaction are restricted, and it's not really a game in the strict sense, but rather a story told interactively. Interpersonal games need to move more towards the story telling if they want to be successful.
Rather than do a parody, I'd just point out that excuses about simulation are crappy because games hardly simulate anything. Outside of rigid-body physics, game logic is just a nonsense of magical rules. Why can't I blast open this door? Why do all the light switches still work after I've released several grenades in the room and decaled all the walls? It's all happily absurd.
So if it's a standard in games that stepping over a medkit can cure you of the shotgun blast you took to the face, in some ridiculous simulacrum of first-aid, then why isn't it standard in games that gifting the love interest a rare flower makes them follow you around in some sort of ridiculous simulacrum of infatuation.
It's a nice parody argument. But I'd rather have a history of how games got where they got. Maybe we can blame it all on Dungeons and Dragons. That game had HP.
If we actually decided where we wanted to go with video games, we could get somewhere. Til then we're going to wander around in this violent killfest wasteland, upgrading the graphics on the explosions.
Actually, it is. Try giving a porkchop to a wolf in minecraft :)
After destroying enemies I use to destroy my allies in the game.
Games are horrible... and mainly made for kids.