At least once a year, usually during an industry trade show, I tend to look at what we’re creating and ask myself, “Why are games so violent? How did we reach this point?”
There’s a simple answer—violence is entertaining, easy to dramatize, and sells like cold beer on a hot afternoon. Violence is not a “video-game problem.” Just take a step back and look at your life. You are a person whose body requires the continual murder and consumption of living matter in order to survive. Not forever, but long enough for something—be it drugs, the sun, your liver—to kill you in an equally violent, possibly unnoticeable way.
Existence has a violence problem. Video games, like all art, are just expressing the world around them. The reason games face more scrutiny is because they are the latest mass-market art form, they are interactive, and most are built around some form of violent game mechanic. Anything that brings joy to children by letting them pretend to kill people will of course get prudes and politicians up in arms. What many people don’t realize is that video-game violence doesn’t belong to the game industry. We stole it from film, along with most of what we know about tone, theme, and story.
It all began in 1990 when John Carmack, John Romero, Tom Hall, and Adrian Carmack gathered at a lake house in Shreveport, Louisiana, to create Commander Keen, a side-scrolling platformer about an eight-year-old genius defending the earth from an alien invasion. Its success led to the founding of id Software, where Romero, Hall, and the two unrelated Carmacks chose to abandon the family-friendly platformer in favor of focusing on 3-D action games. In just three years, id Software released four games: Wolfenstein 3D, Spear of Destiny, Doom, and Doom II. These first-person shooters were fast, frantic, and violent in a way many gamers had never seen because they were too young to watch films like Evil Dead II.
If violence was the only thing worth remembering about Wolfenstein 3D and Doom, we wouldn’t be talking about id Software right now. There are plenty of forgotten developers who tried to ride a wave of mutilation all the way to the bank. id Software understood there had to be more underneath the blood; something new. Their games brought people together through LAN connections and dial-up modems, allowing people to play together in the same game. Modular data files and level editors made it easy for fans to create their own levels and share them with one another. These games created communities and popularized the first-person shooter. The violence was just curb appeal.
In 2001, gaming took another leap forward in the form of Grand Theft Auto III. Published by Rockstar Games, GTA 3 diverged from the early games in the series by presenting a fully three-dimensional world for players to move through and explore. The innovation of an open game world came out of nowhere, but that’s not the reason Grand Theft Auto became a household name.
Described as a “crime simulation game” by its producer, Leslie Benzies, GTA 3 was an immersive American satire and homage to crime films Scarface and Goodfellas. The player took on the role of Claude, a criminal betrayed by his girlfriend, who works his way through the criminal underbelly of Liberty City, the franchise’s version of New York. The open-world nature of the game allowed players to do all manner of terrible things—run over civilians with a car, shoot police officers, sleep with prostitutes and then kill them to get their money back. There was nothing in the game that could not conceivably be found in an R-rated crime film, but the interactive component transformed players from voyeurs to participants, giving the game a forbidden edge.
Grand Theft Auto III was the highest-selling game of 2001 and sold more than two million units in its first five months. As with Doom, its success and innovation created a new video-game genre—the open-world 3-D action-adventure game. It was arguably the last earth-shattering leap made by the AAA industry, and the genre is still going strong. When Grand Theft Auto V was released in 2013, it made more than one billion dollars in just three days. That never would have happened if Grand Theft Auto was an open-world game about living in a city, working a nine-to-five job, and obeying traffic laws.
As a gameplay mechanic, violence is the most dramatic and empowering form of conflict resolution. It’s flashy, it’s familiar, and it sticks with you, which is important, because we need people to notice, remember, and purchase these games. With every new generation of video-game console, our games cost more to make. It took five people less than five months to create Wolfenstein 3D Grand Theft Auto V took a team of around one thousand people over four years to complete.
Violence sells. If it didn’t, we’d be bankrupt within a year.
The problem is, constant exposure to imaginary violence can lead to desensitization. Our job is to keep pushing the envelope and make killing great again. Do you need realistic hit reactions? Okay, enemies now grab their crotches when you shoot them in the dick. Too tame? Fine, here’s an X-ray camera that shows your opponent’s organs being liquefied by your punches. Whatever it takes to make you feel something, we’ll do it. But that’s not always enough. Sometimes, to get your blood pumping, we have to let you decide how far you’re willing to go.
“PEOPLE LOVED THE MORAL choice in BioShock,” said the Fox. “It was controversial and thought-provoking. I think Spec Ops can do it better.”
The Fox and I were in Berlin, presenting his latest idea to Yager. He was adamant we follow in BioShock’s footsteps by presenting players with a moral choice, but he wanted to take it a step further. Where BioShock offered a choice between good and evil, he wanted ours to be a choice between bad and worse. To explain the idea, he came up with a concept he called “the Wailing Virgin.”
“Imagine you’re behind enemy lines, wounded and low on ammo. Konrad’s men are patrolling nearby. If you’re not careful, they will find you. You try to sneak through the area but are spotted by a woman, a wounded refugee. She knows you’re one of the good guys and begins crying out for your help. Her voice rings out like a siren. Every soldier within earshot is now headed your direction. What do you do?”
The project leads stared at the Fox with blank expressions, as if he were a schoolteacher who had asked if someone would volunteer to complete a math equation on the chalkboard.
“Anyone?” asked the Fox.
Kurt—lead level designer, bird watcher, scarf aficionado—raised his hand. He was an interesting guy. What I liked about Kurt was his tell. I always knew when he disagreed with me, and it made my job much easier.
“You don’t have to raise your hand,” I said.
“Yes,” said the Fox. “You are all free to speak. The virgin is wailing, soldiers are coming, what do you do?”
“I leave the area,” said Kurt.
“Very smart. To your horror, the woman follows, continuing to scream. What to do you?”
Kurt shrugged. “I do not know. What am I allowed to do?”
“Anything,” said the Fox.
“Hmm, yes.” Kurt pursed his lips, crossed his arms, and nodded his head. “I see, I see.” That was the tell. Kurt knew where this conversation was going, and he did not approve.
I knew Kurt was done playing, so I jumped in. “I hit her with a melee attack.” There were two basic attacks in Spec Ops, ranged and melee. Ranged attacks were throwing a grenade or firing a weapon. A melee attack was a close-range attack in which you struck someone with the butt of your weapon. It dealt less damage than a ranged attack, and was conceivably nonlethal.
The Fox turned his attention to me. “You hit the virgin with your rifle. She screams even louder. What do you do?”
Kurt leaned forward and rested on his elbows. “There is nothing else you can do.” I’d only seen him like this once before. For Kurt, this was the equivalent of flipping the table.
The Fox looked at Kurt, then at me. “Yes, there is.” He was a little put off. If I had to guess, he probably thought we were ganging up on him.
“I can’t shoot her,” said Kurt.
“Why not? You have a gun.”
“Because she’s an innocent woman.”
“Not anymore,” said the Fox. “Right now, she’s a homing beacon, and both of your lives are in danger because she can’t take a hint. Your pistol only holds six bullets. If you think that’s enough to survive, then you can let the virgin wail and wait for Konrad’s men to arrive. You might survive, but she is a very loud and hysterical target and will definitely die in the crossfire. Or, you could shoot her and slink away to fight another day. No one will ever know. What do you do?”
The room was quiet as Yager pondered the question. Kurt spoke first.
“I see, I see,” said Kurt. “You want us to make a war-crime game.”
“Whoa! No, no, no! Who said anything about war crimes? I want you to make a game about soldiers trying to do their best in a bad situation.”
“What you just described is a war crime.”
“That was an example to illustrate what I meant by bad or worse. The player doesn’t have to shoot the woman. It’s only an option.”
“The option to commit a war crime.”
The Fox threw up his hands. “Do you hear this guy? I know you Germans have a history with this sort of thing, but come on. You’re the one who called it a war crime, not me.”
Timo, one of the company founders, leaned in. “I think what Kurt is saying is this might be too extreme for some players. It is worth asking ourselves if people want to play a game that makes them feel bad.”
The Fox raised his eyebrows in my direction. We’d been fielding this exact question back in California, so I had an answer locked and loaded. “I think they do. People use art as a way to safely explore emotions they might not want to feel in their normal, day-to-day lives. Think of the different movies, books, and songs we consume. They can make us feel sad, scared, angry. Music is especially bad about this. Think of how many sad songs you’ve listened to over the course of your life. I don’t think people are afraid to be emotionally challenged by their games. I think they’re waiting for it. Gamers are ready for a deeper, more emotional experience. They want to play games that matter.”
“That’s right,” added the Fox. “Spec Ops is a game that matters. But it is also dark and gritty and thought-provoking.”
One of the art leads said, “I think dark and gritty is good.” He had been drawing during this entire conversation and turned his pad around so everyone could see. “This is an idea I had. What if Konrad flew a helicopter above Captain Walker and then tilted it so dead refugees fell out the side and rained down on the player? We could zoom the camera in very close and watch the bodies fall in slow motion. I think it would be very reminiscent of people jumping out of the towers on 9/11.”
Oh. Oh God, no. “That might be taking it too far,” I said.
Straight to eleven, every time.
JEAN-PAUL SARTRE COINED THE phrase “Hell is other people” in his play No Exit (translated from the French Huis Clos). In the play, three damned souls are brought to a locked room in hell by a mysterious valet. Through conversation, they are each forced to see themselves through the eyes of others and to learn for the first time who they truly are. That is the crux of Sartre’s point—we can never be truly individualized beings, for we cannot know ourselves without the views of others.
Video games solve this philosophical dilemma by removing other people entirely. We design choices that clearly state the player’s options and outcomes so they can decide who they are and how the world will see them. Do you want to play pretend hero or pretend villain? Make your choice; the game will reinforce your personal fantasy. Moral choices offer players validation instead of revelation, because in games, choice is synonymous with player agency.
Agency is the player’s ability to control their experience through a branching narrative, gameplay, or a moral choice. There are other methods, but these are probably the most popular and widely used.
A branching narrative is a split in the road. The player comes to a point in the story where they must decide which way to go. It can be as simple as choosing which of your crewmates will sacrifice their life to disable a bomb. The player moves forward in the game, having lost a member of their crew, and the dev team moves forward by designing two slightly different branches of the story in which only one of those characters survived.
With gameplay agency, the player is given a goal and must accomplish it in order to continue the game. Goal-driven progress is mostly linear. Let’s say the player needs to find the red key and open the red door. Nothing is going change that goal—if the player wants to continue, they have to find that key. To give the player more agency, you can design multiple ways of accomplishing their key-focused goal. For example, they could sneak into the key office and steal the red key without killing anyone, or they could locate the key master, shoot him in the face, and then loot the red key from his corpse. Choices like these usually don’t affect the larger game, but there are exceptions.
Dishonored is an FPS stealth action-adventure game, meaning the player can accomplish their goals through nonlethal stealth or wholesale slaughter. It takes place in the steampunk city of Dunwall, where a plague is turning the city’s poorer citizens into Not-Zombies. If the player chooses the lethal path, it will increase the number of rats in the city. More rats mean more plague. As the plague spreads, the city falls more into chaos.
There is a vague moral-choice aspect to this, but it’s ultimately undercut by the game’s narrative. You play as Corvo, a royal bodyguard turned assassin who is framed for murdering the Empress. After he is broken out of prison by the Loyalists, Corvo is tasked with “eliminating” the conspirators who overthrew the government. There is a nonlethal option for disposing of each conspirator, but they all make assassination seem like a mercy. One man is branded and left to live in poverty, where the plague turns him into a Not-Zombie. Twins have their heads shaved and tongues cut out before being sent to work in the mines for the rest of their lives. One woman is kidnapped and handed over to her stalker. Finally, the man who orchestrated the entire plot is arrested and sent to be executed.
To summarize, after the player is sold on being an assassin, the game tells them it’s bad to kill people, so if they want the “good ending,” they must doom four people to lives of torture and misery and then have someone else kill the fifth person. Nothing says “clean hands” like facilitating the inevitable deaths of five people but refusing to deliver the killing blows. Dishonored is video-game morality at its most technical.
A real moral choice is like the one from BioShock, which we discussed earlier. To acquire ADAM and purchase new Plasmids (aka “science magic”), the player must choose to “Rescue” or “Harvest” a Little Sister. Harvesting kills the Little Sister, grants a large amount of ADAM, and brands the player as a bad person. Rescuing a Little Sister will free her of servitude and give the player a tiny bit of ADAM. However, for every three Little Sisters the player rescues, they will be gifted a large amount. If the player sticks to one path or another, without wavering, they will receive roughly the same amount of ADAM during the course of the game. This creates a choice that is purely moral. It exists solely within you, the player, and depends on how you feel about killing a helpless girl. However, if the end result had been unbalanced, players would have been forced to choose between killing girls and growing more powerful or rescuing them and remaining weak as the game’s difficulty increased. Had this been the case, the BioShock choice would have challenged the player’s morality, and therefore been more engaging.
I don’t know how I feel about moral choices.
On one hand, moral choices feed my hunger for complex, emotionally driven situations while also satisfying my desire for audacious trash. I also enjoy audacious trash. They straddle the line between good and bad taste more than any other gameplay mechanic.
On the other hand, moral choices normalize violence by setting morality apart from the killing that takes place in moment-to-moment gameplay. In BioShock, only Little Sisters fall under the game’s moral rubric. You only have to kill one to be ineligible for the game’s “good” ending. The hundreds of Splicers you kill don’t factor into it. Their deaths are amoral. We could argue their deaths don’t matter because the player was just defending him- or herself, but that’s a paper-thin rationalization. The only reason it’s okay to kill a Splicer is because killing them is the point of the game. First-person shooters exist because people want to shoot things. A thought-provoking, well-written shooter is not exempt from this truth. In these games, a moral choice positively reinforces the idea that might equals right; making the good choice lets a player feel heroic despite his or her violent actions.
On the third hand (my secret hand that no one knows about), I think moral choices conveniently shift the burden of morality from the designer to the player. Unlike other artistic media, games are treated as a form of audience expression rather than the artist’s. We’ve spent years telling players, “This is about what you want to do.”
If you Google “PlayStation Greatness Awaits,” you’ll find an advertisement in which a grinning man walks through a ruined city while extoling the virtues of you, the player. “Who are you not to be great?” he asks. “Who are you to be afraid? You, who can serve as judge and jury while hoarding infinite lives?”
In PlayStation’s “Michael” commercial, video-game characters gather in a bar to share stories about the player who saved their lives and did the impossible. It wasn’t Kratos who killed Hades or those American soldiers who stormed Normandy Beach. It was Michael. “For all he does,” says the bartender, “for all of us.”
“To Michael!” they shout. “To Michael!”
Only a kid or a very sad adult would take these commercials to heart. Most people will see them for what they are—pandering. That doesn’t change the fact they are an extreme echo of our design methodology, Player First.
What will the player want?
What will they think?
What will they do?
We’ve been asking ourselves these questions for so long that we’ve forgotten how to ask our own questions. “What do I want? What am I doing? What does this mean?” We’ve removed ourselves from the equation. Nothing makes that more obvious than the rhetoric we spew in support of moral choices.
“It’s the player’s choice.”
No, it’s not. We conceived it and built it. The choice is ours. Forcing it onto someone else does not excuse us from moral obligation. If we believe games can establish and reinforce social norms, then our obligation is to the future, not the player. We are the architects of these digital worlds; the power to design a better future is in our hands.
Like I said, I’m very conflicted when it comes to moral choices. The one thing I’m certain of is you should strive to make your game as engaging as possible. Moral choices can do that, but only if you can resist the pathological need to validate the player.
Good people—by which I mean genuinely compassionate, caring, and empathetic people—don’t need validation. They have chosen an outward-facing worldview that focuses on other people. For them, validation is unnecessary.
But take me, for example. I’m vain, insecure, and mildly narcissistic; in other words, an asshole. Validation is all I crave. Without it, the precariously constructed illusion that is my self-image would collapse, leaving me exposed as the fraud I secretly believe myself to be.
I’m convinced nothing good comes from validating assholes who are not me.
For Spec Ops, we decided the moral choices couldn’t just be dark and gritty. To do that would have been exploitation, shock for shock’s sake. If we wanted our game to truly be compelling, the underlying question of our choices couldn’t be, “What is right and what is wrong?” We needed to attack the core of our own game by asking the player, “What are you going to do with the gun in your hand?”
The Wailing Virgin was thrown out almost immediately. It would have been a difficult choice for the player to make, but one that would have played off their annoyance. It would have been too cheap. Instead, we created a new example called “the Hanging Men.”
The player finds two men hanging from a street sign by their wrists. Snipers line the street, guns pointed at the player. It’s all a tableau designed by Konrad to prove a point.
KONRAD
The civilian on the right stole water—a capital offense. The soldier on the left was sent to apprehend him. Which he did, killing the man’s family in the process. Five innocent people are dead, because these two animals couldn’t control themselves. They are guilty. But what is justice? And how would you see it dealt? Who lives? Who dies? Judge these men, or pay the price of insubordination.
The idea was to present the player with a binary choice that actually had more than two options. The player was told to kill the refugee or the soldier, which they could do. But they could also walk away, attack the snipers, free both men by shooting the ropes from which they hang, or stand there and do nothing. Again, it all came down to the question “What are you going to do with the gun in your hand?” In the case of the Hanging Men, the possible answers were “Exactly what the game tells me to do” or “Whatever the hell I want.”
The twist was that none of the outcomes would play out the way you might expect. Walk away and refuse to play Konrad’s game? The snipers kill both prisoners. Attack the snipers and it will trigger combat, killing both prisoners in the crossfire. If you free the prisoners by shooting their ropes, Konrad’s snipers will execute them both. We gave the player every option we could think of, but none of them would lead to success. In fact, the only way the player could save anyone was to do as Konrad ordered by executing either the soldier or the refugee. The snipers would then free whoever was still alive and let them escape.
The Hanging Men were a message from us to the player—you are not in charge here. This world will not bend to your wishes.
From there, we designed six more choices, each contextually different but thematically the same. Only the Hanging Men were presented as a literal choice. The others were just moments that arose in the story. For example, the first American soldier you meet in the game is Lt. McPherson, who you witness killing a CIA operative in cold blood. Stunned by your arrival, he raises his gun above his head as a sign of nonaggression and then slowly backs away. You, the player, decide what to do with the gun in your hand. You can shoot the Lieutenant or not, because those are the only two things you can do with a gun. If you let McPherson leave, he’ll come back with more soldiers and try to kill you. At that point, the choice is taken from you: one of you has to die. If you want to keep playing the game, it’ll have to be McPherson.
Later, another CIA agent named Riggs convinces you to help him steal the city’s water supply from Konrad’s men. When you do, he betrays you and destroys it, dooming everyone in the city to die of thirst. The act leaves him pinned underneath a water truck that is slowly being engulfed in flames. He asks you to shoot him. “Please, Walker. Don’t let me burn.” Do you pull the trigger or leave it be?
Any other game would have added these choices together to calculate whether the player deserved the good or bad ending. I’ve never liked that system; it’s unrealistic. Humans are flawed. We all make mistakes. Our only salvation is that we’re able to learn from them and hopefully become better people. When a game assigns a particular ending based on the player’s earlier choices, it is saying, “Only your past is important. There can be no change of heart, no lessons learned. The person you are now does not matter.” Fuck that noise.
With Spec Ops, we kept the choices coming all the way to the very end. In the game’s final moments, the player looks back on everything they’ve done—none of it good—and is told to judge him- or herself while holding a pistol to their own head.
“What are you going to do with the gun in your hand?”
A well-designed moral choice should sear itself into the player’s brain, like a hand burnt on a hot stove. Will it cause outrage? Yes. It should. Your gut will tell you to tone it down; make it more palatable so players won’t be too put off. Your gut is wrong. You created something monstrous; let that mother roar.
I can hear your sad little cries all the way from the future. “B-b-but it’s just a game!” No. This stopped being a game the moment we all decided it was cool to be transgressive. If we’re going to present players with deplorable choices, then by God, we have to stand by them. Games are art, but sometimes they barely rise to the level of a Thomas Kinkade painting. Art doesn’t embrace the viewer; it grabs them by the arm and drags them out back into an alley filled with shit and needles.
A moral choice should be dirty and dangerous and frightening. It needs to make players look over their shoulders just to be sure no one is watching. Repulse your players. Seduce them. Leave them so ashamed they want to vomit and touch themselves at the same time. They shouldn’t be spared the memory of what they’ve done. They shouldn’t be spared at all.