Patrick talks violence in gaming and the 11 Bit Studios release, This War of Mine.
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| "Hungry, sad, and tired. Sounds like someone has a case of the Mondays." |
Video games have always occupied a strange place among other
entertainment media. Stuck with the
stigma of being a “toy” for the first few decades of their existence, video
games have struggled to find their artistic identities. Nowhere has this struggle been more apparent
than in the treatment of violence in recent years – the “murder simulator” days
of Doom have long since passed, and
gaming continues to mature in sometimes surprising ways.
Take, for example, the fourth entry in Ubisoft’s Far Cry series. The second and third titles in the series
tackled the role of violence in gaming and the concept of choice with about as
much subtlety as a brick through a windshield.
Both games ask the question we often take for granted in video
games: are we, the player, really the
hero when we cause so much death and destruction? Far Cry
4 takes the theme one step further and provides the player with an out - a
way to take a step back from the clichés of gaming and just act like a rational
person for once. It’s difficult to
describe this course of action without spoiling it, but suffice to say you can
finish the game in mere minutes without firing a shot, without jumping to
conclusions and buying into gaming stereotypes.
The result is both an incredible commentary on the series, as well as
gaming as a whole.
Mindless, wanton violence in gaming is fun, but it can often
obscure the narrative. Worse than
indiscriminate violence, one could argue, are those games that force morality
on the player, giving the Karmic scales numerical values that have quantifiable
benefits and drawbacks. Why the
transparency? How can games reach a
level in which the emotional impact of our decisions are enough to cause us to
hesitate before pulling that virtual trigger?
Apparently the answer has nothing to do with technology, and
has everything to do with storytelling, environment, and delivery.
For the first time in my gaming career, I had to stop
playing a game because of regret. Not
because I regretted missing a power-up or allowing a beloved party member to
succumb to permadeath, but because I didn’t want my characters to live with the
mistakes I had just made. It sounds
hyperbolic, I’m sure, but it’s true. This War of Mine, an indy release from
11 Bit Studios, provides an interesting perspective from which to view the
modern warfare that we’ve grown so accustomed to (bored of?) in gaming – the
civilians who suffer the horrors of war the most.
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| "Does this look like the face of the super villain you'll spend the entire game hunting? Yeah, probably." |
Controlling a small group of civilian survivors in a
war-torn country, likely inspired by the Balkans and the other strife-ridden
states of the former Soviet Union, the player must scavenge for supplies and
food during the night, and fight to stay sane in the face of snipers and
bombardments during the day. Gameplay is
surprisingly low tech: point-and-click navigation in a two-dimensional side
scroller. Despite the simplicity, and
with a minimalist approach to storytelling, the desolate desperation of this
world is unbelievably apparent, and when I forced one of my survivors to stab a
handful of unarmed refugees to death for the possibility of scavenging a few
extra boxes of junk, something magical happened – a video game that could have
been technically crafted ten years ago gave me an intense emotional reaction
without the use of Hollywood-caliber voice acting or gut punching plot
gimmicks. There was no immediate penalty
for my course of action, and, in truth, I did manage to grab some really useful
stuff. Regardless, I found myself
mashing the Escape key and wishing to undo something that I had done before in
countless games in the past. Does mean that
the storytelling in gaming is moving beyond its Bloodsport roots and into Full
Metal Jacket territory? Who can say,
but one can only hope the trend continues.
-Patrick B. McDonald