Why So Few Violent Games?

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'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.)

After destroying enemies I use to destroy my allies in the game.

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.

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.