Abstract
Violence in videogames has been a controversial topic since the medium’s inception, but how videogames depict violence has changed dramatically over time. During the seventh console generation, several development studios implemented similar design mechanisms that allowed players to engage in ethically challenging virtual violence through morally compromised characters, contexts, and systems. Fourteen AAA games released between the years of 2007 and 2013 encouraged critical reflection on the ethical qualities of that violence, resulting in a phenomenon I term “critical violence”. Following an overview of the ethics of videogames and a brief history of changes in the industry, this paper performs a comparative analysis of four games, two that engage in critical violence and two that do not, elucidating the techniques used to generate such criticality: defamiliarization, narrative character studies, systemic design, and aesthetic style. These approaches demonstrate that violence in videogames can be a useful element for communicating meaningful experiences.
Keywords
Introduction
Violence in videogames has been a controversial topic since the medium’s inception, but how videogames depict violence has changed dramatically over time. Discussions on this subject have mostly moved beyond the reductive “do videogames make people violent?” debate toward examining how violence is characterized in videogames (Plante, 2020) and what that violence can mean (Keogh, 2012). While there are various studies on the methods videogames employ to make violence digestible (Hartmann et al., 2014), less focus has been placed on the mechanisms that can make virtual violence an ethically reflective experience. This paper discusses common design techniques that enable this reflectivity and explores the appearance of such experiences in the seventh console generation. 1 During this period, videogame hardware became capable of rendering high definition, photorealistic graphics, and game developers discovered a renewed emphasis on narrative storytelling (Jagoda, 2017). As a result, some developers began to reflect on the meaning of violence in their games. The years from 2007 to 2013 contained a trend of videogames that encouraged players to experiment with morally compromised characters, contexts, and systems by having the player engage in ethically challenging violence, a phenomenon that will be called “critical violence.” These games presented such criticality through several methods: defamiliarization, narrative-based character studies, systemic design, and aesthetic style.
These games were not novel in and of themselves. Art games and serious games posed similar questions to video game players prior to the advent of the seventh console generation, such as September 12 th : A Toy World or Super Columbine Massacre RPG! (Ledonne, Danny 2005; Newsgaming 2003). 2 Even earlier mainstream videogames, like Shadow of the Colossus and Metal Gear Solid 3, contained critiques of virtual violence (Sicart, 2009, pp. 107–108, 216). These antecedents to the examples discussed in this paper implemented similar mechanisms to communicate their themes, though they appeared prior to the specific trend outlined here.
This paper is chiefly concerned with commercial AAA 3 single-player games released between the years of 2007 and 2013 featuring moments of critical violence enacted by the player. As the best-selling format, AAA games often represent popular understandings of what videogames are and can be. While it was more common at the time for developers of serious, indie, or art games to experiment with complex themes that “reached beyond the realm of entertainment” (Jagoda 2017, p. 210; Jagoda 2018, pp. 212–213), some AAA games from the seventh console generation engaged in such a practice as well. The presence of an introspective examination from gaming’s most popular and often least experimental sector is an intriguing emergence.
What is unique about this era is not the specific attitude, but the increased frequency of large development studios that explored these themes. This paper identifies 14 games released between 2007 and 2013 that task the player with performing ethically challenging violence. Certain development studios and publishers also produced multiple examples, indicating that some studios, such as Rockstar and Infinity Ward, were more invested in this pursuit than others. This does indicate that such games were not an overriding trend, but the 7 year span from 2014 to 2020 features considerably fewer examples that align with this focus.
These games were identified after examining lists of AAA games released during the stated period and reading interviews with developers in which they state an intent to embed ethical or moral considerations into the game (Grayson 2013; Taro 2014). Further research involved journalistic pieces and forum comments that feature interpretations of game content as ethically or morally challenging, indicating an experience powerful enough to generate conversations around the game’s violence (Bramwell 2014; Sterling 2013). These 14 games demonstrate that violent actions in videogames can be useful elements for communicating thought-provoking stories, and recent changes in the industry suggest that this trend has continued to mature.
Moral Disengagement, Ethics, and Eudaimonic Entertainment
Amending previous understandings of aggression within virtual space, researchers Tilo Hartmann and Peter Vorderer offer a succinct definition of virtual violence: “virtual violence can be defined as any user behavior that follows the intention to do harm to other social characters in a videogame, while the game characters are motivated to avoid the harm-doing” (2010, p. 95). An important element of this definition is that violence happens to game characters who are “motivated to avoid the harm-doing.”
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We can observe this using Halo 3 as an example: a grenade is thrown at an enemy alien, the alien dodges away from the grenade (see Figure 1). By seeking to avoid being killed, these virtual entities simulate the drives of actual beings. This is a common reaction by non-player-controlled enemies in videogames, demonstrating that virtual violence is widespread across the medium. This, however, raises a question: if many players’ virtual actions could be considered violent, and therefore unethical, why do they continue to perform them? Enemy brute evades a grenade (Bungie, 2007). Screenshot by author.
In the past, videogames have been considered “amoral spaces,” the actions taken in them requiring little to no reflection (Formosa et al. 2016, p. 2). The “magic circle,” a notion in game studies that has become “shorthand for the idea of a special time and place created by a game,” has often been advanced to lend this view some credence (Keever 2014, para. 19). However, Tilo Hartmann proceeds from his research with Vorderer to offer a different explanation. In a 2014 study on violent videogames, Tilo Hartmann, Maja Krakowiak, and Mina Tsay-Vogel discovered that players “tend to treat computers and virtual agents as social beings” (p. 311). Hartmann (2017) used the study’s findings to develop the “Moral Disengagement in Violent Videogames” model which refutes the view that users enjoy virtual violence primarily because they are constantly aware that “this game is not real.” Instead, the model follows experimental findings suggesting that videogame users are inclined to automatically feel present in virtual environments and (despite better knowledge) may intuitively feel like actually enacting violence against social beings (para. 1).
Hartmann (2017) goes on to claim that some videogames may eschew disengagement factors to serve a purpose other than entertainment, “whenever self-enacted virtual violence starts to bother users, they may be inclined to engage in higher-order cognitive processing to reflect upon it. This reflection, in turn, may resemble a sense-making process that eventually produces new insights about violence” (para. 29). One such example mentioned by Hartmann is Spec Ops: The Line, a third-person military shooter created by Yager Development and released in 2012. Brendan Keogh’s book length critique, Killing is Harmless, provides a thorough analysis of how Spec Ops constructs violence, stating that it “forces the player to [realize] they are–have always been–shooting humans” (2012, p. 23). Meanwhile, Kristine Jorgensen’s qualitative study on the game discovered that it generated an experience of “positive discomfort” among a group of interviewed players (2016).
Such experiences can be classified under the term “eudaimonic entertainment.” In contrast to hedonic entertainment, eudaimonic experiences are “media entertainment experiences that go beyond enjoyment, such as deeper appreciation of moving or thought-provoking media narratives” (Elson et al., 2014, p. 521). Eudaimonic entertainment’s capacity to offer insight and meaning, rather than simple fun, corresponds to Hartmann’s idea that games can engender higher-order cognitive processing.
Miguel Sicart demonstrates how such higher-order cognitive processing can appear by suggesting that, when engaging with a game, a person takes on two distinct subject positions: the player and the playersubject. The “player” is the person who exists outside the game state with their ethics and personal beliefs while the “playersubject” is a newly embodied “skin” that the player assumes when they engage with the game (Sicart, 2009, p. 77, 79). This playersubject has different ethical frames and beliefs than the player and, in fact, these ethics shift from game to game (Sicart, 2009, ch. 3).
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Both player and playersubject develop ludic phronesis, or an understanding of how videogames operate and how they communicate based on previous experiences (Sicart, 2009, p. 112). Sicart (2009) asserts that ludic phronesis operates the ethical triggers that dismiss the playersubject when the game experience actually forces the player to make choices that are deemed unethical by the being who is external to the game. We stop being players in the middle of a gaming session when our practical wisdom connects the playersubject with who we are as ethical beings outside the game experience (p. 113).
These ethical considerations form the basis from which an understanding of critical violence can be extrapolated. As Sicart (2009) claims in relation to the art game Super Columbine Massacre RPG! By forcing the player to commit these acts, the game designer forced players to reflect on the meaning of actions: as a player, you want to win, but as a human being, you have to think about what winning means, and what the actions that are being simulated meant.… it is in this tension where thinking about the ethics of computer games is productive, and shows the potential of computer games for creating rich moral experiences (p. 101).
Changing Cultural Contexts: Moral Panics, Narrative, and Violence in Videogames
Public concern over depictions of violence in videogames dates back almost to their origin. In 1976, game developer Exidy released Death Race, an arcade game in which players control a vehicle with the goal of crashing into non-player-controlled stick-figure targets (Exidy, 1976). In a report on the game, The New York Times referred to these targets as “symbolic pedestrians” and expressed concern over the violent attitudes the game might encourage (Kocurek, 2012, para. 30). Regardless of Exidy’s statements that the targets represented monsters and not people, public perception from The New York Times article led to the first moral panic around violence in videogames (Kocurek, 2012, para. 17). The controversy that surrounded Death Race serves as a prototypical example of a cycle that would reappear throughout the following decades, from Mortal Kombat to Grand Theft Auto III to Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2.
While public outcries in response to virtual violence may follow similar patterns, videogames themselves have changed drastically since 1976. In particular, the narrative component of videogames became increasingly important in the seventh console generation, with the transition to high-definition graphics emboldening development studios to pursue stories with more mature tones (Krishna Lal, 2020). Although many artistic and narratively ambitious games were released in the 20th century, Patrick Jagoda (2017) asserts that the period immediately leading up to and following the year 2007 saw a visible growth of the separate, though related, phenomena of “indie games,” “artgames,” “serious games,” “Do-It-Yourself (DIY) game making,” and “casual games,” as well as the expansion of the more instrumental area of “gamification.” These categories opened up many previously unavailable, often experimental avenues for games that exceeded merely economic motivations.… In these same years, mainstream companies also produced a range of narratively complex videogames with multi-faceted characters, including Bioshock (2007), Mass Effect (2007), and Fallout 3 (2008), which reenergized discussions about games and narrative that had fallen out of favor in earlier debates about ludology versus narratology (p. 207).
Conceiving of videogames as vehicles for rich narratives became fully cemented at this time, evidenced by the change in how companies responded to moral panics over violence. In 1976, Exidy rejected the critiques of Death Race by claiming that news outlets misinterpreted the game’s visuals (Kocurek, 2012, para. 32). In contrast, Activision’s response to the 2009 controversy surrounding the “No Russian” mission in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 rationalized the violence of that level as necessary. In this level, players assume the role of a CIA operative in deep cover with a Russian terrorist cell and take part in an attack on an airport that causes the deaths of hundreds of civilians (Infinity Ward, 2009). Activision defended the level’s inclusion by stating that the game “features a deep and gripping storyline” and indicating that the content of the mission was integral to that story (Thorson, 2009; para. 5). Rather than trying to dismiss the presence of violence, Activision and Infinity Ward used the narrative of their game, and the momentum of an industry gaining mainstream success at tackling heavier thematic subjects, to justify it.
Unlike Death Race, there can be no debate over whether “No Russian” depicts scenes of graphic violence. What could be argued, however, is whether that violence is justified as providing a eudaimonic experience to the player, an argument that depends on the industry changes in the mid-2000s that brought videogame stories newfound respect. It is in this context of a medium steadily putting greater emphasis on narrative that we can examine how videogames use violence to serve a productive role in generating eudaimonic experiences.
Qualities of Critical Violence in the Seventh Console Generation
In addition to the changing rhetoric employed to defend violent videogames, game developers themselves began questioning how their work depicted violence. As Walt Williams, writer of Spec Ops: The Line, notes in relation to violent games, “It’s getting harder and harder for us to play these games, and to look at them critically and say, ‘This is ok. This makes sense’. Especially as we get older, especially as we play more of them” (2013). This uneasiness led some developers and writers, like Williams, Yoko Taro, and Jeffrey Yohalem, to design experiences that were critical of the very violence they asked players to enact (Grayson, 2013; Taro, 2014). Such eudaimonic experiences were generated by videogames through several mechanisms: defamiliarization, character studies, systemic design, and aesthetic style. It is also critical to note that this is not a rigid typology and that videogames can implement multiple techniques. 6
Defamiliarization involves moments that change how players engage with the game, either by altering the interactive mechanics used to play the game or by revealing new narrative contexts that reshape understanding of the game world, causing the “pause in instrumentality” (Sicart, 2009, p. 95) that results in ethical cognitive friction. These games are Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (2007), Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (2009), God of War III (2010), Red Dead Redemption (2010), Nier (2010), Ninja Gaiden 3 (2012), and Grand Theft Auto V (2013).
“Character study” is defined by Dictionary.com as, “A work of fiction in which the delineation of the central character’s personality is more important than the plot” (Dictionary.com, Retrieved January 8, 2020). Games that implemented critical violence through character studies involved narratives in which the character’s personality and values are connected to the violence they perpetrate, implicating the player who controls that protagonist as complicit in their violent acts. Spec Ops: The Line (2012), Bioshock: Infinite (2013), and The Last of Us (2013) are games that emphasize this technique, with God of War III (2010), Red Dead Redemption (2010), Kane and Lynch II: Dog Days (2010), and Max Payne 3 (2012) involving elements of character studies as well.
Videogames that employ the systemic design method are rarer, with only two games, both from publisher Ubisoft: Far Cry 2 (2008) and Far Cry 3 (2012). Systemic design appears when the meaning of a game is embedded within its mechanics by virtue of them encouraging certain behaviors and dynamics (Hocking, 2011). For example, Far Cry 2 presents mechanics like “shooting to wound,” a reputation system, and other components that combine to distort the player’s relationship to violence as they progress through the game (Hocking, 2011; Riley, 2010). In isolation, these systems would be less impactful; however, Far Cry 2 weaves them together to create a critical experience that highlights the human capacity for savagery (Hocking, 2011). Unlike defamiliarization, which often appears in singular instances, systemically designed critical violence occurs through a layering of mechanics and systems as players learn to perceive the meaning of their in-game actions over time.
Aesthetic style can usually be understood as a subcategory. Every game uses aesthetics to characterize the nature of their violence. The Last of Us, for example, contains minimal UI elements, a grim tone, and photorealistic style to add weight to its brutality. In some cases, however, aesthetic style can take the foreground such as in Kane and Lynch 2: Dog Days (2010) and Max Payne 3 (2012). Both games fit the mold of character studies, but their most striking characteristics are the visual and audio design which embrace hyper stylization to engender discomfort in players, whether it be the use of pixelation in Kane and Lynch 2 to censor the horrors that players inflict or the slow motion kill shots that simultaneously emphasize Max Payne’s feats of super humanity and the destructiveness of his actions (Geller, 2020; Keever, 2014; Keever & Pinabella 2015).
The next sections will discuss case studies in which these different techniques appeared from the years 2007 to 2013. These will then be compared to games that feature similar situations where critical violence does not appear. Given the limited scope of this paper, analyses will be limited to the most frequently observed techniques: defamiliarization and character studies.
Defamiliarization
Defamiliarization is a concept with roots in poetic critical theory that, within game studies, has most frequently been applied to art and serious games. Alex Mitchell (2016) quotes Reuven Tsur that defamiliarization results in a “prolonging [of] the process of perception” that “draws attention to the form of poetry” (p. 1). Mitchell (2016) proposes the term “poetic gameplay” to describe how such a process appears in games: By poetic gameplay, therefore, I mean the structuring of the actions the player takes within a game, and the responses the game provides to those actions, in a way that draws attention to the form of the game, and by doing so encourages players to reflect upon and see that structure in a new way (p. 2).
There are also examples that defamiliarize the context of the story to offer players new perspectives on familiar actions. After completing Nier for the first time, players can replay the entire game; this time with the ability to understand the language of the monsters they have been killing (Cavia, 2010). Where players once understood their violent actions as morally justified, in this new context, they learn that they are actually the aggressors in the story, undermining the familiar morality of videogame protagonists (Reed, 2021). However, most of the games that implemented defamiliarization did so by changing the mechanics players use to engage with the game for short periods of time, opening opportunities for players to experience critical violence.
Grand Theft Auto V
The Grand Theft Auto series has a long history of pushing the boundaries of ethical gameplay interactions and, as a result, has been the target of many moral panics, from the prostitute murder of GTA III to the Hot Coffee Mod of GTA: San Andreas (Leichtamer, 2015). In 2013, Rockstar released Grand Theft Auto V and the game drew similar controversy.
Partway through the game, players undertake a mission called “By the Book.” The mission tasks players with torturing a man to extract information on a target that a non-player-controlled partner wants to assassinate. The player is taken to a menu-like screen where the player-character, Trevor, gazes at four different tools. A prompt in the top left corner of the screen tells the player to “pick a torture weapon” (Rockstar North, 2013). There is no ambiguity about what activity the player is engaging in and each of the four options results in a painful scenario such as pliers to rip out one of the man’s teeth or battery clips to deliver an electric shock to their chest (Rockstar North, 2013).
These tools are not weapons players have access to in standard gameplay and the players perform the actions by using the controller to mime Trevor’s physical movements, assisted by prompts in the corner of the screen that explain how to use each tool (see Figure 2) while the victim pleads with them to stop (Rockstar North, 2013). Rather than the familiarity of the game’s traditional mechanics, this scene reduces disengagement factors experienced by the player, focusing on the consequences of each action while clearly positioning players in morally unjustified ground. By giving the player tools they are unfamiliar with, GTA V requires them to read text and adapt to new mechanics, causing a prolonged process of perception that makes them aware of the game’s artifice. Trevor using the car battery tool (Bramwell, 2014; [Image]).
While the moral panic directed at this sequence regarded the presence of player-controlled torture, the scene is followed by a metacommentary from the developers and delivered by Trevor. Rather than listening to their employer who tells Trevor to kill the torture victim, Trevor unties the man and drives him to the airport so that he can live a life on the run. During the drive, Trevor monologues about how torture is ineffective, that it is more about the torturer’s ego and desire to torture, specifically criticizing the United States government for engaging in such activities (Rockstar North, 2013).
One view on Trevor’s perspective is to understand the situation as a satire and critique of America’s approach to interrogation (Kain, 2013; Leichtamer, 2015). That being said, numerous players found that the scene was poorly handled, causing a disconnect from the game that did not result in eudaimonic appreciation or hedonic entertainment, but an unpleasant break between playersubject and player (Bramwell, 2014). While its depiction of torture may be insensitive, it left a strong enough impression that people who experienced it still discuss the scene on forums even 7 years after the game’s release (ResetEra Gaming Forum, 2020). Regardless of interpretation, the reduction of disengagement factors and Trevor’s direct confrontation of the subject matter demonstrate that the discomfort that results from engaging in this morally unjustified scenario is intended by the developers.
Splinter Cell Conviction
A direct contrast to Grand Theft Auto V’s torture scene is Splinter Cell: Conviction, released in 2010 and developed by Ubisoft Montreal. This game takes an uncritical approach to violence and serves to demonstrate what sets Grand Theft Auto V’s torture scene apart from other examples of defamiliarization that do not engender moments of critical violence.
Splinter Cell: Conviction features protagonist Sam Fisher who has become a rogue operative after being abandoned by the US government. Without the support of the military and with only his own skills to support him, Fisher will stop at nothing to prevent a dangerous terrorist threat, even if that means crossing some moral boundaries (Ubisoft Montreal, 2010).
Splinter Cell: Conviction features several interrogation scenes involving physical torture. In these sequences, Fisher establishes physical dominance over his target, allowing players to grip them viciously and drag them to various parts of the environment to initiate physical attacks (see Figure 3). One scenario, for example, involves players bringing the hostage to a urinal in a bathroom. After tapping the standard interaction button, Sam slams the hostage’s head in the urinal so hard that the porcelain shatters. One “interrogation” scene. Broken urinal in the background (Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Conviction, n. d.).
Disengagement factors are somewhat reduced in these interactions, but they do not endeavor to cause any cognitive friction or intentional break with the playersubject. These enemies continue to be hostile toward Fisher, continuously trying to regain the upper hand. But they always fail as Fisher displays his physical domination. This structure and the narrative’s insistence that these are evil men maintain the disengagement factor of advantageous comparison in favor of the protagonist. In addition to the narrative justification that Fisher must engage in this violence to save lives, players maintain a sense of being threatened, allowing them to justify increasingly violent actions.
Furthermore, unlike Trevor’s diatribe about US foreign policy, the player is never primed by the narrative to think about the consequences of Fisher’s actions. The story in Conviction is constructed such that the information Fisher gains is always accurate, ensuring that his “ends justify the means” mentality is always already justified. Though these torture scenes involve some elements of defamiliarization by crafting an isolated scene of intense violence, the game never prompts players to reflect on their brutality, resulting in an uncritical attitude toward violence.
Violence as Character-Study
Another common form of critical violence from this era came from reapproaching and adjusting the characterizations of protagonists in violent games, a shift noted by journalist Chris Plante (2020). Characters that once might have been likeable people or morally justified saviors were turned into anti-heroes or sometimes presented as the real “bad guys” of the story. Some of these stories fit the term “character study” in that the games explore the characters’ violent tendencies as arising from their personality traits, not the necessity of the plot (Williams 2013).
A concept that is particularly helpful for analyzing these games is Gordon Calleja’s alterbiography: “An alterbiography refers to the active construction of an ongoing story that develops through interaction with the game world’s topography, inhabitants, objects, game rules and coded physics” (2009, p. 5). This ongoing story develops as the player takes on personas and performs roles afforded by the game’s possibility space (Calleja 2009). Though Calleja notes three different types of alterbiographies, this paper is chiefly concerned with the alterbiography of entity which describes a role in which players take on the persona of a specific character represented within the virtual world (2009, p. 4).
Calleja developed the concept of the alterbiography to account for how videogames convey narratives even during moments of gameplay, hence his emphasis on the “ongoing” story. For this paper, the alterbiographies analyzed are more defined and scripted by the embedded narrative of the game than the emergent processes Calleja discusses. While this represents a slight difference in emphasis, the alterbiography still functions as a useful metaphor to illuminate how players assume Sicart’s playersubject skin and interpret a given game’s ethics and themes through the perspective of the protagonist.
The Last of Us
The Last of Us is a story-driven action survival-horror game released in 2013 by Naughty Dog. The game takes place in a post-apocalyptic United States following a worldwide outbreak of a fungal virus that turns people into what are essentially zombies. Players interact with this world through the perspective of Joel Miller. After watching his young daughter die in an altercation with a human soldier during the outbreak, Joel has become a haggard, desperate, and callous man who lives with a nihilistic and selfish perspective born from the realities of surviving in the post-apocalypse for 10 years. Joel is forced to evolve past this status quo when he is conscripted into escorting Ellie, a young girl with an immunity to the virus, across the country so that a group of scientists allied with a militia group called the Fireflies can study her and develop a cure for humanity (Naughty Dog, 2013). The resulting journey tests Joel as his relationship with Ellie deepens.
As an alterbiography of entity, players are keyed into Joel’s character largely through the world around him. In addition to the tragic loss of his daughter and Joel’s solitary attitude, every environment of the game is laden with details that convey small stories about the apocalypse, like a journal from a teen that chronicles the virus’s advance and the slow trauma that their family endures (Naughty Dog, 2013). These details convey the message that this is a desperate world, one that requires a reevaluation of conventional morality. And one that necessitates violence.
Of all Joel’s qualities, the most inescapable is his aggression. Through Joel, players murder dozens of people without mercy. Rather than using many disengagement factors to sanitize the experience, however, the violence is put on full display (see Figure 4). Enemies are frequently fought in close range, forcing players to see spurts of blood and pained expressions. The most prevalent disengagement factor is the straightforward moral justification of fighting for survival. A typical combat encounter in The Last of Us (Naughty Dog, 2013). Screenshot by author.
However, there are numerous instances throughout the story where this justification is tested. Upon reuniting for the first time in years, Joel’s brother Tommy claims that some of the things Joel did in the past were unforgivable, indicating viciousness that might have crossed an ethical line the previous gameplay did not. In a later chapter, Ellie comes across a seemingly friendly character named David who states that a “crazy man” traveling with a girl “slaughtered” a group of his community while they were scavenging for supplies, revealing that this man was Joel (Naughty Dog, 2013). Players maintain an advantageous comparison in this instance when it is revealed that David’s community is a group of cannibals, but this narrative moment demonstrates the cycle of violence and vengeance that Joel’s attitude toward the world inherently creates. These examples do not outright condemn Joel’s character, but they plant seeds of doubt in the player’s mind. They demonstrate that there are potentially legitimate criticisms of Joel’s actions and prompt players to consider the ethical dimensions of the violence they perform through him during gameplay.
This is exemplified in the final section of the game. After a year of ordeals, Ellie and Joel finally reach a hospital with doctors who can develop a vaccine for the virus. However, to study her brain tissue, the source of her immunity, the doctors must euthanize Ellie (Naughty Dog, 2013). This places players in a difficult position. Conventions of storytelling and videogames might lead players to assume that doing the ethically “right” thing involves sacrificing Ellie’s life. Throughout the entire game, players have been led to believe that they are fighting for the salvation of humanity. Now they are faced with that salvation, and it comes with a moral quandary: is it more right to sacrifice Ellie and save the world, or to sacrifice the world and save the companion you have come to cherish? For Joel, there is only one answer: save Ellie.
The result is a gameplay sequence in which players must fight the Fireflies, a group that has been positioned throughout the game as the “good guys.” The predicament is complicated. On one hand, players have spent enough time with Joel to have effectively assumed his alterbiography. They understand the motivation that is driving Joel to murder the militia and medical personnel. Yet that understanding does not necessarily correspond to agreement with his extreme actions. Whether they agree with Joel or not about what the morally “right” thing is, however, players must pursue this path of violence and engage with that moral quandary as well as the cognitive friction that accompanies it.
With the violence heightened by the removal of almost every disengagement factor, players guide Joel as he kills his way through the corridors, murders the surgeon presiding over an unconscious Ellie, and then carries his surrogate daughter out of the hospital. Once Ellie wakes up, Joel lies to her about what happened, claiming that the doctors were unable to develop a vaccine (Naughty Dog, 2020). He does this knowing that Ellie would disapprove of his actions, the game thereby acknowledging the dark side of Joel’s choice. By presenting a compelling alterbiography, removing disengagement factors commonly associated with violent videogames, and subverting narrative expectations, The Last of Us crafts a eudaimonic experience of critical violence that engages players in a reflection about the nature of violence, morality, and humanity.
Uncharted 2: Among Thieves
In 2009, four years before The Last of Us, Naughty Dog released Uncharted 2: Among Thieves. Drawing inspiration from franchises like Indiana Jones and Tomb Raider, Uncharted is a series of globe-trotting action games following the misadventures of Nathan Drake as he pursues long-lost historical treasures. Uncharted 2 was a breakthrough moment for the series, achieving wide acclaim for its story and character writing as well as its polished and propulsive action. The game centers Drake’s pursuit of Marco Polo’s lost fleet and the long-lost entrance to Shangri-La as he comes into conflict with the ruthless Zoran Lazarevic and his seemingly endless army of mercenaries (Naughty Dog, 2009).
Over the years, numerous videogame players have identified a discrepancy in Nathan Drake’s characterization. He is consistently portrayed as a thieving scoundrel with a heart of gold who will avoid violence, if possible, yet the Uncharted games simultaneously feature him murdering hundreds of human beings over the course of the games. Unlike The Last of Us, the Uncharted games have a much more lighthearted tone, being stories about adventure and exploration with an entertaining protagonist and not a grounded meditation on the nature of violence (Anderson, 2016). As a result, the alterbiography of Nathan Drake is easily assumed as he represents traditional characteristics of the heroic, likable, and friendly everyman.
These traits are reinforced at several points in the story. Chloe Frazier, a fellow partner in crime, often rolls her eyes at Drake trying to “play the hero” by going out of his way to rescue people. Elena Fischer, Drake’s series-long love interest, also comments on Drake’s heroic actions as he stands up against the evil Lazarevic (Naughty Dog, 2009). This treatment of Drake stands in contrast to that of Joel in The Last of Us. Unlike Joel’s actions, which are repeatedly revealed to have moral implications and consequences, the story of Uncharted 2 continuously reinforces the idea that, while the player may be committing acts of violence throughout the game, those actions are heroic.
The violence in Uncharted 2 also contains numerous disengagement factors. Combat routinely occurs at long distances and the blood effects and kill animations are significantly less brutal, thus distorting the consequences of the violence (see Figure 5). Moral justification is also a much more prevalent factor in Uncharted 2. Lazarevic is needlessly violent, willing to murder his own soldiers at perceived failures and destroy an innocent village in his pursuit of Shangri-La. Late in the game, Drake learns that Lazarevic seeks Shangri-La because the lost city contains a mystical power that will make him and his army immortal, threatening the safety of the world (Naughty Dog, 2009). As a result, through his defiance of Lazarevic, Drake’s character is transformed from a scoundrel seeking fortune to a heroic savior. Drake defends a Tibetan village from Lazarevic’s army (Naughty Dog, 2009). Screenshot by author.
There is one moment, however, where Drake’s violence is directly addressed by the game’s story. At the end of the game, after Drake has defeated Lazarevic, the mercenary begins to monologue: “You think I am a monster, but you’re no different from me Drake. How many men have you killed? How many, just today?” (Naughty Dog, 2009). Such a claim might be viewed as prompting the player to reflect on their previous violence critically, but this statement reads more as a trope of action movies than a true condemnation of Drake’s inherent character (Anderson, 2016). Players know that they were killing Lazarevic’s men to save the world (Anderson, 2016), a goal that was pursued earnestly and without subversion unlike The Last of Us. Furthermore, the previously mentioned support for Drake as a heroic character undercuts Lazarevic’s suggestion, further demonstrated by the fact that future games would not touch on this narrative idea again.
Ultimately, the violence of Uncharted 2: Among Thieves is a quality that, like many other videogames, is not intended to reflect negatively on the game’s protagonist. Players assume Nathan Drake’s alterbiography as a heroic character in a lighthearted adventure game, pure hedonic entertainment with no critical violence. In this way, Uncharted 2 exemplifies how most videogames tend to construct their characters, tone, and story, revealing how eudaimonic experiences in games like The Last of Us were generated by subverting those elements.
Changes Present and Future
In the years since 2013, the videogame landscape has continued to morph and evolve. Though the recently concluded eighth console generation may not have provided the technological leap that the seventh did over the sixth, narratives have become more and more prominent as a central feature of numerous games. Virtual violence, in turn, tends to be represented differently.
Rather than the critical violence of the seventh console generation, which often centered on making the player question their assumed status as the “good guy” in a story, videogames with an interest in crafting eudaimonic experiences through themes of violence are more likely to use that violence to explore other themes. Battlefield 1, released in 2016 and developed by DICE, uses its mechanics and aesthetic to communicate themes about the chaos and unfeeling cruelty of the first world war (Ramsay, 2020). The 2018 reimagining of God of War takes Kratos, one of gaming’s most legendarily violent protagonists, and explores how this character can grow beyond his violent past to connect with his estranged son, Atreus (Sony Santa Monica, 2018).
There are some current videogames that engage in critical violence 7 ; however, more recent games differentiate themselves from this trend of the seventh console generation by moving away from designing for positive discomfort or ethical cognitive friction. Battlefield 1 and God of War do not ask players to enact violence that the games then critique or frame as ethically questionable. Violence is one element of the eudaimonic experience, not the focus.
And yet, even in these maturing games, developers still use the same techniques to communicate their messages. Kratos helps educate his son through a character study that also involves simple systemic design for improving Atreus’s abilities. Battlefield 1’s grounded aesthetic and constantly shifting mechanics contribute to its message about the vastness of its historical conflict. The seventh console generation’s development of introspective critical violence shifted to eudaimonic experiences in the eighth console generation that are more concerned with the world that surrounds that violence. Future research can use the information collected in this paper to further explore why the trend of critical violence in videogames appeared at this specific time as well as to extrapolate its effects on the industry and confirm that the trend did mature as I hypothesize it did.
Conclusion
The previous sections provided a comparative analysis of four games, two of which use mechanics and narrative themes to provoke an experience of critical violence, and two that do not. The games that involve critical violence achieve this by removing disengagement factors and designing a eudaimonic experience either through a process of defamiliarization that heightens the player’s awareness of their actions or by featuring characters whose violent histories and personalities are emphasized through the game’s story. In doing so, the games cause ethical cognitive friction, moving beyond the playersubject to communicate directly with the ethical player. This break is not a failure of these games, but an intended effect.
It is also important to note that consensus on the success of any game in terms of generating a eudaimonic experience of critical violence can vary significantly. Sicart (2013) asserts that “not all games and not all players will experience a moral gameplay situation, even if the game is designed with that intention. Play is a complex phenomenon, and game design can only aspire to cue play activities and experiences” (p. 91). As indicated with Grand Theft Auto V, when searching for discussions about the violence of Bioshock Infinite or Far Cry 3, one is as likely to find critics claiming that they offer subversive perspectives on the shooter genre as they are to find those who criticize their attempts as indulgent window-dressing that ultimately fall flat (Hamilton, 2013; Peppiatt, 2018; Sterling, 2012, 2013). Yet, the very existence of these criticisms demonstrates the ethical thinking and debate that such examples produce.
This paper does not claim that each game listed here achieves the same degree of success at handling their themes of violence; in fact, there are convincing arguments that several of them cross an ethical line or otherwise fail in their construction. My focus has been to elucidate a trend of videogame developers who reassessed the violent game mechanics that had gone widely unexamined until the seventh console generation and to describe the techniques that development studios used to invest those elements with thematic and ethical weight. The resulting critical violence encourages deeper engagement with the ethical nature of videogames and stimulates insights that exceed entertainment to inspire thought-provoking and meaningful experiences.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
