Warren Spector says the ultraviolence trend has to stop!

http://tinyurl.com/d3363qo

Having seen the Tomb Raider video on Microsoft's E3 Conference, I'm kinda inclined to agree with him.

He has a point. My uncle used to work for Eidos, then he left to start his own company doing cell phone games for Apple with his wife because he said creating games was really ruining their quality for him as a gamer.

He really does have a point. On the one hand, I shamelessly love it all, on the other hand, there's something disturbing about it when you step back for a minute and look at society as a whole and what we like consuming.

This coming from a guy who made a game where you can stab children.

Of course, before anyone is going to care, he's going to have come up with a better reason for why it should stop than 'I don't like it'

edited 14th Jun '12 5:59:46 PM by Hylarn

His point isn't about the violence, it's that the violence isn't portrayed as a bad thing any more.

But also tried to make you feel really bad if you did, extrapolating from that article.

There's a difference, IMO, between having violence in a game (Half-Life 1 and 2) and glorifying violence in a game (most of this year's E3). And you can have ultraviolence be arty (see Quintin Tarantino films) but it can also be cheap and exploitative (see many other, less highly regarded films). I can't say I disagree that it would at least behoove designers to look at possibilities beyond the later.

I wouldn't mind dialing things back a bit, personally, but it's gonna be a bit hard to break that trend.

The child-stabbing in Deus Ex isn't portrayed as something bad either, it's just something you can do, with no consequences.

On one hand, do I mind violence in gaming? Well, not really, I'm far too desensitized with the things I've watched and played as a kid. On the other hand, do I think we should probably try taking the end product of said violence a little more seriously? Yes.

(Though in all honesty, the human obsession with violence is nothing new.)

Really? There's nothing about the child stabbing that is portrayed in a negative light?

Because I don't believe that for a second.

I love Warren Spector to death, but the incident with the blood pool from killing dogs raises an excellent point. Many sequences, even if there isn't a specific gameplay consequence, are still capable of making people feel bad, or at least that would be the intent.

One of the problems is that some designers can be too subtle at times.

edited 14th Jun '12 6:17:34 PM by unnoun

I think it's a bit silly to be so squeamish about violence and sexual content in video games, but I do agree it needs to stop being used as a selling point. Games like Fallout 1 and 2, Deus Ex, System Shock, and what not were very violent games, but they never used it as a selling point but instead to reinforce the game's themes; Fallout 1 and 2 had very dark humor, Paul urged you in Deus Ex to avoid killing and characters like Anna and Gunter would compliment murderous characters, and System Shock would lose some of that great horror atmosphere if it were less violent. Nowadays, it seems like violence is used to trick easily impressed teens into buying the game. I mean, when Todd Howard was showing Fallout 3 at E3 about 5-6 years ago, he would never shut the fuck up about how violence is funny "like Itchy & Scratchy" (ironic, since Itchy & Scratchy parodies the old violent 50's slapstick humor by taking it to ludicrous levels) and would go out of his way to show things like the teddy bear cannon (ugh) that made people explode into gibs and nuclear car explosions (double ugh). It just seems like a cheap and calculated way to sell shit to dumb people and I'd rather violence be used for thematic purposes.

When the ultraviolence is against something like zombies or is cartoonishly over the top like in Team Fortress 2 I have no problem with it, but when we have all of these games whose combat systems seem built around money shots of a guy's neck getting stabbed or head blown off by a shotgun blast, you have to take a step back and reexamine the direction the industry and its consumers have gone.

Ultraviolence and gore has its place and can be quite effective when used appropriately, but when the only reason for its existence is to titilate and satidfy the player's bloodlust, well, that's call for consideration. Sadly though, given the blockbuster mindset the western industry is currently entrenched in, I don't see things changing anytime soon.

Really though, previous Fallout games had that kind of toon violence feel as well.

Remember that the Bloody Mess perk, that makes all deaths as violent as possible, was in Fallout and Fallout 2.

While it might be true that the violence is more of a selling point now, that sounds like more of a problem with how games are advertised than with the games themselves.

Spector sounds like he's just stepped out of a mid-90's debate on videogame violence.

edited 14th Jun '12 6:17:33 PM by Talby

The only thing that dissuaded me from turning enemies in Deus Ex into Ludicrous Gibs all of the time was only the fact that gibs couldn't be looted. I think the only reward you got from sparing enemies instead of killing them was some assault rifle bullets.

And yes, there are many places where you can stab a child to death in that game and face absolutely no repercussions for it. You can go on mass murder sprees of anti-terrorist and police agents with no long-term complications from it. It's practically encouraged since the non-lethal weapons are not just difficult to use but also limited in supplies. Heck, Human Revolution did a better job of encouraging a pacifist run—you get more experience for non-lethal disabling of enemies than shooting your way through and it's a lot easier to actually go non-lethal.

edited 14th Jun '12 6:19:48 PM by FirionStrife

But the deaths of the children might have been designed, in the same way as the dogs, to cause some form of emotional response, even if there were no gameplay consequences.

Which, admittedly, is bad design, and Gameplay and Story Segregation. Deus Ex had plenty of What the Hell, Player? moments, and something of that level of Video Game Cruelty Potential requires a bit more heavy handed approach.

Warren Spector is great with ideas, but I find that he sometimes falls short in execution.

edited 14th Jun '12 6:32:32 PM by unnoun

You know, I probably wouldn't be agreeing with Warren right now if i didn't watch E3 myself and bear witness to the crowd cheering during the The Last Of Us presentation when Not!Nathan Drake caused a mook's head to cave in by repeatedly slamming it against a drawer. I thought that was disturbing. Other people apparently thought it was awesome.

There have been otehr times when a game's selling point was often violence, back when most gamers actually where teens in the mid-PS 1 era. We grew out of it then, but it might take us longer this time. Seriously though, there needs to be more T-rated action games. Those are my favorite.

@Fluid: I don't recall Fallout 1 or 2 allowing me to explode people by shooting teddy bears at them and I don't recall Black Isle Studios developers hyping their game based on the fact that you can turn people into gibs in slow-mo. Not to mention that little text box in the original games just made thing seem way more fucked up.

I don't mind heads caving in and slow-mo blood spurts, what I dislike is when they are played to pander to the mindless "we want badass" crowd. I don't expect an anvil to be dropped each time a mook dies, but the other extreme is immature.

I could go with themes and storylines that make you question life, actually.

I like the point about always fading. I found it odd the only mainstream title I can think of where dead bodies didn't fade away without justification was Pikmin...well it still has things that explode for no reason but does better than most, those were for gameplay purposes.

We're kind of past the "too much memory" excuse. All this effort put into "realistic" graphics and hardly any put into making the game realistic. Dead bodies should stick around and so should their health packs, at least they're tangible objects in some attempt at realism only for the health pack to fade for not being reached it in time.

Or people could drop pretense of realism and just try to make interesting games. Mario Kart's still outselling call of Duty.

so why do we want realism again?

There are different types of games. Some would benefit from not attempting realism, others would be harmed. We can't make such generalizations. Mario Kart is a world apart from Call of Duty. Role playing games are in another world.

edited 14th Jun '12 6:46:51 PM by Anfauglith

To support realistic themes? Just because Call of Duty, Gears of War, Battlefield, and what not use it as an excuse to show BLOODY SCREENS AND GORE SO GOD DAMN REAL doesn't mean that every game with a realistic art style is bad.

edited 14th Jun '12 6:47:24 PM by Kev-O

Skyrim's bodies don't "just fade". They do eventually but it's most likely to happen off camera, many days later in game time (which is probably good because I don't think anyone wants to see realistic decomposition).