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Thought experiment:
What could we end up as an industry if for the next 5 years, no games with physical violence were made?
What would you make, if your next game could have no physical violence in it?
Defined as: Physical violence you can hear or see. There can still be implied violence. There can still games about revenge, war, crime, you just can't have physical violence shown/heard. Yes, that cuts out the core of most shooter games, but that's sort of the point.
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The Witness
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Also: The game would ideally be in a new franchise. I suppose it could use an existing franchise (though things like Gears of War and Halo would be tough, but again--could be something interesting from them).
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The Unfinished Swan
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There are already a lot of independent developers making games with no or limited violence and they've created some very original games. I'd really like all the AAA studios to think about it as well. There are so many hugely-talented people on these massive teams with giant marketing budgets. What could they produce that would then reach the world as the next thing they have to play? Hopefully something different from Farmville?
No Assassin's Creed III, Halo 4, Dishonored, or Call of Duty Black Ops 2. What would those companies make instead? What TV ads would we see?
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Dance Central
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Now, I realize the irony in me asking this as Mommy's Best is finishing an XBLA game in which you stack guns on top of guns on top of guns. (I like guns.) I really like fighting and shooting in games. I like it a lot. But I see games like The Unfinished Swan and I think, what would a whole industry look like if we did that for a while? What if we all pushed in that direction? Sure, we can make violent games again after that--but maybe we'd hit on something so good, we'd keep going?
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Super Hexagon
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I think I'd do something with expanded social interaction, story-manipulation and very responsive NPCs. I liked where LA Noire was heading in the interrogation sections... I'd probably look at interesting AI for characters interacting and responding to situational changes. A short game, but with lots of breadth to support more interaction options along the way, and additional replays.
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Maybe as an example, your navigator finds out his wife has been having an affair while he's gone, and this puts him on edge, and then an off color remark from one of your crew members sets him off.. And maybe that's when you find out that he's smuggled a gun on board, and he's threatening to put a hole in the hull. You think you could possibly disarm him, but he may be injured in the process, and you'll be left without navigation. Or you can attempt to talk him down, or just call his bluff and see what happens. I dunno, something along those lines.
Granted, most people can't just walk into their yard and shoot like I can. But it is a viable alternative to gaming.
It isn't a iron clad constraint since I've worked on games that involve heavy shooting (Steambirds, Realm of the Mad God, Tyrian) but I do try to balance those out.
I see this challenge as essential training in my goal to become a more well rounded designer. Violence is an easy system to design. There are well defined tropes and rote solutions to common problems. Like making rote platforming games or rote racing games, making rote shooting games fails to stretch your abilities. It can very easily be a creative rut that limits personal growth.
take care,
Danc.
Personal morals and philosophy aside, it is a creative rut, akin to those who resort to the same 4-6 swear words to describe everything rather than expanding their vocabulary with more appropriate and descriptive adjectives.
I think you've been very very successful in proving it can be done, especially in a casual setting. Thanks for leading the way and setting the example! Be assured that others are following in your footsteps.
That said, I think you're quite right that more developers should consider severe limitations on violent gameplay, and there is a clear correlation between design creativity and nonviolent play. But at the moment, you might get farther with more of a Shadow of the Colossus model; violence more as puzzle than as battle, and even then, a sore questioning of whether that violence is appropriate or not.
Here's my nonviolent game: Rebuilder. You're the civic leader of a city - say, Athens, which has just been burnt down by the Persian army. They've been repelled for now, but you know they'll come back. Your goal is to bury the dead, gather the living, and rebuild the city, while forming diplomatic alliances with other cities for mutual protection. Best case scenario - you make peace with Persia. Worst case scenario - they invade again, you're too weak to withstand them, and your city is ruined again. Reload from save...
--Dan
Nathan's closing remarks alluded to it: if we took out violence, we would need *much* more sophisticated and interesting NPCs. If you meet an NPC and your goal is not to kill them, your interaction with them is not going to be 2-10 seconds long but potentially much longer. Just think about the complexity of the interaction and the social relationship that this might involve...
More importantly, violence is an unwilling means of conflict resolution. When two people are in conflict and one kills the other, the conflict is resolved in favour of the killer and the victim did not have to agree to this particular resolution.
Violence is basically denying another person their free will. You can do so physically (killing, imprisoning, etc.) or non-physically (stealing, kidnapping). Altering the state of the world in a way they do not want it altered without their consent.
This makes conflict resolution through violence very easy to simulate in a game: if you kill the other person, you win the conflict; if they kill you, you lose the conflict. If you successfully sneak past the guards and steal the gem, you win; if they see you, you lose.
Thus, there are basically two forms of games: conflict resolution games that rely on some form of violence no matter how abstracted (chess isn't gory violence, but you still kill or eliminate your opponents' pieces), or games of skill. Note that games of skill can still be competitive (eg: racing) but they are not, strictly speaking, conflict resolution games (I would argue that determining who is the faster person is not a conflict; or more specifically that actually racing does not resolve it).
A conflict is when two goals or objectives are mutually incompatible. I want to save the princess, you want to keep the princess prisoner. We can't both get our way. A non-violent negotiation would involve finding out what each person would be willing to take in order to abandon their objective: what I be given to give up trying to save the princess? As Daniel rightly points out, saying "I'd rather die than X" is shorthand for saying "there is nothing you can give me to make me change my mind." When both parties in a conflict hold this view, then violent conflict (either through overt violence or subvert violence) is the only possible way to resolve the conflict (in this example, sneaking in, getting the princess, and sneaking out again is a kind of subvert violence).
Still, not all games have to rely on violence; just games based on conflict. Non-conflict skill-based games don't need violence at all. Playing Tetris to get a high score doesn't need violence because there is no conflict to be resolved. The downside is that games of skill generally don't have anything else to offer beyond the skill challenge: it's hard to tie in story, character development, or anything else really into a game of skill... with the sole exception of using that game of skill as a means of resolving a rather contrived conflict.
Imagine if everyone in some weird world would defer their goals to anyone with a higher Tetris score than they had. Sure, you could write a game where you go around and save princesses by beating the boss at Tetris. It's non-violent because you've weakened their resolve to their objective and done so in a wholly unbelievable manner. But you could do it. And people don't, because it's stupid.
That's why we have so many violent games: nothing is more believable than killing when it comes to resolving irreconcilable conflict.
TL;DR: Any skill-based game can be a non-violent game, which gives you unlimited potential for finding existing non-violent games and creating new non-violent games. Just invent a new skill challenge.
It's the same issue I have with movies that are just all action and not substance. Children of Men, one of my favorite movies; is intense and the violence is gut-wrenching. It doesn't inspire anybody to create violence. It puts an ugly face on it. And the movie is not about the violence. So, in the same way, the FPS's that you mention are not appealing to me at all, because as you say; they are catered to please a macho, womanizer section of the psyche.
A game about a lonely dissident in a totalitarian regime, conspiring against the government. Countrary to initial impression, this is a stricly non-violent game: when they come knocking on your door, it's already too late, so the real challenge is to not raise any suspicions in the first place. Also, trust no one.
A game about an NGO trying to activise a local community.
A game about a young girl who covertly does good deeds, in order to convince her untrusting, nihilist and paranoid neighbours that life is good after all.
A game about a robot whose creators built it so that it would help them investigate a large scale accident in a remote science facility. What they don't know is that they have accidentally made it sentient. The idea scares them, so the robot cannot let them know, while trying to complete its mission and learn as much as possible about the world.
A game about protecting a town from flooding.
A game about a uniquely gifted gardener living in a sleepy vilage at the edge of civilisation. Her garden has the strangest and most magical plants in it. She tries to solve her friends' problems using her gardening skills.
Two siblings: little brother and big sister. She's fit, sensible, and proactive. He's anything but, but he's also gifted: he always hears what people actually mean instead of what they're actually saying. The town they live in is being hostile, because they're strange and don't fit. Now their borderline insane mother has gone missing, and the neighbours may or may not have had something to do with it. The gameplay revolves around the sister using her fitness to help the brother get somewhere he can listen to people talking.
A game about damage control. Inevitable disaster is approaching. Use your very limited resources to get as any people as possible to safety.
A game about an interpreter. Two civilisations meet, and each of them communicates using a different system of visual cues (a simple language of icons, essentially). Learn both. Learn to translate one system into the other so that both civilisations may interact meaningfully.
A game about a kid whose parents are giving him (or her) impossible tasks that he (or she) has no hope of fulfilling. Every time he (or she) almost manages to succeed, the parents change the rules or find an excuse to turn success into failure. The goal of the game is to learn about the nature of non-pshysical domestic abuse. The kid needs to learn how not to get involved in his (or her) parent's unfair games. This idea tends to freak people out, so here goes a disclaimer: it's autobiographical.
Another game about damage control. The disaster has already happened (I was thinking about a coastal town being flooded by a rising sea). Your job is to keep others safe and well until they're ready to leave. This is going to take a lot of improvisation, since all the usual ways to get resources (food, energy, transportation) are gone.
A monochromatic game about a city in the dark. The darkness is... wrong. Things that stop being visible literally disappear, forever. You need to keep your town illuminated -- but the neighbours don't believe you, of course. They may actively try to extinguish the lights so they can go to sleep, for example.
One thing I'd be really interested in seeing is more horror games without violence. This is something I've wanted for a long time. Some of the greatest games I've ever played have been horror, but it seems difficult for some people to understand what makes the difference between tastefully done violence in games and that which is not tastefully done. Sometimes the violence in a game is really just there to be there and add a quick thrill, not to serve a higher purpose, and I find this sometimes can even detract from gameplay.
I for one as an artist, don't care what the general public thinks of my craft. I will keep doing what I'm doing, and whoever gets it, good for them. If someone doesn't get it, oh well. You need to do what you believe in, what comes out of you naturally, explore why you are here as a designer/artist and pursue that goal. Don't let the mediocrity of those that don't understand bring you down.
Even so, some would take up the challenge. We might see a kind of Cambrian explosion of new forms of exploration games, puzzle games, adventure games, world simulations, interpersonal dialogs, racing games, flying games, dating sims, economic/trading games, sports contests, historical simulations, tycoon games, knowledge games, perception games, story games, manipulation games, collecting games, and oh, did I mention exploration games?
That's just a quick high-level mention of some categories; there are others. For that matter, we might see different combinations of these that might not otherwise be tried for a long time, if ever.
I don't see it happening, other than as one part of a large-scale social rebellion against a perception of cultural coarseness. (So not at all, then.) But it would be interesting to see.
Then afterwards you'd see the results of your crew "down below" which still gives you the emotional and human tragedy of war without seeing it "on screen." Or would that not fit your criteria?
But just to be Devil's Advocate, being able to kill everyone in Dishonored (it will let you) makes the path of not killing anyone at all (nobody will even know you were there) much more satisfying. But it's certainly an outlier.
I wonder what would have happened to adventure games if they would have been able to evolve instead of being swept away by shooters.
My concern is that the debate is extremely polarized. It's either an all out gung-ho military shooter and another hack-and-slash fest, or a totally neutral Puzzle, Car-Wash, Pong or Minecraft type game. Are we missing something here? Let's think for a second about the issues that are dealt in relation to violence in movies such as Star Wars and Kurosawa's Samurai movies. They are not action movies - They are more or less like dramas, and in Kurosawa's flicks the samurai duels last only but a couple slashes. Can there be a Samurai game that doesn't feature ridiculous amounts of hacking and slashing? I think so. There could be plenty of stuff happening in that game. Think about how we "translate" a Star Wars movie into a Video-Game - They become shooter-fests or another hack and slash drone. That is the problem!
I am a big fan of Mass-Effect and the only reason I can stand the game is because of the story, and dialog driven progress. If I all I had to do was shoot through hallways I would be bored as hell just as a movie that is only explosions and gunfire bores me to death. What we need is content around the issue of violence. Maybe there is a lack of maturity and wisdom on how we deal with violence. Maybe we haven't found ways to package the violence so that it doesn't come across as senseless or too one-sided. Let's take for instance these words by famous filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky:
"What is violence? A galaxy exploding is violent. A comet falling down on Jupiter provoking craters on it is violent. The birth of a child is violent. Life is violent, the circulation of the blood, even our heartbeats are violent. But there are two kinds of violence: The creative and the destructive".
I also feel that this idea to rid games off violence comes off as a reaction to the destructive culture of violence in the US. And that itself is the problem. In most video-games there is not a "Why?" to the violence. It's just shoot-shoot-shoot. I personally despise modern military shooter games, first because they bore me to death, 2nd I can't stand the constant gunfire sound effects, 3rd I prefer to keep my head clear of military propaganda.
But I do think that there still is potential on how we deal with the issue. I recall adventure games like Monkey Island or Indiana Jones. People hit each other, but that wasn't the point.