 |
|
|
| |
Opinion: Can Murder And Games Meaningfully Meet?
by Christian Nutt [PC, Console/PC, Mobile Console, Exclusive]
|
|
| |
|
July 7, 2009
|
| |
[Is it possible for games to deal with murder as a dramatic element, and not simply as part of charge-and-kill mechanics? In this editorial, Gamasutra's Christian Nutt examines the deceptively complex issue.]
You can't do a murder game.
I'm not talking about making more games like Manhunt 2 -- a game that was widely decried and almost banned in its Wii incarnation, for inviting the player to physically mimic acts of sadistic violence.
I'm also not using the inflammatory term "murder simulator" -- even ironically -- to make any sort of point about the appropriateness of violence in games.
No, I'm thinking about other media, and how much murder -- be it police procedural, detective story, whodunit, or crime drama -- is an integral part of the medium.
If you look at the current TV ratings, shows like NCIS, CSI, and The Mentalist dominate the drama ratings. Action movies like Casino Royale manage to make death (okay, not murder) emotionally meaningful even when the main character is a walking killing machine.
Contrast that against the Treyarch-developed Quantum of Solace, which took in scenes from that film but pumped up the body count tremendously to fit the need for entertaining mayhem.
What got me thinking about this, though, is not film or television; it's the fact that the two best books I've read in the past couple of years both center on murder. Neither one is a mystery; in fact, both show their murders, early on, and then spend the rest of the books filling in the tantalizing psychological details of the characters and situations that surround them.
The two books are Donna Tartt's The Secret History and Natsuo Kirino's Out. Tartt's book is about a group of classics students at a secluded New England liberal arts college. The story revolves around the murder of one of them; in some ways, it eerily reflected my own college experience -- murder aside, thankfully. Out, on the other hand, is a gripping story of Japan's underclass, and how socioeconomic pressures in a fracturing society warp people's behavior.
Neither would make a very good game. I am of the belief that some stories probably aren't meant to be told -- or certainly can't as easily or effectively be told -- in video games. I'm not encouraging anyone to license Out or The Secret History (newsflash: that isn't going to happen anyway.)
But it did get me thinking about the power of murder as a plot device. In these books, the death of a single character has huge reverberations for the entire cast. In most games, death is a constant; it's ubiquitous. There have been effective attempts to humanize foes through clever ambient dialogue and plot twists, but these are clever exceptions to the rule, and don't fundamentally change the charge-forward-and-kill nature of so much of the medium.
Some story-based games take the death of single characters to the height of effective drama, but these often just serve to sharpen the contrast between the game's two states. Probably the most talked-about character death in gaming history is that of gentle flower-seller Aerith Gainsborough in Final Fantasy VII, run through with Sephiroth's sword in one of the game's many climaxes. But in this same game, you slaughter huge numbers of human enemies -- Shinra soldiers by the score, for example, in the company's HQ.
And as games get more and more realistic -- witness the characters in next year's Final Fantasy XIII, who look almost human, compared to the living dolls of 1997's FFVII -- the layers of abstraction that made this acceptable are less possible to maintain.
We can (and the FFXIII demo does) throw helmet-faced storm troopers at the player endlessly. We know the player knows that these are pawns, not people. I think we accept that there is a layer on which all right-minded players understand the abstraction of the game-layer simulation, and that is what, in our minds, diffuses the game violence arguments. I wholly agree with this.
But maintaining that abstraction does work to rob us of one of the most crucially human, moving, intriguing storytelling elements we could be working with. If gaming is accused of having a limited palette to work with, adopting conventions that encourage that limitation is not an effective move.
Building a game that effectively tells the story of a murder -- makes it realistic and interesting -- works against many games' strengths in other ways. It requires extremely good writing, for one, with nuanced dialogue. I do believe many games have good writing right now. But I also don't think that this is frequently precisely a strength of even many that do have solid storytelling.
Of course, the obvious answer to this is that some games do deal with the subject well: adventure games. The detective story/police procedural tends to leak into games from this angle, when it does, and it has pretty much been thus since the medium was born. It is definitely related to audience issues, but it's also down to the medium. The Japanese call many of the games in this genre -- the ones that are largely just pictures and text -- "visual novels", and I think that sums why these games work well nicely. But it would be nice if we could see a murder-focused game that branches out beyond that.
Indigo Prophecy, and its developer Quantic Dream's new game, Heavy Rain, stand something in contrast to this problem: they make murder central to the story, not the gameplay, and eschew combat except as dramatic punctuation. Yet they're still of their generation, and not in any sense a visual novel. It's hard to think of other contemporary examples.
It's not as if the drama of murder can't be effective in a traditional framework. Sega's Yakuza games are poignantly dramatic tales of personal relationships marred by death. The games also see their thoughtful protagonist battle countless thugs on the Tokyo streets. This is acceptable because it's a hell of a lot of fun, and Japanese games tend to be comfortable with gameplay abstractions.
But I so often hear Western developers express the desire to reject abstraction; the ideal is a realistic world, with believable characters, compelling situations, and integrated gameplay and storytelling. In that context, will there be a way to tell the heartbreaking, or chilling, or disturbing tale of a murder and its effect on that world? It'll be quite a challenge for whatever developer approaches it head-on.
|
| |
|
|
Telling a tale of murder and building a game around it would not be particularly meaningful to the player. Games reach out to players through interactivity. Trying to force feelings and emotions to the player, trying to force what is meaningful, is not fit for this medium. When somebody watches a movie and sees one character murder another, he or she takes into account that the characters are acting (according to the story, at least) the way they choose to behave, and thus the movie can convey what is meaningful without giving the experience being interactive. The observer can understand the characters' emotions.
In games, though, the player's emotion are his or her own, the characters are controlled by the player, and trying to control them tightly does not work as well. To convey the significance of murder, a game would have to be more like a sandbox. Whatever actions the player takes will make a difference later in the game; decisions come back to haunt the player. Then actions like murder will be more profound to the player.
The Agatha Christie games if nothing else. They keep making those, so I have to assume that they're doing well.
It's not as if all genres of film or novel regularly produce emotionally compelling murders.
In Half-Life 2: Episode 2 (spoilers coming), the player feels frustrated and sad at the death at the end, as they never got the chance to find out what that character knew about their "mutual friend". This a mystery that has existed since early on in the first game of the series, and it was just about to be solved when BAM! You lost your chance. Not to mention he was a well-written character for whom the player should have felt great compassion.
Actually, to make a better comparison, people like to play competition-based FPS games for the same reason people like to go play paintball. It's not because people enjoy the thought of actually killing other people, it's because some people enjoy shooting competitions instead of competitions involving a ball/bat/stick/puck/racket/whatever.
@Matt: A bigger part of the impact of the EP2 ending wasn't the effect on the player, it was the effect on Alyx, for whom the player has already (presumably) developed even greater empathy for over the course of the game. The people who were fighting back tears as the credits rolled weren't doing that because they weren't going to solve a mystery, or even because they were that attached to a likeable (if secondary) character, but because someone died horribly in front of their family. The fact Alyx's voice acting at the end was so haunting and wracked with emotion was probably no small part of it.
(/spoilers)
This to me seems the key. It's tough to make the player care about people who don't exist, but it's easier to make them empathize with the emotions of fictional characters. Having a murder impact someone other than the player means you can use that character as a proxy for the player to focus on. Empathy is the key here... getting the player to become invested or attached to something that isn't real seems to me to be much more difficult than taking advantage of the built in ability of the human brain to empathize. Hell, people empathize with the most arbitrary things, even if they aren't human... it's how we operate.
@JJ, Who said this isn't about interactivity? I didn't suggest a linear narrative structure -- although I do personally argue that games with emotive and/or linear narrative structures are satisfying to a large number of people, I did not do it here. Think about being plunked down inside a situation like this and interacting with that world. That wouldn't have to be a cutscene-driven storytelling game at all; ambient narrative techniques could be more effective, even.
By the way, I'm not suggesting that the player character should BE the murderer, though that could be interesting (though likely controversial, cf. Manhunt 2.)
One thing I thought about but didn't mention in the piece was the fact that even books I've read about serial killers are deeply disturbing and emotionally effective -- i.e. Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho, Joyce Carol Oates' Zombie. Or in another medium, the film Monster. Death happens a lot in these stories; it hangs around them.
Think about a film like Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures, if you've seen it. I often close my eyes during the final scene, reflexively. I'd like to see a game that emotionally effective about death.
Creating that type of empathy takes time, both to develop and time spent in-game. With attention spans as short as they are, that's a real challenge, and you're not going to be able to do it with your moment-to-moment opponents. Where there is opportunity is in having a cooperative character become a target, or making the the nemesis you've been after for much of the game slowly transform into a sympathetic character. Imagine, for instance, if after most of the way through HL2 you found you needed to kill Alix, and look her in the eye as you pulled the trigger. Brutal, and not in a "dude, that's cool" kind of way.
There are traps in using "role reversal leading to murdering someone you like" or "role reversal turning hunting a villain into murdering someone good", however. The first is that if adopted by more than a couple of AAA titles, it would become a cliché and quickly lose impact... it might even put people off, once people get the idea that it's a cheap stereotype into their heads. The second is that people will become genuinely upset if they realize they have to kill a character they like... they may well abandon the game unfinished, or even take a serious dislike for the producers and abandon the brand in anger. We want them to feel empathy for these characters, but if too good a job of that is done, being "forced" to kill that character is going to have business-level consequences. The third trap is potentially the most disturbing: what lessons does "winning by betrayal" teach? If desensitizing people to killing is bad, is training them that it's okay to betray a friend if it's expeditious worse? (I don't buy the third argument, but I can see how it would be a powerful argument nonetheless, and the industry doesn't need to hand even more ammo to its opponents.)
This brought a couple of games to mind for me. One was Hitman, in which the killing is sufficiently isolated and rare (presuming you're trying to only kill your target) that it develops at least some nuance. I found some of those missions to be a bit affecting.
The other game is Police Quest 3 in which your wife, Marie, is stabbed. While she doesn't actually die, that act of violence resonated with me fairly strongly. One interesting element is that, of course, you're not the one doing the stabbing, and it's partly that feeling of powerlessness relative to the event that makes it all the more awful to experience.
So, I guess I'd venture that the only way to build resonance into death is to stop having so damn much of it :)
Very True. It's one of the few games that does without senseless killing as Christian pointed out. There is no mistaking the melancholy felt upon defeating a colossus.
I have always wanted games to have more of an emotional impact on me, whether it be through murder or some other device. Unfortunately, I can't think of a game that has impacted me in the same way that books or movies do. And the games that are able to do this, really only accomplish them through cut scenes, defeating the purpose of "games" having emotional impact. It needs to be based on the gameplay.
Still, it would be against what games are suppose to be. John Hahn has a good point in his response. Even in a single-player game with deep saturation in story, the key experience will always be through gameplay and will always feel more like a sport or competition. Gameplay can't really have an emotional impact unless there is a story which may always feel like it is tacked on to it.
As a bad example, think of the game Pac-man. Now change Pac-man into a little girl and change the ghosts into a gang of escaped killers. Try to see that we can overlay that basic gameplay with a more "emotive" narrative, but it will always remain the same game so to speak.
Another problem is that game designers aren't using the full extent of the medium to express themselves in a lot of cases. Some games, like Eternal Darkness and Metal Gear Solid 2, have tried to use the medium to make the player feel the confusion and loss of sanity that the main character goes through, but those kinds of examples are far and few between. We should be using sound, imagery, and even gameplay to impart emotional information to players. Every game these days has bloom or HDR or depth of field or something like that, but what about visual filters to impart confusion, or guilt, or happiness? Those kinds of things are completely doable, and could be quite effective, but they're much harder to get across in screen shots and back-of-the-box bullet points.
I'd give a player the choice of saving a life, that's would be meaninful, leaving your friend to death is worst than killing a pawn...
I myself got so caught up in the action that in running around a corner I shot and killed the first man I saw, who turned out to be nothing more than an innocent bystander. The subsequent series of events was one of the most emotionally jarring I had ever felt in a video game. It starts by the playable character expressing his remorse, and jumps immediately to how he is going to get away with this mistake, then forces the player to go and confess to your superior so that he can cover it up.
I felt remorse after the killing because I didn't mean to do it, it wasn't part of the game plan. I probably should have felt angry at the game designers who had "tricked" me into killing an innocent man. Instead, because I was so immersed in the atmosphere of the game at the time, I felt angry at myself for not being more prudent.
This scene served a few different purposes...
- To jar the player out of the flow of "investigate > chase > investigate > chase."
- To show the player the corruption of the world by showing the confession and cover-up scene.
- To make the player think about one of the subjects that is brought up in the movie; the possibility of a Blade Runner "retiring" a human by mistake.
...but a side effect was, that in coming from other games around the time which were based on "kill without questions" gameplay (eg. Goldeneye), simply being told that killing someone was wrong was enough to elicit an emotional response.
I think that your audience and the way you can make a game that includes murder in a meaningful manner may be limited based on how your game is made, though. The author and many comments seem to think only in terms of third person games, for example, and that seems to be a case where making a meaningful message isn't as easy. Just the same, there's a fair few comments above that do indeed prove it's even possible with that style of game.