So a friend suggested I do an essay about this, but the fact is as long as I have this awful night shift job (thankfully, not too much longer) I won't be up for anything but tweet threads.

So, I'm gonna do a tweet thread: on the weird intersection of video game violence, realism, and $$$

So folks may have noticed I've been complaining a lot about Assassin's Creed and specifically Assassin's Creed: Odyssey. I've also been a bit frustrated with the - mainly wonderful - Horizon: Zero Dawn, and even a little bit with The Last of Us. All for one reason.

Specifically, what all of these games share, in descending order of how much of a problem it is, is a problem most video games have had for about as long as we've had video games involving fighting: when your character in the game hits someone with a weapon, it is improbably weak

Now, I want to handle this topic delicately, given that we're dealing with real world violence that's extremely proximate to a lot of us right now. But of course, video games have always been linked to causing real violence.

I want to make an extremely important observation involving multiple factors, but leaving the one that I think is driving a lot of this kind of invisible for a moment:

Video games have been seen as excessively violent for a long time. However, this has clearly been exaggerated - video games have always been, and in many ways remain, one of the least realistic forms of entertainment.

Films have been able to show convincing death and killing for far, far longer than video games. Video game graphics only reached the ability to reliably portray humans distinctly in the late 1980s, and that's being generous.

Furthermore, video games are in no way unique in relying on violence narratively. While I'm not going to go make another one of my spreadsheets, I would wager that a significant number of video games every year have not dealt with violence as a primary mechanic - just like film.

However, also like film, the violent video games are the ones that often generate the most attention. But, again, it's only *very* recently that anything approaching "realistic" violence could be depicted.

Furthermore, one reason video games may have started focusing on violence perhaps a bit more than movies (this is my impression, I again do not have stats) is that depicting interpersonal interaction in general was difficult and violence is one of the "simpler" forms

It would have been very difficult to make most non-violent *or* violent narrative games in a true "8-bit" or even 16-bit format. I know this because I have been an adventure game fan since I was a child.

The first true (aka not Microsoft Golf or Minesweeper) video game I ever played was 1996's THE DIG, which was produced by George Lucas, funded by Lucasfilm, and may well have been originally intended to tie into the SW prequels before it ran overbudget.

THE DIG, which you can get for like $5 or less on Steam btw, holds up okay, and it has what were for the time impressive FMV sequences. It still doesn't hold even a slight candle to indie adventure games like Unavowed which intentionally ape the Lucasarts visual style

This is because, like RPG Maker, Adventure Game Studio (which was used to make Unavowed) emulates the surface appearance of game engines from the 90s but in fact is a fully up to date game framework.

My point is that George Lucas, going overbudget, couldn't achieve the level of narrative sophistication that indies can today.

This isn't purely about graphical realism - again, Unavowed has the graphical resolution and even interface of a Sierra/Lucasarts game from the early 90s - but rather about what game engines can facilitate in terms of narrative.

Sorry, had to pause to look something up. Anyway, so what I'm getting at is this: my parents bought into "video games cause violence" and only let me play adventure games, which usually aimed heavily at narrative and fell short, and strategy/sim games, which aren't >

> centered on interpersonal violence in any kind of "realistic" way.

It's not exactly true that no video games from my childhood managed to achieve true narrative status - The Dig would be an example of one that came close, although ultimately it would be a very short game if it was made as is with today's standards

Likewise, Myst and Riven were basically the "walking simulators" of their day, just with challenging puzzles added in. They could easily have been (and IMO would have been stronger) made without the puzzles with the tech of the time - Gone Home was totally makeable back then

And obviously, text adventures did a lot of stuff with very limited resources, and that continues today. But that was always a niche. I'm discussing mainstream and high end indie games in this thread, the stuff the Discourse is about.

And the fact is I had an enormous amount of fun with games like the King's Quest series, Monkey Island, Timelapse, etc., but none of it came close to presenting narratives comparable to contemporary adventure games like Oxenfree, Life is Strange, the communist animal game, etc.

The games I *wasn't* allowed to play - DOOM and Duke Nukem being the iconic examples - were able to engage people by being fast paced and by using violence, a very simple way of engaging with the world. But not realistic violence. There's nothing realistic in DOOM.

Back then, everything was blocky and characters could barely be told apart. Enemies were often things like demons, so who's to say that it doesn't make sense you could shoot a demon 90 times before it dies?

And yet somehow, this was held up as causing real world violence.

There's some arguments for this - my parents were, for whatever reason, despite me never really pushing back on the "no violent games" rule, very active in being against violent games, Tipper Gore types - like the psychological effect of desensitization to guns etc., I guess

Anyway, let's skip forward to today, I'm an adult, I've fired an actual gun and not become a serial killer, I have a Playstation and access to a seemingly innumerable library of games about killing people. And it's overwhelmingly people, now, not demons, etc.

Here's where things start to get weird in my mind: I cannot remember the last time I saw a serious editorial or whatever concerned about violence in video games. It seems to be a dead issue. Which is fine, but it was a huge thing for my generation we won't forget.

Meanwhile, video games have gotten MUCH more graphically realistic, and this has two implications:

1) violence is capable of being both superficially and actuall more realistic;
2) that hasn't entirely happened, and nonviolent games are actually at least as successful now as b4

Like I said, the closest thing to a modern fully narrative game I can think of from before 2000 was THE DIG. It had most of what you'd expect from a Telltale or DONTNOD production, with a kind of weird dialogue system, and mechanics like helping people climb things etc.

And again, THE DIG was perhaps the first AAA game at today's budget levels. To hit the bare minimum of narrative storytelling that indie devs can do now (with significant effort and expense, just not George Lucas bucks)they needed the kind of money that goes into an AC game today

A game like LIFE IS STRANGE or OXENFREE - neither of which have action or explosions or spaceships or anything like that - requires enormous investment in researching how to simulate humans interacting both socially and in physical space

Oxenfree, for instance, has the thing you also see in action games like the ones from Naughty Dog where two characters are adventuring together and one of them boosts the other up a ledge. THE DIG tried to do this and had to use kludges, even with its budget. It's not simple.

So, going back to violence. It's super easy to show people exploding and guts flying everywhere and those sort of animations were super common and caused moral panic in the 80s and 90s and 00s. But of course that's not how violence works.

People don't get shot fifteen times and then explode in a shower of blood and guts. Also, contrary to what Jack Thompson and Tipper Gore seemed to think, playing games where that happened did not make my peers who were allowed to do that think that was realistic. Or good.

Anyway, there was recently a controversy around Naughty Dog which made me disappointed in them, as I am with a lot of how they treat their developers, where reportedly they were making TLOU2 devs watch footage of people actually dying to make death scenes more realistic.

Morally abhorrent if true. Also, probably unfortunately more common than just Naughty Dog, they've just pissed off enough devs to talk about it.

I say this bc - and now I'm finally coming around to my beef with Assassin's Creed: Odyssey - I've unfortunately seen some real death footage against my will, of what appeared to a massacre at sea committed by freighter security/mercenaries against people on a capsized boat.

That highly disturbing imagery, which is now burned into my brain and which I advise you not to seek out, was nearly identical to what it looks like in AC: Odyssey when you kill a crew and then sink their boat.

So first of all, the fact that we can now *actually* recreate images of a real massacre in video games (a thing Thompson and Gore and others insisted was possible back in the day, but it was very much not) does not mean we should. Very much not.

But also, the presence of visual realism does not create narrative realism, even when narrative realism is very much possible within the visual framework offered.

I think this has to do with the idea of a "gameplay loop".

I know I'm in "ludonarrative dissonance" territory with this ramble and I know everyone's tired of hearing about ludonarrative dissonance, but I guess I'll get to the point:

It is the definition of ludonarrative dissonance when Assassin's Creed eventually shows me sickeningly realistic imagery of death occurring to almost-real looking 3D modeled people, but before that, they can be shot, stabbed, and kicked hundreds of feet & get back up.

Playing on the minimum difficulty in Assassin's Creed: Odyssey, to get that gruesomely real shipwreck with floating bloody bodies, you have to shoot each live crew member with approximately 5-15 arrows, depending on their level, or stab them dozens if not hundreds of times

Each time you do that, you see semi-realistic arterial spray or whatever, which I'm sure they also researched. Now, IRL, these characters might not die immediately from being shot with a Hellenic era bow or stabbed once with a spear, but they shouldn't be just fine either.

So we've reached a point where video games can and do "realistically" depict death, but their depiction of *combat* is so ludicrously distant from real combat that it's laughable.

I've mentioned I've fired a real gun at a range. Firing a Beretta pistol in a controlled setting was honestly not that different from firing one in a game, it's just that the recoil's a few dozen times stronger than a controller vibration. Even the weapons in games are"realistic"

But it's just, expected, that in the game if you're firing that pistol at a person, they're going to be more or less *unbothered* the first five, six, seven times you shoot them. Maybe even if it's in the head.

I will never forget the first time I went into an area in AC: Odyssey where I was "overleveled" and had Kassandra sneak up behind a guard and slit his throat

and he
got the fck back up and started fighting, with his health bar reduced by less than 10%

Now this is completely in line with the games I wasn't allowed to play as a kid, the ones whose allegedly brutal realism was trumpeted to the press. And it's not out of line for RPGs, which act at a certain level of abstraction

but this is a game with incredibly realistic death

The slitting of the guard's throat was graphic. I'm not familiar with if it was anatomically accurate but I'd bet cash it was

and he

got
back
up

So, anyway, what I find fascinating is that moral panic around games violence has decreased, even though if anything there's a bit more reason to be concerned with it given the level of detail the devs probably don't need to be going into. BUT ALSO

AC: Odyssey is basically ruined for me by the fact that I can't sneak around like a stealth game promises, but have to stick to areas the game designates as appropriate for my character level, where people don't regenerate throats. And of course, that's bc they want to sell stuff

All of this enormous graphical realism comes at the cost of, well, money, and Ubisoft's solution to paying for it is to sell you a game for $60 and then sell you a boost to level up faster for another $10, and some items that maybe actually stab people correctly for $5

Most publishers are thankfully not as bad as Ubisoft, but what's weird to me is that even other AAA action game publishers, like Naughty Dog and whatever the developers of Horizon: Zero Dawn are called, basically only give you verisimiltude on the easiest difficulty

If you play The Last of Us on easy mode, characters fight, and survive or don't, more or less "realistically" - one gunshot won't down a regular human, but if it's to the head, it will. if you turn up the difficulty though? this isn't true anymore. Same for Horizon.

There's other ways, especially when you're a AAA studio, to increase difficulty, and both TLOU and HZD are games where the mechanics to do so already exist. Make resources scarcer, enemies more numerous, enemies better at spotting the player, better at calling out to one another

But instead, these games (well, except Horizon, which is Teen rated and not realistic in any sense of any word other than its portrayal of corporate handling of global disasters) give you photorealistic graphics and DOOM 64 gameplay on higher difficulty.

Anyway, I guess I have a couple of concerns:

1) I'm glad the moral panic about violent games (and sex in games, too!) is over! That sucked! But why did it end, when games are more violent in meaningful ways than ever before? This is my big TLDR

2) I'm concerned as someone fond of narrative games that the expense of narrative games will give us more AC: Odysseys and less The Digs and Life is Stranges and The Last of Uses, because all of the latter games are hard to monetize, but still expensive

Life is Strange admittedly was made on a comparably low (under 10 million dollar) budget for a AA game, and it saved DONTNOD from bankruptcy, but their returns are limited by a LOT compared to an AC: Odyssey or especially a Fortnite/PUBG/etc.

They sell you the game, you play the game. With the budgets of games ballooning the way they are, I fear narrative games are being pushed beyond their limits, and maybe that's partly because they're spending money on things like ultra-realistic death gore that adds little.

Despite being a pure adventure game, Life is Strange involves fighting and death and guns in a few scenes. Chloe gets shot twice in the game. There isn't excessive gore and it doesn't matter, because we're invested in Chloe as a character.

There's no way DONTNOD could have designed that narrative experience and also sold us booster packs to enhance Chloe's survivability, bc that would ruin the whole... thing. But that seems to be becoming increasingly required/expected to make a vivid game.

So anyway, video games today are super violent, super expensive, and I don't *inherently* object to either, but I do wonder to what extent the focus on superficial realism is creating unnecessary expense, ludonarrative dissonance, and *maybe* - cautiously here - moral hazard

that's it for now