I love violent video games and I’m not afraid to say it. As a games journalist, I have taken my spot in the trenches, time and time again, to defend the medium I cover from older relatives testing out vaguely coherent takes about how violent video games cause real-world violence and/or are the cause of societal deterioration. That’s never been true. At most, a violent video game may cause the player to feeltemporary aggression immediately after they finish playing it. The Columbine shooters may have playedDoom, but so did millions of other gamers who lived normal, productive, non-violent lives.
But then sometimes I see a clip of a video game I like out of context, and I suddenly understand where they’re coming from.
Recently, I’ve been on a video game documentary kick. I started with some Noclip videos, including one on the making ofReturn to Monkey Island. That game is gentle and easy to watch. There’s no disconnect between the story the developers are telling and the gameplay being shown on screen.
Then I moved onto Valve’sHalf-Life: 25th Anniversary Documentary andGrounded II: Making The Last of Us Part II. I love both games, and like both docs. But when footage from the games was on screen, I was reminded of how their protagonists' body counts are casually higher than any soldier in any war in the history of the world.
Gordon Freeman, mild-mannered scientist, takes to killing like a duck to water.The Last of Us Part 2launched more than two decades later, and Ellie’s violence is better woven into the narrative. But it’s still incredibly gory, often committed with little provocation, and a little shocking to watch when you’re not the one playing the game. When you hear developers calmly speak about designing their game, you can forget what playing through the game actually entails. Then you see Gordon mowing down a bunch of Marines with realistic (for the time) blood spray and you remember that the medium is married to graphic depictions of violence. There are plenty of non-violent games, but you can’t write the medium’s story without a lot of blood.
The Last of Us Part 2 is the rare violent video game that is interested in interrogating the causes of violence. But, whereas a novel exploring a similar topic, like Crime and Punishment, can depict one horrific murder that haunts its protagonist throughout the story, a game like TLOU2 is built around repeatable actions. Stabbing and shooting are the primary verbs, and violent encounters are the primary obstacle. So, the violence swells to astronomical levels, with Ellie murdering hundreds of humans (and a few dozen dogs) during her quest for vengeance.
The game is interested in addressing these issues. DuringGrounded II, one developer notes that each of the enemy NPCs has a name and that the game’s arc is playing out in miniature each time Ellie kills an opponent, causing their friend to hunt her down to seek revenge.
But, even in a game this committed to ludonarrative consonance, there are moments where the scale of the violence the gameplay requires is at odds with the story the game wants to tell. Ellie sets off to finally take Abby out in Santa Barbara, and casually kills a bunch of dudes on the way there. But, when she finally finds Abby, she can’t bring herself to do it. It feels alot like when you see a character get shot a bunch in gameplay and heal immediately, then they catch one bullet in a cutscene and die.
Seeing violence in video games presented without comment in another medium brings home how much there still is left to do. The Last of Us Part 2 is a worthwhile story and a pioneering work in wedding the violence of gameplay to a narrative interested in exploring it. But, it also reveals how much there is left to do if video games want to tell serious stories. Not every movie isJohn Wick, but the medium keeps forcing games into the same mold.
