At the beginning of today’s Keywords in Video Game Studies meeting on the topic of “violence”, I offered a provocation: that the most dangerous thing about games is not that they provide us ultrarealistic depictions of violence, but that they lie to us about what violence is.
By this, I meant that games encourage us to think about violence as only ever interpersonal and physical — the violence of a gun fired in an FPS or a sword swung in a fantasy RPG. What they conceal are structural violences. And what happens in most discussions of violence in and around games is that this reduction of violence to an immediate physical transaction is reproduced. We fail to see structure — we’re instead captivated by the flamboyance of violent physical acts.
During our discussion, someone brought up the newly-released version of CounterStrike and mentioned that the game features a group of anarchists on the “terrorist” side in one stage. I immediately thought of the ways in which popular discourse on protests always characterizes the actions of “anarchists” — torching cop cars, smashing windows, and so forth — as violence, and thus places it in a realm of moral opprobrium, constrasting it with “nonviolent resistance”, which is understood as the only acceptable form of resistance.
What this discourse fails to do is to take structural violence into account. It can only ever see direct actions by individuals as violence. Racism, sexism, capitalism, and other oppressive structures are never understood as violent. In the context of resistance, violence is always understood as an illegitimate and self-defeating act. Oppressed peoples are instantly stripped of the moral high ground should they choose to enact violent strategies of resistance, a view which utterly ignores the daily violence of living in an oppressive system.
Most games, and most discussions about violence in games, encourage us to think about violence along these lines. We first understand violence as a decontextualized individual act, and from there we either characterize its depiction as either “harmless fun” or as affecting the player in some negative way.
I think this is unfortunate. As experiences created by systems of rules, games seem to me to have an extraordinary potential to depict the logic of violent systems, and not just the consequences of individual acts of violence. Games can tell stories about the kinds of violence that weigh on us daily, the kinds that we are encouraged to inflict on ourselves, the kinds that relentlessly chip away at and ruin bodies and lives. These are the kinds of violent games I’m interested in making and seeing more of.
(image: Gear Wheels by freefotouk, used under a cc-by-nc licence.)
if you only play “modern warfare” style games, you’ll sure feel like the only violence is individual acts. try more psychological games, like the Silent Hill series, especially parts 1 and 3. these show the oppression of a violent religious cult. also, Half-Life 2 (and episodes) — the oppression of the alien occupation of Earth and violent resistance against it. of the most recent games, Dishonored. it depicts oppressive government really well.
there are many popular games about oppressive systems. maybe not enough. but a lot.
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I agree that games should be a better medium for the depiction and critique of structural violence than they really are at the moment.
I’m not so sure the relatively restricted use of the word “violence” is really a symptom of this. Taking the direct, interpersonal kind as the default kind is common in general. The structural kind of violence can only be spoken of from a worldview that takes broad social structure into account, which is not especially common outside of academia. Structural violence doesn’t describe a variety of experience per se; it explains many things a person can experience. I think it’s a better explanation than what I usually hear on the radio, which tends to rely on the Just World Fallacy, victim-blaming, and the like. Still, structural violence is harder to comprehend than those other explanations. I think that accounts for much of why it’s not talked about, either in video game discussion or in general, as well as why video games tend to depict violent conflict even when structural kinds would be easier to simulate. Being able to show the player an animation and have them instantly understand who’s in conflict with whom, who’s strong, who’s weak, and who won in the end, is tremendously convenient for the designer.
Structural violence is more abstract than the physical kind, and must therefore be implemented in similarly abstract ways. 4X games like Civilization do this–yeah, the units can shoot each other, but if you’re any good you’ll be spending most of your attentions on grabbing land and its resources, thus denying it to your opponents.
Google Cartlife or Sweatshop. Also Dys4ia. These are generally free games, but use systems in the way you talk about.
In AAA games
Dishonoured also portrays systems of change based on your action. Similar with Red Faction Guerrilla, which is about being a terrorist / freedom fighter in an oppressive government. I don’t know if Assassin’s Creed 3 draws any parallels to structural violence and protest and the founding of the US, but that would be a missed opportunity if it didn’t.