Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Genodical Maniacs!

A lot of first person shooters involve battles of genocidal proportions. I never really thought about it until I listened to Penny-Arcade’s Tycho and Gabe discussing Army of Two, but it could be said of almost any shooter. Over the course of the game you’re going to end up killing a lot of people. An incredibly large number, really.

There are exceptions, certainly. The early Rainbow Six games, for example, were harshly realistic. If you tried to act like a walking murder factory in those games you’d end up riddled with holes. Instead they demanded careful tactics and the judicious use of your a small force to wipe out a group of enemies who were rarely overwhelming in number.

But nowadays you can’t play a first person shooter without having to mow your way through legions of baddies. Think of every arbitrary machine gun segment in every military FPS you’ve played in the last two years. Think of all the rooms filled with three to four guards you have to pass through in “stealth” missions. Think of all those poor Combine soldiers killed in the line of duty in Half-Life 2. Where do they keep finding these guys, anyway? There don’t seem to be that many people left, but they’ve got an army of those fuckers coming at you out of the woodwork.

Even in multiplayer matches, our genocidal progress is how we measure our FPS prowess. Eventually it comes down to the all important kill-death ratio. How many can you take down before they catch up (and they will catch up, just you wait). Even relatively conservative games, such as Counterstrike, hold up a two to one ratio or better as a golden standard. If you pull a 17 to 1 or a 35 to 2 you should probably be playing for a living.

And this mentality persists in other genres. Real-time strategy games are almost all based around tossing man after man into a meat grinder in order to kill more of the enemy’s tiny soldiers than you’re losing. Again, there are exceptions, Myth and Dawn of War 2, to be specific, but most RTSes are based around killing as many little dudes as you can so that you can have free reign to destroy buildings with your remaining dudes.

And stealth games, even games which encourage players to expressly avoid killing such as the Thief series, involve leaving a trail of bodies a mile wide. Especially if you perceive the blackjack of Thief outside of the game’s explanation and in the context of its performance, where it stops being a non-violent implement and simply becomes a silent one hit kill weapon with some stringent use requirements.

So games encourage people to kill, to eliminate opponents. It’s almost everywhere, and its not that odd when you really think about it. After all, games are all about challenges. And what better way to offer up a challenge with both mental and emotional heft than to put players in mortal engagement after mortal engagement. But it is odd that we don’t think about it or discuss it more often.

Consider the Master Chief. He’s a heroic figure, fighting to keep Earth safe from alien zealots. But he accomplishes his goal not through savvy or subterfuge, but brute force. He’s a blunt implement, and a huge one at that. Think of all those poor Grunts, scrabbling to escape your grenades. You kill thousands of those little fuckers one after another without batting an eyelash. And then there are the Jackals, those poor, servile Jackals, and those noble Elites, simply fighting for what they believe in. The Brutes even have their good points, but you kill them by the truckload.

It doesn’t take much work to shift the Master Chief from noble defender to genocidal maniac with a little slice of racist in there. Yes, I know he has a black friend, but come on. That’s such a cop out. And its not an unreasonable subject to think about in the game’s context and think about how people who don’t constantly murder for a living survive in this world, the way that I Love Bees did.

This logic can be extended to almost any setting. Thief: Deadly Shadows has you literally annihilating the last remnant of an ancient culture in order to steal a sentient crown (on a side note, I love being able to say sentient crown, and would like to genuinely thank Thief: DS and its development team from allowing me that luxury). Resident Evil 4 involves methodically wiping out the entire population of a Spanish fishing village, with a careful eye towards resource management, then moving on to other exotic locations where you methodically remove more local inhabitants. Add in to that that you’re doing so to save a spoiled, rich white girl with connections and the game suddenly takes on a sinister air (assuming you ignore the part about mind-controlling centipede things).

Call of Duty 4 involves killing enough people in various locales to beg the question, where do they keep finding recruits for these suck-ass armies? Do they just have incredible health benefits or something? The earlier Call of Duty games involve killing enough Nazis by yourself to turn the tide of the war right there. Far Cry 2’s supply of mercenaries is literally endless, and you’re almost always going to have to kill every last one of them in a variety of fun, inventive ways. Play Time Splitters and you’ll be wiping out populations in various exotic locales and epochs to “save the world.” You’ll also be doing your damnedest to eradicate a totally inexplicable race of hilarious aliens, but whatever. And don’t even get me started on World of Goo, forcing us to kill all those poor, flammable goo balls. It makes my heart heavy just to think of it.

Innumerable foes of all shapes and sizes populate so many games, and so many times it makes no sense outside of the game’s internal logic. It’s simply the way things must be in order for the game to be as fun as possible. But it’s worth noting and thinking about, and when games do so they improve vastly.

Enter Left4Dead.

There’s been some criticism levied at Left4Dead, and rightly so. The game play is crazy repetitive and there are only four campaigns at around one to two hours each which, after you’ve beaten them, probably won’t be revisited by casual players. There are only seven different guns, three of which are just “upgrades” of other arms. There’s very little differentiation, in general, in the game play, and this is a problem for a lot of people.

This is coming from someone who, to this day, still plays Left4Dead on Expert and in Versus when he has the time, by the way. And in Left4Dead’s defense, I would like to mention that the dynamism offered by the Director, which makes replaying the game a lot of fun and is just incredibly cool from a technological perspective. But I digress.

Left4Dead is sort of unique in another way, as well: it actually offers a reasonable context for its traditional video game violence. In Left4Dead, life is quaintly precious. You are, after all, simply fighting to survive, and the people around you are soulless zombies. Even the Resident Evil games didn’t capture the oppressive and fearsome soullessness of zombie apocalypse as well as Left4Dead did.

Unlike in say, Call of Duty, the people you’re killing in Left4Dead really don’t have families anymore. They don’t have a culture of their own, and they’re actively destroying any surviving culture or intelligence simply by existing. Sure, they might’ve had parents at one point, but they’re so inhuman and you can inhabit Romero’s film and thinking of them, not as individuals with motivations, hopes and dreams and instead walking obstacles, hell bent on removing as much flesh from your bones as possible.

This is the only context where video game violence really holds up with external logic: you’re not fighting for a cause against people of other ideologies, and you’re not engaging thinking opponents. You’re just scrabbling as hard as you can to survive, to reach safety. And for this, I think Left4Dead deserves some praise, because in presenting us with a reasonable context for video game violence, it also casts a light on the absurdity of other contexts.

Is it really effective to mow down insurgents in order to accomplish your goal of moving across a city? Is putting the last shovel full of dirt over the bones of fish-person society really the thing to be doing, from both a moral and financial perspective? Wouldn’t the Combine consider listening to their supplicants’ complaints after losing the first thousand or so troops to one PHD who never even finished his post-doc? Left4Dead doesn’t raise any of these questions. You’re moving towards safety the only way you know how, and zombies are in your way. You’re not part of anything bigger than that.

I love all the games I’ve used as examples, and I don’t think that video game violence is bad, or stupid, or that it takes away from the experience of playing games. But I do think it warrants discussion and consideration. Video game violence is so often on an epic scale, and with good reason. We play games to experience stories, and bigger stories are usually more interesting. But the violence in these games, and our response to it, is something we need to consider if we ever want to sit at the big-boy’s table, art-wise. It’s no different than discussing Hemmingway’s misogyny or Stein’s pretension. It’s a part of the works we love.