Opinion: Can Murder And Games Meaningfully Meet?
July 9, 2009 8:00 AM | Simon Carless
[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, our own 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.
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7 Comments
Ironically, the biggest factor keeping murder from having a serious emotional impact is, as you've said, that it's so central to the action of so many games. In fact, I hesitate to even use the word murder to describe the role of death in most videogames simply because of how abstracted it is from reality.
In order for murder to have a strong impact, it can't be repetitious if only for the reason that every instance of it has to be treated with intense care in order to get a reaction from the player. This more or less forces design in one of two directions:
1. A detective or survival horror story, where the player evades a killer and intermittently encounters victims, solves puzzles, hides, etc.
2. A role reversal of the above where the player spends most of the game preparing and setting up the murder so that when it finally happens the act carries all the dramatic weight it is supposed to.
Needless to say, the latter is extremely discomforting and seems to be for now resulting in games like Manhunt, which tend to provoke reactions from the stomach more than the heart.
The biggest problem for gameplay is making all the parts in between the most dramatic moments interesting to the player. Survival horror is probably the modern genre that does it the best, but even those games rely on a lot of monsters in between puzzles to hold player attention, which doesn't really work in a murder mystery. Visual novels work well here because they’re so gameplay light they don’t have to worry about this. The solution to this problem has very little precedent, which I imagine is the reason we haven’t seen much of it, but I think there are enough elements existing between adventure and survival horror games that a creative team could make a game of it.
Andrew | July 9, 2009 11:30 AM
Shadow of the Colossus is a murder game.
concrete_d | July 9, 2009 12:27 PM
Deaths of fictional characters in any narrative medium, be it games, movies, or novels, only matter in so far as they affect those who the audience cares about. Killing off a random faceless stormtrooper is so far removed from killing off the female lead that I doubt one affects the other in any meaningful way, regardless of whether the characters themselves look like lego-people or actual human beings.
The real issue, as I see it, is that game stories tend towards the epic rather than the personal, which means that the vast majority of people you run into are disposable. I would imagine that this is because a broad focus is highly beneficial towards the goal of finding things for the player to do, as well as requiring less effort used on aspects that don't work very well in an interactive context.
That said, I'd love to see games with a more personal focus, and I imagine that criminal justice-type games could provide that. I'm not sure that they'd necessarily take every murder all to seriously, though - even in television dramas, the murder victims come off more as objects of curiosity than as sympathetic characters in most cases.
Ikkin | July 10, 2009 9:43 PM
"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."
But... that's the point! That's why Aeris's death isn't the big twist, the big twist is when Cloud removes his helmet in the "true" flashback scene, and you realise where he was all along. And your slaughter of the million faceless Shinra drones gets completely turned on its head.
kateri | July 11, 2009 3:42 AM
"2. A role reversal of the above where the player spends most of the game preparing and setting up the murder so that when it finally happens the act carries all the dramatic weight it is supposed to"
I think that Hitman: Blood Money comes close to taking murder seriously, sure you can kill everyone on the map but your encouraged through low health and being rated at the end to kill only your targets and make anything else appear as an accident, your even given background to your targets and they are the only unique characters amongst the other generic npcs, these murders also have repercussions with a newspaper report being shown after each level detailing the public reaction to the murder and any evidence you may have left. Although this serious take on murder is largely provided by the context of the game (as a hit man) the developers have done a good job of using game mechanics and story to encourage you to kill less people in a more thoughtful way.
thy_dungeonman | July 11, 2009 6:45 PM
You're forgetting about a little thing called player narration.
While sometimes bodies just pile up in the name of entertainment, players can often justify these actions through self construction of some story.
For example. I recently bought Prototype for PC. It begins with a conundrum where you must murder and consume people and enemies to gain health and survive, and while there are plenty of enemies around, it's often more convenient to grab an innocent passer-by instead.
When I started playing the game, I didn't want to do that. I was the good guy.
At some point that changed, not due to the story line, but my inner motivation. I was killing so many soldiers, and the soldiers were killing so many bystanders, I asked myself what the point was, and started going for them too. Hell, they're likely to die anyway, at least when I kill them they're dying for a good cause. Right?
Which in turn changed my character from mr-nice-guy to mr-evil-guy, and fueled later character development for my internal story.
You should have seen me by the end. Oh boy. And while I'm at it, I was having nightmares at night over that game too. But they were not like you'd expect me going around killing people - because that was not my motivation. My motivation was always "the greater good", so I was super powerful and killing demons and saving people.
I don't know if the designers made the game that way or if this decision process and narration was something I did myself, but it feels personal.
And it makes me think the same things probably happens in other games too without people thinking too much about it.
Anonymous | July 12, 2009 4:39 PM
"Fahrenheit" (AKA "Indigo Prophecy") is a game that does this. You play as a ordinary guy, who comes out of a daze to find he's just murdered a complete stranger in a diner bathroom. You initially play as the guy, and attempt to escape from the scene of the crime. After you've done that, you play as the police investigating the crime and chasing down the murderer (the guy you were playing as before). The game swaps back and forth like this as the story progresses. As you can see, murder played a crucial part in Fahrenheit.
Anonymous | July 12, 2009 6:53 PM