10 Violent Games That Comment on Violence
Back in 2010, while working on Irrational’s Bioshock series, Steve Gaynor, posited a simple metric for how violence in videogames should be represented. “Violence performed by the player in a video game is only legitimate if the victim is a unique and specific individual,” he wrote. The future Gone Home co-creator supposed that violence in games should continue to exist so long as it wasn’t “lightweight, pedestrian [and] meaningless”—if games stopped featuring “faceless masses of enemies.”
I agree with the basic ground-rule that Gaynor laid out and think that, if adopted unwaveringly, it would foster a much higher quality of writing in games. But there are also games where violence is abstract and/or committed against faceless opponents en masse, but remains meaningful. The violence in the games included on this list is legitimate, even if it isn’t always suffered by legitimate characters.
Receiver
The central conceit in Receiver is that your virtual handgun essentially operates on the same principles as a real one. You don’t just press one button to reload it—you press several, first to eject the clip, then refill it with loose rounds, then re-insert it into the gun, then pull pack the slide. It’s complex and time-consuming, and by extent dulls the mystique that games have built around firearms. Your gun in Receiver isn’t a magic wand that kills with the press of a button. It’s a fallible, mechanical object, and if you want to use it, you have to take the time to learn and practice. Receiver isn’t an overt polemic against videogame violence, but it undermines the idea that killing, at least with guns, can be performed blithely and without thought.
Silent Hill 2
Recalling the story of Silent Hill 2 (James Sunderland, your character, killed his wife when she became too ill to have sex with him) you can interpret the game as a kind of coming-to-terms drama, as James bludgeons and shoots his way through various sexualised monsters. There are the mannequins, two pairs of plastic, womanly legs balanced end-on-end. They represent stereotypical female sexual objectivity—they’re composed entirely of traditionally attractive, though artificially rendered body parts. Then there’s Pyramid Head, a hulking, masculine figure complete with an enormous, phallic sword. James kills these monsters, plus many others, including fetishised hospital nurses, but the violence is never mere spectacle. Considering what James did to his wife, Mary, the violence in Silent Hill 2 can be viewed as him wrestling both with his sexual frustration and his dangerous, priapic masculinity. Throughout the game he brutalises various feminine creatures, repeating what he did to Mary ad nauseum. At the climax, however, he kills off Pyramid Head, perhaps putting to rest the more aggressive side of his sexuality.
LA Noire
LA Noire is more stomach-churning than anything in the ostensible canon of controversial videogames. Rather than idly committing violent acts and then moving on, your time is spent examining blunt force traumas, lacerations and gunshot wounds in detail, getting close to dead bodies to inspect the consequences of violence. That alone is enough to make LA Noire stand out—with the exception of firmly tongue-in-cheek simulator Viscera Clean Up Detail, there are no other games focused on inspecting the aftermath of violence, rather than partaking in it first-hand. But LA Noire goes further. Since you play as a detective, once you’ve inspected a victim, you then have to go and question his relatives. You learn about his work, his family, his personal life—he becomes more than just a part of a “faceless mass.” LA Noire is still a violent game, but it excels in showing just what violence leads to.
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