Video games lack sufficient gore and violence

[JustAShcookius]

Just to be crystal, I am not a sadist. I like my entertainment to have meaning and impact.

I will be using Far Cry franchise as the big example in my essay here.

In Far Cry you (the protagonist) undergo some catastrophe and then subsequently undergo a crisis where you are then introduced to the antagonist or "boss guy".
"Boss guy" is evil, annoying, a pain in the ass, a sadist, is an iron fist to his group of thugs, and is likeable at the same time.
After this amazing introduction and escape level, you are released into the open world, freeing enemy outposts to achieve a questionable goal, usually revenge.
After the main chunk of the game is over, you meet the antagonist who has usually undergone some sleepless nights because of your tyranny. He is angry and upset someone would defeat him. All or most of his thugs are dead.
Then bad guy pulls a plot twist out of his ass, you fight him, lose, and he wins anyway. This completely nullifies any effort the player did in freeing the land from bad guy in the first place and then the credits roll.

This horrible ending style was why I highly disliked Far Cry 5 specifically among other things.

Now you know what Far Cry is basically about, lemme tell you what is missing from that particular series and many other games like Call of Duty.

The answer is meaning.

When you shoot a thug in Far Cry, there is no meaning. He died. Okay?
Am I supposed to feel bad or something?

The problem is that there are little to no repercussions to killing people in most games these days. By repercussions I mean emotional impact or "feeling" repercussions to the player.

Far Cry doesn't appeal to your conscience. You just kill the thugs to obtain a half assed ending where everything you did turned out to be nullified.

Modern examples of Call of Duty do not appeal to your conscience either. Hell, CoD goes out of your way to not offend you. In COD WW2, the Swastika is replaced largely with the Iron Cross. The colors are bright, the mood is bright. Even in times of emergency you feel good because the orchestra music continues to roll in the background monotonously. (Press L to pick up the grenade).

Here is an example of unrealistic boring action. The only thing remotely holding this CoD WW2 scene up was the special effects. If I wanted to watch an action movie I would have bought one. The trick western pistol shot was laughably fake:


By the way, a locomotive at that weight would have cut that cheap German Kubelwagon in half like butter.

They sacrificed the horror and mystery of war for boring action where you feel like Arnold Schwarzenegger high on speed and crystal meth at the same time.

Yes it feels BAD.

Take this scene from its respectable predecessor. CoD WAW was a masterpiece and everyone should play it even if they dont like first person shooters. The atmosphere was dark, it was bloody, the soundtrack was scary yet still conveyed urgency and maintained a sense of action; MEANINGFUL and JUST action:


Keep in mind that walkthrough was on Veteran mode. This mode is notoriously difficult and the person playing had to be very patient and advance slowly. You can spend many hours on one level in veteran difficulty. Newer CoDs are very easy to complete on their hardest mode now.

Let us begin to formulate a hypothesis here...

In order for a Video Game to be successful, it must contain meaningful content, evoke various feelings from the player, and reach a resolution.

HERE I WILL LIST THE MAIN ISSUES I HAVE WITH CERTAIN MODERN GAMES:
1. They are afraid to offend you
2. They are afraid to appeal to your conscience
3. They rationalize a particular path the player must take with circular reasoning.
4. And most importantly, they LIE to the player about the true cost and impact a war entails on everyone.

Here is a quote from an intelligent man that I like:
“A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil." -Tim O'Brien

In essence this quote is why I fell in love with Fallout and consider it to be the best game of all time. The old Call of Duty games and Company of Heroes 1 and 2 hold up to this rule very well. Fallout in my experience, has been the best in holding up this quote.

Back to Far Cry, the game, like the above quote suggests, tries to moralize and cover up the massacre of the admittedly nasty enemies you encounter in outposts.

But what about when the enemies are not so nasty?

In Far Cry 5 specifically the people guarding the outposts are either brainwashed citizens of Hope County USA or horribly drugged individuals known as "Angels" who are used to perform the "dirty work" of the cult. I guess they were farmers or something?

Anyways I think that Far Cry series in general needed to "humanize" its enemies a lot more. But how do you humanize brainwashed and drugged people? Simple. Make em scream when they get hurt.

Problem is that their deaths were so damn artificial it was hard to FEEL anything after clearing an outpost. There were no loss of limbs, little gore, when you used an explosive SATCHEL FUCKING CHARGE the enemy would disappear.

Thats right, in order to shield the player from "HORRIBLE" blown up gibs and torsos, they make the ragdoll disappear after being subjected to an explosive device.

Then the game attempts to humanize the antagonist at the end, the game gives you a chance to spare the boss Joseph Seed and let him regain control of Hope Valley despite the hours of actual playtime needed to clean out the outposts. Very pitiful writing. Like fuck I'm gonna let Joseph Seed go with my friends in his hands.

How should I the player, humanize the bad guys when they do not even act like humans would under the circumstances.

For example, if the thugs were to scream horribly or cry out as they die I might be more merciful. If their bodies could be mutilated, if they could beg for mercy before being killed.

There was no conflict of morality, all there was was that banjo violin battle soundtrack that screams action and violence.

You see my video game enemies do not even ACT like humans, dont SCREAM like humans, dont CRY FOR MERCY like humans, dont RUN FOR THEIR LIVES like humans, dont RUN INTO MY BULLETS like humans, The dont even BLOW UP like humans.

And I am supposed to have a conflict of morality here?

To wrap this up, I say as a consumer that I would like a video game that tells me to, "Go fuck your feelings bitch".

Alright, this was probably a waste of my time and many other people might come on here to talk about this very same thing. I just felt I needed to talk about this cause I am angry and sort of sad right now.

I leave you with a 3 minute or so clip of a memorable ending to a CoD mission that tells you to go fuck your feelings.

 

[naossano]

Not that most AAA publishers do care about it, but a video game that would be too raw wouldn't pass the censorship and would be confined to limited distribution. They sell games to make money, not to enhance our perspectives.

 

[Atomic Postman]

For whatever you may say about the game, Last of Us II had that interesting mechanic of the enemy NPCs all having individual names that their friends would call out to in worry, fear or grief, and apparently quite gruesomely realistic screaming/violence.

Also as it relates to Fallout, I also feel there has been a huge downplaying of the absolute horror of nuclear conflict. In Fallout 76, the end of the world feels more like a virus or zombie film rather than nuclear holocaust. As the immediate survivors exist in a pastoral wild west, verdant and ripe for the taking. You might even get the impression that life after the bombs is more peaceful in simple. Weirdly, this also applies to Far Cry New Dawn. Where post-nuclear america is a verdant, vibrant land of the free.

Contrast this to 8 years prior, in Honest Hearts, where Randall Clark describes lying to an old couple blinded by the blastwave that help is on the way, before putting them together and killing them to save a worse death from radioactivity. Wherein he then spent months sponging water off of a cave wall, watched people cannibalize and murder, the sky turn to something biblically evil, and the hollowing of his own soul.

 

[JustAShcookius]

For whatever you may say about the game, Last of Us II had that interesting mechanic of the enemy NPCs all having individual names that their friends would call out to in worry, fear or grief, and apparently quite gruesomely realistic screaming/violence.

Also as it relates to Fallout, I also feel there has been a huge downplaying of the absolute horror of nuclear conflict. In Fallout 76, the end of the world feels more like a virus or zombie film rather than nuclear holocaust. As the immediate survivors exist in a pastoral wild west, verdant and ripe for the taking. You might even get the impression that life after the bombs is more peaceful in simple. Weirdly, this also applies to Far Cry New Dawn. Where post-nuclear america is a verdant, vibrant land of the free.

Contrast this to 8 years prior, in Honest Hearts, where Randall Clark describes lying to an old couple blinded by the blastwave that help is on the way, before putting them together and killing them to save a worse death from radioactivity. Wherein he then spent months sponging water off of a cave wall, watched people cannibalize and murder, the sky turn to something biblically evil, and the hollowing of his own soul.

Honest Hearts was very good in that respect. I did find the adventures and story of that poor man to be quite...
How should I put this...
Thought inducing.

Also I completed Far Cry New Dawn and it made no stinking sense. Magical trees and magical forest and magically a fallout wasteland 17 feet away from a heavenlike one?

 

[JustAShcookius]

Not that most AAA publishers do care about it, but a video game that would be too raw wouldn't pass the censorship and would be confined to limited distribution. They sell games to make money, not to enhance our perspectives.

Very sad. Video games never used to be a world you escaped to. They started out as concepts like PacMan and Missile Command. Then they started to make them like books or movies. They had lessons to teach and well thought out script.
You know how they are recycling the same old Star Wars story with a female character? That was just a movie built to specifically enrage me I guess.

 

[TheGM]

You know your shits fucked when entries in a terminal tell a better story than you entire fucking game. Only Far Cry worth playing is Blood Dragon, prove me wrong.

 

[Gamesbasi]

Not that most AAA publishers do care about it, but a video game that would be too raw wouldn't pass the censorship and would be confined to limited distribution. They sell games to make money, not to enhance our perspectives.

Exactly, but I agree with OT's rant, maybe releasing a few good games from time to time that would be as realistic as we want it to be would not be bad at all and I hope some developer considers it.

 

[The_Proletarian]

Not that most AAA publishers do care about it, but a video game that would be too raw wouldn't pass the censorship and would be confined to limited distribution. They sell games to make money, not to enhance our perspectives.

That's it! The Warhammer Total War games have even sold the blood & gore as a DLC. In that way the main game gets a low ESRB rating and then the players who want blood & gore can buy that seperately.

I totally agree with you however. In my shooters I like to feel the punch when I shoot someone. As in Quake 2 when you hit somebody with a shotgun blast. Even Half-Life 1 had some minor blood and gore. Remember scientist being crushed by falling cabinets and their skulls would be on the floor.

I must also inform that I'm not a sadist but I like how bodies take damage in Fallout 1&2 for example, it feels so meaty when you shoot someones torso of with a blast. There are also some nice effects in older RTS games were people die in pools of blood or burn to death.

Only Far Cry worth playing is Blood Dragon, prove me wrong.

Spoiler: CORRECT

 

[Gamesbasi]

Yep! Total War: Warhammer is a fine example of this kind of setting. I'm still waiting for Warhammer III, I wonder when it will be released?

 

[mustadiokeepsdying]

When you shoot a thug in Far Cry, there is no meaning. He died. Okay?
Am I supposed to feel bad or something?

The problem is that there are little to no repercussions to killing people in most games these days. By repercussions I mean emotional impact or "feeling" repercussions to the player.

I think there's a term for that. I remember an achievement in Uncharted you get for killing 1,000 enemies called Ludonarrative Dissonance. It's what happens when the gameplay conflicts with the story. Like in Uncharted, you're this cool white guy who goes through crazy shit and gets the girl and saves the day and is the hero, and then in the game you're murdering countless men and slaughtering people with machine-gun fire and grenades. One thing I always liked about companies like Naughty Dog and Sega is their capabilities to laugh at themselves.