Another Perspective on Violence in Games: Far Cry 2

As I’ve said, in Fallout 3 violence is not so much a thematic element as a medium. The game’s events, and its world, are painted in shades of violence. The spectacle of a zombie’s head exploding, or the deadpan gallows humor of dispassionately witnessing one over-the-top tragedy after another — these are the violent strokes by which the game evokes desperation, hand-to-mouth survival, and a deeply sick world. It’s the sort of post-apocalyptic environment that a particularly morbid eight-year-old might have imagined circa 1953. It seeks the common ground between a child’s drive to understand the world and the crippling paranoia of the nuclear age, and finds that that common ground is violence.

To understand why this works so well in Fallout 3, let’s take a look at a roughly contemporary game in which violence does not particularly work as an expressive tool: Far Cry 2. Whereas Fallout 3 takes an absurd, hallucinatory view of the world and runs wild with it, Far Cry 2 diligently and disastrously strives for realism, or rather for its own spectacularly misguided notion of what makes a simulation feel real.

FC2 is an arcade-style shooter painted in unconvincing shades of “realism”.  This is a game that combines meticulously researched weaponry (the guns all have real-life military designations) with magically regenerating health (with the application of a mysterious syringe, the protagonist is good as new as soon as he escapes enemy fire for more than 10 seconds). Likewise, some of the vehicles in FC2 are exact representations of certain models of Jeep,  yet completely repairing such a vehicle — after it has been sprayed with bullets and pelted with explosives — consists of repeatedly tightening a single bolt that, upon closer inspection, does not seem to be connected to anything more mechanically vital than the Jeep’s frame.

Realism!

Every design decision in the game seems to follow this pattern: chasing the “real” at the expense of anything that might ring true. Take for example the unnamed African nation in which the game takes place, which is designed, without the slightest pretense of subtlety, to evoke a realistic feeling of poverty and oppression.

In Farcrytwoland, there are shanty-towns aplenty, scads of demilitarized zones, reams of blood diamonds, and enough roving gangs of ungoverned bandits and mercenaries, corrupt strongmen, and heavily-guarded jungle estates to fill any Chuck Norris/Steven Segall/Sylvester Stallone vehicle. Everything is dingy and chaotic and absolutely screaming for the player to realize how terrible it would be to try to eke out a peaceful existence in a place like this.

And indeed, the player cannot imagine living there, because — and here’s where the “realism” comes crashing down — no one lives there. Even in the game’s “cities,” ordinary things like houses, businesses, livestock, and citizens are entirely absent. For all of its sandbox-y aspirations toward a living, breathing world, Farcrytwoganda is less a country than one endless, sprawling battlefield where one’s presence is proof of complicity in war. Farcrytwonisia only contains non-combatants when the disjointed plot demands it, and even then there are only ever a couple at a time. If you play this game to completion, then your body count will reach into the thousands–yet if you are diligent you might see 15 civilians over the course of the entire game.

Realism?

Speaking of body count, the combatants on either side are not only anonymously killable, but also utterly interchangeable; you rarely ever know which side the soldiers you’re killing belong to, and even when you do, it’s usually a deductive inference more than anything else: “The APR sent me to kill these guys, so they must be UFLL troops.” For all the work that’s been put into distinct, detailed models for the major players on either side, they’re all characterized minimally and more or less identically, so that the two warring factions become just two more mission-assignment hubs with little to differentiate between them. The people are indistinct and their motivations ill-defined, but damn do their outfits look lived-in.

In short, the whole set-up is sloppy, poorly explained, and even more poorly realized.  Everything the game gives you to do seems designed to make you feel like a bad guy, but this is apparently not so much to make any kind of discernible point as it is because it’s grittier and more realistic for there to be no good guys (cue dramatic soundtrack stab). War is hell, and it makes monsters of us all, or something, and like, you don’t even realize it until it’s too late, or something. Wait, what were we talking about? I was admiring how well-modeled this Heckler & Koch G3A4 7.62mm Battle Rifle is.

Even with all of the above issues, FC2 needn’t have been beyond saving. The unforgivable part, in my view, is that there are maybe eight unique missions in the entire game, four of which are repeated dozens of times apiece in various locales — they really have more in common with the mini-games found in the ancillary bits of the Grand Theft Auto and Saints’ Row games than with the missions in those, FC2’s fellow open-world franchises. This immense, realistic, open world full of guerrilla warfare and intense firefights really serves no more of a structural function than the do the menus in Super Mario All-Stars. At bottom, the idea is simply to get you from minor task to somewhat different minor task.

Did I mention that blood diamonds are the game's only currency? Because they are. And you get them from missions and by stealing them as part of a scavenger hunt. And there's very little to spend them on except guns. Realism.

All of which has what to do with violence in games? Well, I’m glad you asked, dear imaginary reader, because the game as I’ve described it doesn’t actually bother me because it’s monotonous, or poorly executed, or un-fun. (It is, at least in places, but none of that makes the game irredeemable on the one hand, or worth discussing on the other). No, the real problem with Far Cry 2, and the thing that most sets it apart from Fallout 3, is that FC2 completely fails to paint a coherent picture with its violence.

While Fallout 3‘s violence could be in some cases pure spectacle, it was also sobering and thought-provoking at times–or all the more sobering and thought-provoking because it was pure spectacle.  FC2‘s violence, on the other hand, is neither weighty nor frivolous, meaningful nor entertaining; it is simply rote and boring, which strikes me as far more deadening, and far more dehumanizing, and far worse than frivolity.

I almost hate to bring cinema into this discussion (because as we will discuss later, cinema and video games get compared a lot), but think about it in terms of film for a moment. What would be more horrifying to witness in a movie: a character being rewarded and applauded for gruesomely killing bad guys while on a world-saving quest, or the same character standing at a conveyor belt and absentmindedly shooting bad guys as they roll past him, maybe checking his watch and yawning every few minutes?

FC2 is a little like that second movie, only the player is the one doing that job, because that’s all there is to the game. I don’t cotton to the notion that people are spurred to real-life violence when exposed to video-game violence, but even when deployed as pure entertainment, surely it’s hard to belittle and dismiss a concept more thoroughly than by making it both utterly without effect and dull as dishwater. For a game that’s trying so hard to make an ill-defined point about The Horrors of War, FC2 does an amazingly good job of utterly trivializing realistic violence.

It’s a misuse of the medium. It’s like using a thousand gallons of paint without making a painting. Or if you like, it’s like burning through a thousand hours of film without capturing any images. It’s proof positive that violence, like any other tool of expression, lives and dies by the skill of the craftsman wielding it.

Prevalence of Violence in Video Games: The First Unoriginal Thought

Why is violence of some flavor so central to so many video games?  My opening this post with a rhetorical question should tip you off: the answer is both complicated and uncertain.  Some of it just has to do with convention and matters of how games have, historically, been marketed.  Let’s leave those perfectly valid, but more industrial concerns to the side for a moment, though, and look for a possible answer in the way in which violence functions in games.  For this fragment, consider a fairly recent, popular, and very violent game: Fallout 3.

The DC Wasteland is a cheery place.

Fallout 3 is the inheritor of the violence of the first two Fallout games by Interplay (and their spin-offs), late-90s role-playing games designed to evoke the post-apocalyptic feeling of Mad Max and The Road Warrior, as well as to satirize contemporary culture, people, and events.  The setting in all the Fallout games is a wasteland in the US created by a nuclear war, but not one as we might imagine it today.  The games evoke an apocalyptic future as it might have been imagined in 1953; everything looks about how it would have then, only covered with retro-futuristic touches like vacuum tubes and metal fins.  Radiation, in addition, is treated much like it was in movies like Them! — as a kind of sci-fi fairy dust that can do everything from making ants and scorpions huge to giving cows an extra head to creating entirely new (and revolting) mutant creatures to giving the player-character super-powers.  This rather quaint, Leave It to Beaver aesthetic gives the ashy, hellish wasteland a lastingly jarring quality, so that no matter how long you play and how much you see, you can still be unsettled by, for instance, a crumbling likeness of a cutesy drive-in movie mascot emerging from the ruined landscape.

The games’ violence is just as important to its oppressive post-apocalyptic setting as any of the above elements, though.  The constant threat of attack; the unrelenting feeling of menace; the grim realization that danger and violence are universal in this world; and the notion that in this imagined reality, slavery, casual murder, open warfare, and the grisly results

Nothing of note here...

of such things (pictured) are a part of everyday life in much the same way as indoor plumbing in the present-day US — these are what ultimately make all of the bleak landscapes, disconcerting contrasts,  and heartbreaking characterizations relevant to the player as they wander the wastes.

In many ways, Fallout 3‘s central theme is consequence.  Pulling the trigger on your weapon wears it down until, eventually, it will break and disappear; in order to prevent this from happening, you can repair it by sacrificing another weapon of the same kind, but doing so also sacrifices whatever profit could have been obtained from selling the scrapped weapon.   Choosing to aid one character will almost always prevent the player from being able to interact with or assist another character.  Choosing to defend yourself against attack (rather than fleeing, or even simply allowing yourself to be killed) keeps you alive and allows you to avail yourself of any of the resources of fallen foes, but it also depletes your character’s resources and subjects you, the player, to witnessing the often graphic demise of your enemies.

Now, as a veteran player of video games in general and of the kinds of games that Fallout 3 takes its cues from in particular, I am somewhat used to the simulated violence of first-person shooter (FPS) games.  Part of this acclimatization consists of the knowledge that the violence is simulated, and often poorly, and not automatically associating it with real-world violence.   Thus, in Fallout 3, there are moments when, for instance, the slow-motion spectacle of the devastating effects my character’s combat shotgun has on his or her attackers is simply that: a spectacle.  There are moments — particularly when I’ve been set upon at random by hostile wildlife, evil mutants, or sadistic slavers — when the spectacle is a gratifying one, a testament to my character’s badassery and an illustration of my contempt for the threats I’ve learned to overcome.

However, there are also moments, more commonly the ones associated with the game’s story and quest system, when the violence you perpetrate in Fallout 3 carries with it a more sobering feeling.  Imagine a scenario in which your character walks into an apparently abandoned convenience store in search of water, medicine, money, or ammunition, only to be accosted by a wild-eyed and highly territorial hermit.  After attempting to converse with the man for a time, you are presented with two conversational options: attempt to appease the man by offering him some very valuable first-aid supplies of the kind that have already saved your character countless times, or take him up on his threat of violence.  What then?  Or what if, upon arriving at this binary decision, your character possesses none of the items that will appease the hermit?  At moments like this, or in cases where the violence you perpetrate is in pursuit of a more complex or altruistic goal than “do what it takes to survive”, Fallout 3‘s violent content takes on a much weightier feel.

Furthermore, it’s important to note that Fallout 3‘s brand of violence is unique to its format; while movies (for example) could and indeed have featured similar acts and portrayals of violence, it is qualitatively different when the player of a game, possessed of an avatar in the game world, must decide if, when, how, and upon what or whom to enact violence.  In films, “the character Mad Max (or whoever) killed the bad guy”; in Fallout 3, “I, through my character, killed or chose not to kill the shopkeeper who was secretly selling her neighbors into slavery.”  Quite aside from enabling power fantasies, that level of involvement in the game’s created world allows an experience of media like no other, and makes sure that the game’s bleak commentary on society and human nature lands with the precision of a scalpel and the force of a wrecking ball.