SJ Longthorne

The core theory behind this thread is that I believe we don’t have a problem with violence in games itself - violence is after all a deeply human trait - but how we portray it. Especially with how narrow our portrayal of violence is - this of course not being limited to games.

I’ve had many discussions about violence in games with students when I was a teacher and often the point came up that game mechanics just lend themselves very well towards portraying violent acts. Action-based gameplay is more common, first person perspective etc etc.

I don’t disagree with this entirely but I also think it’s a poor excuse. It’s likely less of a mechanical thing and rather a culture thing in how we view and portray violence, often taken from other media such as movies. What if we view violence from a different angle?

First, we need to come to acknowledge that violence can have different angles. For example there is violence to perpetuate power (mainly used for villains) and violence as a means of protection (technically meant to be used by protagonists but often poorly executed).

Violence to perpetuate power is usually something we portray in extremes. Acts of particularly cruel killings, often of large groups, women or children. Violence towards women is excessively used to code characters as the bad guy. Exactly BECAUSE it is supposed to be about power.

What’s interesting about the correlation of power and how we portray violence (and who gets to be violent for that matter) is how it is almost exclusively coded masculine. We VERY rarely see female characters portray violence towards children or sexual violence.

Now... we have established that violence and power have an intimate correlation in our media and when designing games, that correlation is extremely important because it means it needs to influence your design intent within both mechanics as well as characters.

For that matter you’ll need to think about: Who wields power in your world? How does said power manifest? Are there better ways to portray power than lingering on violence? Is violence used to perpetuate power or as a means of protection? What mechanics suit those best?