Editor's Note: this piece contains plot spoilers for Spec Ops: The Line and Halo 4.
In video games the subject of violence is often treated as monolithic, something which must lead us to moral truth. In reality, no such simplicity is possible. Just as the violence of an older sibling delivering a charlie horse is different from the violence of an armed robbery, violent video games must be taken each in their own context.
It was a year of games that pushed back against us.
In 2012 many video games were cruel, horrific, surreal, and disturbing creations. It was a year of games that pushed back against us every time we pressed into them. Works whose meanings are obscured when taken as a whole, but when considered individually reveal the wild variety of experiences that can come from one seemingly simple word.
Hotline Miami was one of the purest examples of video game violence in 2012, luring players into a gauche world of stereotype with incessant spurts of gore and mid-tempo dance loops. The game, from the luminary Swede Jonatan Söderström, is a frenetic, top-down action game with almost immediate respawns after death, turning the experience into a kind of violent hypnosis.
All of this is built around the ingenious mechanic of using the mouse to spiral one's aim around the screen like a weaponized clock hand. The game's visuals, inspired by the hyperreality of 1980's action movies, initially give it a satiric effect. But the longer you play, the more the visual elements recede, leaving an obsessive vortex of blood spatters and corpses, which briefly animate death like Tetris blocks atomizing into empty space.
Papo y Yo made an interactive parable out of developer Vander Caballero's childhood growing up with an abusive and alcoholic father. The game's boy hero, who enters a magical favela fantasy world after hiding in a closet during one of his father's belligerent outbursts, has no destructive powers of his own. He must instead bait a snuggly monster to crash through walls and help him reach high-up places, though when the monster gets high on toxic frogs the boy's beloved helper becomes the game's only real enemy, chasing the boy and slamming him into the ground again and again. The game is an experience of puzzle solving that interrupts the player with violent betrayal from your most trusted ally.
ZombiU
ZombiU turned the fight against the undead into a strangely personal experience. As you play, the game will populate the fallen corpses of other people on your friends list into your experience. Even if you can't play together, there is a sense that their death is given some small purpose by allowing you to loot their bodies for weapons and ammunition.
When you're taken by the clasping arms of the infected, you will respawn as a new character whose first order of business is to return to find your former character -- now transformed into a lumbering and lost zombie -- who you must kill to retrieve your former belongings. It's an incremental reminder, however transparent and mechanical, that each of those zombies were people, and surely each of them struggled to escape before they, like you, proved susceptible to failure through no fault of their own.
Spec Ops: The Line offered a seemingly familiar war shooter experience, but gradually revealed that its hero was a hallucinating wreck who was doing more harm than good on his quest to rendezvous with a mysterious Colonel Konrad. One of the first major turning points in the game comes when Walker decides to fire white phosphorous on what he thinks are troops loyal to the Colonel, overriding strong objections from one of his teammates.
Spec Ops: The Line
As you walk through the wreckage after, surveying the burnt bodies, you realize the phosphorous hit civilians the Colonel's troops had been trying to get out of the battle zone. Games have a way of always excusing violent action by asking players to perform it in circumstances where there was no other choice, and Spec Ops seizes on this classic construct to remind players that this is a formula for villainy far more than it is for heroics.
Spec Ops is an elaborate set up to make players feel guilty.
Medal of Honor Warfighter offers the reverse experience, with one early level built around a car chase through an open air market in Somalia. The first-person experience significantly narrows your view as you drive, frequently smashing into stalls, killing innocent merchants. The game even offers a Trophy/Achievement ("Vendor Bender") for players who destroy 90 stalls or more during the chase.
If Spec Ops is an elaborate set up to make players feel guilty for their propensity to destroy first and think later, Warfighter rewards it, creating a scene where the military imperatives of the United States take precedent over a poor Somali trying to support him or herself. Not only should you not worry about trying to sympathize with these bystanders, you should indulge in the pleasure of mayhem itself by trying to take out as many as possible.
Halo 4
Halo 4 offers another strange twist of moral logic, a kind of anthropomorphic, object fetishism endemic to violent video game fantasies. The story revives Master Chief and his imaginary friend Cortana, who becomes periodically visible as a semi-nude hologram telling players where to go next. The story centers around the growing instability at the heart of Cortana's AI. As you sprint through the game's eight missions you'll kill all manner of living creatures, each with their own warlike motivations. But the biggest personal imperative for Master Chief is to save the computer that matters more to him than any other living thing. When you reach the sentimental conclusion, Halo 4 encourages you to mourn for a corrupt piece of software, whose companionship was worth more than the mountain of corpses that lead you to that climactic point.
Halo 4 encourages you to mourn for a corrupt piece of software.
Video games are not simply violent, as if violence is an objective and singular condition. They simulate one of the most inescapable and disturbing aspects of human life and allow us to consider it in a near infinite number of contexts, each of which dramatically changes the nature and meaning of a simulated act of violence.
Like every other form of human creativity, games are not guide posts whose behavior must be modeled, but prompts for personal inquiry that can either be taken up or left behind. Many believe we will become less violent by leaving these violent tendencies unexamined. But we have only just begun to discover how many different meanings we can see in them, each unique in their own way.
Michael Thomsen is a writer in New York. He killed a chicken once. Follow him on Twitter at @mike_thomsen.
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