Content warning: Detailed description of violence.
I don't want to be a violent person. I doubt you think so either.
Nevertheless, violence enters our lives in special small ways. My Venom of Choice is an independent first-person shooter game. The past five years have seen a resurgence of the genre, and I've always played countless different games over the years, as I've played similar games since I was a kid. At some point along the way, I started thinking about how they tied into the theme of violence. Of course they're great, but I'm interested in how individual games handle this as an issue.
There are games that pretend to explore this intellectually, but is it really possible? Can a game be fun, gory, and think about violence at the same time? Well, it's not as simple as yes or no. I'm not here to take a unilateral position and say that these games should be banned or that we should specifically lift them up. I'm just here to report: I've played hundreds of hours of first-person shooter games over the last three years without thinking about who I'm shooting. I can't go in.
In 1993, id Software released Doom, a game where you kill demons and close portals to hell with guns.In many ways, it is of Video game. It expands on the previous framework of id's shareware hit video game, Wolfenstein 3D, the iconic Nazi-killing gameplay, and serves as a straightforward starting point for the genre. In the beginning, we were blasting blood and organs from demons and possessed soldiers – straight from metal album covers and onto the screen. Doom is full of demonic imagery, scary demons, blood, and guns. It's a miracle of careful design that the game doesn't become this unpleasant. Corrupt men with red eyes, devil men with goat horns, kill them with guns because they are evil. From an outside perspective, the fetishization of guns and violence itself provides the most interesting thread to follow. Doom is a game that takes the joy and excitement of wielding a shotgun for granted, and in doing so creates the language of the genre. A long time has passed since Doom. Especially when you look at the genre's recent resurgence, games are becoming more thoughtful, blending the practices and mechanics of literary criticism you'd expect from movies and novels. This brings us back to the provocative question: Who are we pointing our guns at?
As it turns out, there are many answers to that question. The game that I believe revitalized the genre on the indie scene is David Szymanski's 2018 game Dusk. Who will this game point its gun at? Just like Doom, there are demons, supernatural evil, and possessed cultists. Other styles in Doom have been reworked with a different kind of artistry, for better or worse in certain places. After all, it's the same aesthetic: gore pentagrams, horned monster men, and blood as far as the eye can see. It is a rejection of, and an obsession with, a counterculture that is 40 years out of date in modern times. No one thinks black metal album covers are cool anymore. There's a reason these games are called “boomer shooters.” In general, these games are more of a response to Doom and its contemporaries than to each other. Dusk has little more to say on this point.
Released in 2023, Trepang2 answers questions by pointing guns everywhere. Your enemies are all kinds of people: capitalist enforcers, doomsday cult members, the military, the police, and more. Some are literal monsters. The strangest thing about the first game is that this guy seems to have little interest in distinguishing between the two. The incredible brutality of pulling the pin out of a man's grenade and throwing his entire body as a projectile demands serious answers. Can you do that to any person and not be seen as a terrible person? Trepan 2 feels like it ends with you being guided by the answer. I said this many times while playing. “I'm sure there must be an answer: a confrontation with the brutality of being a participant.'' But there is no clear answer. At the end of the game, you'll fight a clone of yourself. This is the perfect, pointless action movie finale. However, before that happens, countermeasures have been proposed. The game's fake antagonist is a mysterious bald billionaire. Sure it's radical, but as long as we're trying things out, why not? Let's kill some capitalists.
If modern demons are capitalists, why shouldn't they team up with each other in Doom? There's a recipe for it. Make Wolfenstein 3D's Nazis into capitalists. Imagine a not-too-distant future in which companies like Amazon command a paramilitary core in a kind of corporatized authoritarianism. For extra brownie points, add a neon “cyberpunk” aesthetic. Now give the man a gun. Sprawl, Turbo Overkill, Ghostrunner, the aforementioned section of Trepang2, and many more. Authoritarianism permeates corporatism when a single image of the “bad guy” materializes in the lower frequencies. This also has the added bonus of making more use of radical, counterculture aesthetics. That being said, the main character's coolness and unique cowboy style are nothing too radical. These are not so much works of art as contributing psychologically to real-world resistance. Proposing such a high bar for video games is a little ridiculous in itself. Instead, these games use the violent resistance of lone wolf characters as shorthand for revolution, whether from capitalism, authoritarianism, or anything else. The trend is to give games an innovative background. I'm not saying this is bad, but it's easy. That might be a little lazy.
But how weird can you get with this? Let's put everything in a blender. A combination of buzzwords is spewed out: terrorist capitalist of the flesh world. With titles like Cruelty Squad coming along, we're seeing games that focus entirely on violence. The game follows your job as a hitman for a private military contractor who is hired by a billionaire to kill billionaires. This blends with the game's grotesque world-building, capitalist epistemology, and physical aesthetics. Ironically for our purposes, the Cruelty Squad's actual targets fade into the background beneath the noise. This mixture serves as a backdrop for the game's other themes, but despite being quite eye-catching and grotesque, it doesn't feel particularly relevant to who the person photographing is. Even the game, which is thoughtful throughout, doesn't seem interested in answering this question.
The last thing we want to look at is HROT. Developed with a custom engine by a single developer, this game is one of his three games that inspired me to start this three-part journey. Set in a post-apocalyptic Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, you battle a frenetic combination of Soviet science and Czech folklore monsters. The choice of victims is uncomfortably playful. The final boss of the game is the floating head of real-life Czech politician Gustav Husak. Levels include a fever dream digression into a pop novel about salamanders taking over the Soviet Union, and the game's multiple challenges yield real-life food recipes. Blow up both the real human and the floating Lenin robot head. It takes a toybox approach to worldbuilding, aesthetics, and atmosphere. The game's greatest fun comes from the feeling of discovering what the next strange place will be. Its precise playfulness set next to violence makes my heart spin. There is something perverse in the frivolity of that juxtaposition.
I'm tired of comparing real gun violence to fictional gun violence.For years, people have been trying to create of A metaphor that ultimately distills the unique causal relationship between these two things. I've been exposed to this issue for many years as a fan of these games. I accept at once that violent art is always used as a scapegoat before confronting violent cultural ideals. However, on the other hand, we can also accept that art has a certain effect on our brains and that exalting individualistic violence is dangerous. The disconnect between my aversion to the real thing and the joy and satisfaction I get from these games is now at the center of my mind every time I play them. Let's face it, it just doesn't feel like anything meaningful is happening here. These games are frivolous as far as genre conventions go, and often don't give any thought to the subject matter of their violence. But in that frivolity, there is a growing sense of discomfort. Why shouldn't they be asking these questions? Victim issues, or broader issues of violence, are not the focus. Instead, they create an easy target that no one can object to and give you a gun.
What are the possible artistic merits of killing the devil with a gun? If the devil takes the place of bad things and the gun takes the place of bad solutions, then we have considered all the implications. Ta. The game becomes a flashing image on the screen. Although violent, it is done only by association. Overall, this genre can be frustrating. No heart. In a sense, subconscious. Interrogating these parts of the game feels silly in itself. It's a bit pointless. No need to worry. And you know, most of the time I really don't. But I feel that way inside myself. I like these games. I played a lot of these games. Just as Tetris players see falling blocks in their dreams, the itch sometimes strikes and they imagine the gaze that soars through the air and turns demons into piles of flesh. Think about how cool it is to use these guns. I have no idea how to feel about that. It's sickening to see violence become part of my brain as an unconscious process.
This article is the first of three on this topic. While I can't necessarily give you specifics, I encourage you to think about it this way and dig into the rationale behind what you really like. Maybe that's all I can do for you. Why on earth do we play these games?
Daily Arts writer Holly Tsch can be reached at: htsch@umich.edu.