Why violence in videogames is boring

[Oppenheimer]

[Himuro]

Heh. I don't mind adventure games if they are a fetch quest. Most of them are so...I don't really mind much.

As for your solution, like turning his enemies against him and such. Would that be challenging? Would it be a simple matter of "Hey guys, come and betray your leader"? Because that's not engaging at all. Apart of the appeal and charm of video games is that you over come challenges. It's the thrill of winning that makes certain games still popular to this day (such as sports games, or war games). The prospect of winning after a tremendous amount of odds and force is what gives a gamer his high, his kick.

If you could simply turn his enemies against him and tell them to take him in...to the police station, I don't know about that one. It doesn't sound like it lends any difficulty or challenge whatsoever to the player. And it actually sounds like a boring solution and finale to a video game. You know it's still possible to have violence in a game without killing people, right? How about a game that gives multiple endings depending on how you beat people? If you just knock them out with your fists or shoot them with your tranquilizer gun, you end up not killing your enemeis and have a more peaceful ending. If you shoot them with normal guns and manage to kill them, you get the normal ending.

[Ujitsuna]

Some gamers don't want to use intellect to solve problems, since it may be more involving, more effort or another reason. Violence is a straight forward basic human characteristic that has been overused in video games. I'd like a mixture personally.

[Himuro]

[Ujitsuna]

I'm not saying none is used, but I do feel that in a lot of video game violence it is all very simple and easy to play through.

[OptimisticPessimist]

I don't mind the violence in games actually, since I more or less concentrate on the RPG genre rather than on any other game genre.

I think I would find an RPG without combat of any sort to be something akin to a novel of sorts. It's simply something you can potentially breeze through without actually doing anything. That's not to say that novels are always easy reads. They can tend to be predictable.
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♪~ OptimisticPessimist ~♪
Tensui Star of Harmonia

[Luceit]

It also depends on what you define as violence. To me, I consider video game violence to be something more akin to Grand Theft Auto where you shoot people and you can kill people in multiple ways although I know that even RPGs have violence in them, seeing that violence means pretty much any aggressive physical action against another person.
As a predominantly RPG player, I must admit that 'violence' doesn't interest me much. I'm much more interested in the story of an RPG than the amount of blood, guts and other such pixelated things spilled during the game. Of course, I also admit that a game where pretty much nothing happens would be very boring unless its concept was innovative. Two of the games I'd consider to have no violence that I liked were Harvest Moon and Sim City (For the latter, you could cause havoc by making disasters, but that's not really violence to me).
I just think that the author could have worded the title better. From reading his article, I get the impression that he simply doesn't like the thought that violence is all too prevalent in action games and he'd like more alternative ways to solve a problem. In essence, he wants an alternative solution to exploit that doesn't involve killing but does not heavily penalize a player.
I sort of like his idea, because it makes the game more realistic. I remember reading an article once about how an agent like James Bond would never survive in the real spying industry and it caught my interest. However, I'd also like to note that the solution is simply to make the 'alternative' elements in the game more common and easy to use, so that other players can do it as well. In that sense I like MGS because it involves quite a lot of stealth.

Is violence in video games boring? Not quite. I do think it's boring when it's the central focus of the game though.
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[ThricebornPhoenix]

[Futch]

You can finish Fallout 1 without shooting a single bullet.

A post nuclear role playing game were using bazookas as a weapon is easy as eating cake gives you the chance to play it the diplomat way.

Diplomacy at it's finest!

A church does blow up, but hey, you didn't do it!

Seriously, everyone here in this post should play Fallout. You'll be surprised!

[Arcana]

Article's author uses bad examples. I know he's trying to emphasize that "free-form games should emphasize options other than combat" as a way to win, but he does title his article poorly (as has been pointed out by a number of repliers in this thread).

Because sports games are among some of the most popular games ever and aren't about combat in a traditional sense. Now whether you actually think NFL football is violent is a whole other story :) And let's not talk about Wii Sports or Guitar Hero.

The reality is, many people want to feel overpowered and strong in a video game. Truth. His example with Call of Duty is interesting, but is overall not a good sample because the point of that mission being memorable was precisely to put you in a position of vulnerability. It is thrilling because it goes against the grain, but if the next mission did that, and then the mission after that did it too, your game is going to tank big-time. You do not go out and buy Call of Duty so you can run around without a gun - you want to shoot things and blow stuff up. The fact that you go through a mission without a gun is just a way to stir things up.

So let's turn to FPS's. It's interesting that he rants a bit about how Japanese games give different options and fails to mention that the Japanese RPG system is Totally. The. Most. Unoriginal. System. Ever. He points out examples of Fallout and KoToR as games where Violence is the Answer, and points out that sometimes, you can do alternate tactics. Well, guess what. In Suikoden, if you don't like a guy, you kill him. Simple as that. You do not engage in thrilling negotiations with them (ugh, imagine an entire game based on thrilling negotiations). You do not play Triple Triad with him and bet your Kingdom. You kill him (or on occasion fight him until he gives up/runs away/whatever). There ARE exceptions, yes, but you get my drift.

But I wil lgo back to saying that combat IS easy, so that's why people do it. It's nice to have a goal like that. Even a game where combat is not the main focus, like in Phoenix Wright, it's entertaining and amusing to note that all of the cases in that game are murders :)

Simply put, unless you all want to play dating sims, combat will remain prevalent! People want to be overpowered. People get enough fluffy negotiations, tip-toeing through emotions, doing silly things like cooking and cleaning and vacuuming. When they sit down at the TV and fire up that console, most players probably want to smash some heads (or read some engaging story sequences that eventually lead to smashing heads).
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Woo, 2000 posts as of Tuesday, 2007 August 28.