Over the past year, I’ve been thinking a lot about the place of violence in video games. Pretty much every game I’ve played this year requires some degree of violence in order to make forward progress. In my beloved RPGs, it is the central pillar of almost every game. Sure, there’s usually a story and some excellent character work, but almost the whole thing still revolves around violence. My favorite RPG from the past year, Chained Echoes, features combat as the main mechanic of moving around the world and the method of resolving every bit of story tension in the game (even if the story isn’t really about violence and is actually critical of how “the ends justify the means” style philosophies are almost always an excuse for power getting what it wants through violence). Perhaps the biggest game of the year, Baldur’s Gate 3, is incredibly violent, sometimes moreso than others because there are entirely legitimate, if digustingly evil, paths through the game that involve indiscriminate murder. Sure, both these games involve violence against monsters and people with little to distinguish the two groups from each other (and next-to-nothing to explicitly point out that maybe you’re the greatest monster of them all, in the case of Baldur’s Gate 3), but games with violence exclusively against monsters aren’t much better since they still require violence in order to progress the game. Even one of the cutest, most-delightful games I’ve played (Lil Gator Game) involved violence, albeit violence against cardboard “monsters” rather than against other people. There’s almost no escaping it, which is unfortunate because one of the things that drives my escapist desires the most these days is the amount of violence in the world.

Conflict is fine, of course, since there are lots of ways to resolve conflict that don’t involve violence (like in Spiritfarer, where none of the conflicts in the game even allow violence and are mostly solved by conversation and each party trying to reach out to the other), but there aren’t a lot of games that are entirely free of vioelnce. I mean, even the grandest and most famous of all “cozy games” (a category I don’t really care for since it seems to include a lot of stuff that it probably shouldn’t), Stardew Valley, involves spending time in a mine full of monsters you have to fight in order to continue delving ever deeper in search of the resources you need to improve your tools. Animal Crossing doesn’t allow for violence, thankfully, which is probably why I spent so much time playing it in 2020 and why I keep going back to it even now, but it’s also incredibly free of conflict of any kind (which I’d say is a step backwards because, in past games, you could have relatively minor conflicts with your neighbors that required actual work to patch up).

All that said, I don’t necessarily hate all violence. Some violence can serve a purpose and a lot of the better RPGs that involve heavy violence work to tone it down a little bit. One of my favorite RPGs, Earthbound, frames pretty much every battle as the protagonists returning people to their senses, fending off an invading species of aliens, or beating up an animated object until all the evil power making it move has dispersed. Baldur’s Gate 3, which can be incredibly violent if you want it to be, allows you to try to find non-violent solutions in most applicable circumstances and the fights you can’t avoid are typically because whatever you’ve encountered has decided it wishes to kill you and can’t be dissuaded (like any number of powerful magical beasties or the cultists that form the backbone of the first two acts of the game). That said, the game does punish you a bit for choosing non-violent options by denying you the resources and experience points you’d have gotten from doing a bit of violence. Sure, it makes sense that the guy you convinced to leave probably wouldn’t pay you every penny he has for the privilage of walking away from something he wanted (though there is sometimes the option to extort people when you send them away), but you still resolved the encounter and should get the same amount of experience whether you’ve killed them or convinced them to leave so thoroughly that they never come back.

It’s frustrating, but even then I’m still okay with it most of the time (and perfectly capable of playing something else during the times when I’m not up for dealing with it). After all, it’s still fairly fantastical. Very little of it matches up with the type of violence I see in the real world. Sure, a fireball spell is a lot like a bomb in terms of one specific effect, but it’s also incredibly different in pretty much every other possible way. Most sword, bow, and magic combat in these games is fairly evenly matched–though things tend to lean in favor of the protagonists most of the time since that’s, you know, how games need to work–so you rarely wind up with a huge disparity in how much violence one side can inflict on the other (fun fact: the super evil thing I did in my Evil Dark Urge playthrough in BG3 involved a huge disparity in violence that made me sick to my stomach and that’s why I didn’t play it again for two months). I can still escape into a world full of magic, axes, and muscley giants who can hurl their enemies around because that stuff doesn’t really come up in the world around me.

The last game I played extensively that had guns in it was Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, and the protagonist only had one gun. Sure, the enemies had a lot of guns that they used against me fairly extensively and I had a laser sword I could use to dismember my enemies, but I was not put in the position of the person inflicting violence via guns. I tried to play Armored Core 6 and struggled to stick with it, so I’m not counting that one (and the whole Mech versus Mech combat setup feels fantastical enough to not resonate with the violence I see in the world at large, though that was just the first level and I suspect there might be some of that discomfort further down the line). The more I think on it, the more I realize that the last game I played that involved guns was probably Cyberpunk 2077 in the fall of 2022. Which feels weird, to realize that it has been that long since I’ve played a game that heavily revolves on gun violence, especially because I did my best to play that game as a quickhacker who killed my opponents by hacking their cyberware in a way that ultimately ended in their death (though they were frequently just permanently unconscious because its not like an unconscious enemy could get back up and continue fighting you ever again, a point that erased most of the potential different between knocking people out and killing them). Though, even there, I had to forego on of the most powerful attacks on that tree because making my enemies commit suicide was too grim for me to handle. I used to replay the Borderlands games (ususally Borderlands 2) once a year at least, sometimes more, because they’re really great looter-shooters. Hell, I used to play Destiny 2 all the time (which might actually be the last shooting game I played, come to think of it, since I definitely played it a bit in the later fall of 2022). But not recently. Not in a while, now.

Clearly, this didn’t always bother me. I never really enjoyed the guns for being guns (which is why I played Borderlands and Destiny, since the guns were sometimes barely guns at all and the whole point of them was getting weird effects that usually do non-gun things rather than getting just a gun that shoots better). I played a few of the more realistic ones here or there in my life, but I rarely played them for long. I didn’t want realistic combat, after all. I wanted to escape the meat world and so many of the “realistic” ones pride themselves on how tied they are to the “real” world and the various conflicts in it (a pile of horseshit that this Kotaku article does a great job covering in relation to the ongoing slaughter of Palastinian civilians). They were games about war. About killing in war. About the ways in which people act to incite or attempt to prevent war through, you guessed it, smaller war. Borderlands is violent, sure, but the protagonists aren’t necessarily good people and the whole world is structured such that violence is necessary to protect yourself. Destiny is about being granted a new lease on life and using that life to kill self-stylized gods who want to, last I heard, kill all of humanity because we had the misfortune of being a way station along the horrible destructive path of two deific forces. Very different bits of framing narrative, between games like Borderlands 2 and Modern Warfare 2.

I think I’m mostly done with games that revolve around gun violence and portrayals of warfare. I don’t think I have it in me to try to engage with them since half of them wind up propaganda for the various armed forces of the US (again, see that Kotaku article for a much better write-up than I can do here) and the other half don’t critically dig into the violence they’re portraying. It’s almost always “those are bad guys and we gotta kill them before they can kill us,” frequently with some incredibly racist or islamophobic undertones (also covered here). Or, you know, overtones. Some of these games don’t really try to hide what they are. And I’m just sorta done with all of them. I’m really not interested in them anymore. I know they’re still pretty popular and I own a lot of them, but I’m just can’t bring myself to feel excited about any game whose primary vehicle for progression is violence and whose primary means of violence is bombs and guns. I’m also not terribly interested in games about wanton violence, though there’s plenty of room in there for exceptions (like Pokemon and the Smash Brothers franchises, though I’ll admit that the veneer of battling as being some kind of fun communication and non-harmful activity occasionally falls away from Pokemon and I stop enjoying them for a little bit). I just wish there were more games out there at the size and scale of things like Baldur’s Gate 3 that didn’t involve tons of killing. Maybe we’ll get a new Animal Crossing game sometime soon or the whole “cozy games” genre will shift to include more conflict, storytelling, and character work rather than being defined by being mindless grinding games. Maybe someday…