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.