Crosspost from Ludonauts
Recently, Bill Harris made a post regarding violence in videogames:
http://dubiousquality.blogspot.com/2005/07/on-violence-in-games.html
Some of his comments focused on Grand Theft Auto in particular. While I agree with many of his points, I find his analysis of GTA troublesome.
In particular, he refers to the violence inherent in the system as 'unnecessary' because they do not provide positive feedback to the player. That is, there is no point to killing random people because the player receives no in-game advantage as a result. He then goes on to conclude that since there is no possible game design reason behind the violence, the inclusion of the violence is purely a marketing ploy on the part of the developer.
This seems like an unfortunate application of meta-gaming as design criticism. True, there is little advantage to killing of NPCs in GTA3 (although this changes in San Andreas) in the sense that your character receives no explicit benefit. However, this doesn't really account for any emotional pleasure that the player may receive as a result of engaging in murderous activities. I don't think it's so easy to dismiss this kind of visceral positive reaction simply because it doesn't represent a boon to the meta-game. Even if that reaction is regarded as antisocial or sociopathic, it does not mean that the design is useless or unnecessary.
As evidence of this, I would cite the fact that many people will play hour after hour of GTA without ever playing through a mission. This may come as a surprise to some of you. It has become apparent to me that people who play GTA fall into two basic camps: those who play through the missions and nothing else and those for whom the missions are secondary to, for the lack of a better word, fucking around with the game. The latter behavior is clearly a major method of playing the game. Yet, this behavior is not predictable if the violence and other random, non-'beneficial' acts is solely for the purpose of marketing.
Compare Harris' take on violence in GTA to Frasca's analysis of the role of violence in GTA3:
http://www.gamestudies.org/0302/frasca/
Frasca's comparison to flight simulators is apt. Although describing it as a 'sim' as such would miss a large portion of what the game does, GTA is built around the simulation school of design. The 'random' violence is a major part of this simulation. It's something simple that players can use to figure out the limits of their interaction with the game. Once those initial limits has been explored, the player starts to build on this. Nobody I know who plays the game runs around with a baseball bat, hitting people for hours on end[1]. It's too simple an interaction to provide any sort of meaningful response for long.
Instead, the player uses building blocks of previous actions to create more complex interactions with the game. The rules that the game provides can be manipulated to create increasingly complicated set-pieces of carnage that owe as much to Rube Goldberg as they do to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre[2]. In the end, driving a school bus off the top of a building onto of a flaming fire engine than then careens down a hill into a busy intersection is no different than figuring out how to land in a flight simulation or building a crime-free city in SimCity. It is the player manipulating the rules of the game for self-pleasure[3].
I'm not enough of a fool to think that Rockstar isn't taking advantage of the 'edgy' content of GTA in order to market their game. This is pretty obviously taking place and many companies are taking this strategy and running with it, usually without including the foundation of solid design that makes GTA worthwhile.
However, to conclude that marketing is the sole reason behind the inclusion of violence in GTA would be ignoring the fact that players derive pleasure (and more importantly, that games can predict this pleasure and aim to provide it) from elements of the game that also do not have an impact on the logic/code/meta-game, and so, in the end, I would have to say that such a conclusion would be incorrect.
Now let's talk about an area where I do agree with Mr. Harris. Assigning consequences to actions is a game design concept that has remained under-utilized to date and represents an incredible source of making play more compelling, especially when applied to role-playing games, such as GTA3.
And make no mistake, GTA has become a series more dedicated to player choice and creating an in-game persona than most 'traditional' RPGs such as Final Fantasy, which have become highly polished interactive stories, largely bereft of player agency beyond the logistics required to drive the narrative forward. Not that these games are essentially bad; they are not, however, truly 'role-playing'. Games like GTA and Morrowind are a resurgence of Western-style game design, focused on the impact that a player can have on a system, rather than the impact that the system has on the player.
Morrowind is also a good counter-example to GTA in that it has many of the attributes that would make GTA a better game. These attributes are largely tied to consequences and the fact that the world of Morrowind is persistent. Kill someone, and they stay dead. Become friends with Person A and Person B will always be mad at you. Although there are many glaring errors in terms of both the micro- and macro-logic of the game, it is a step in the right direction, the foundation for a world focused on long-term decision making as well as the short-term.
Persistence and consequence create a more compelling world for the player because it assigns more weight to a player's decisions. As much fun as it is to run about causing mayhem, it is far more interesting to know that your actions have serious connotations in the way that the game will play out afterwards. Consequence is the clear direction that will prevent the GTA series from continuing in its current downward slide. However, we should realize that the slide is continuing from an apex of excellent design.
------------------------------
[1] - Most of the people who presumably enjoy this kind of braindead activity are advised to play State of Emergency, as it's easier to find cheap.
[2] - Interestingly, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre has a slight connection to GTA in that 'Chainsaw' was at the forefront of media that began to treat violence as simultaneously extreme and mundane, creating situations where audiences were unsettled less by the actual violence and more by the fact that the violence was blase or even humorous, rather than horrific.
[3] - Not that the design is always so impressive. As an example of a misstep, I find the interaction with the prostitutes to be poor design not because it's not beneficial or because it's 'immoral'; rather, it's poor design because it's non-interactive, fairly lengthy and doesn't form a building block for other actions. It's a trick, something that you might do once for the novelty and only do it again if somebody is over and wants to be impressed/you want to impress him.
http://dubiousquality.blogspot.com/2005/07/on-violence-in-games.html
Some of his comments focused on Grand Theft Auto in particular. While I agree with many of his points, I find his analysis of GTA troublesome.
In particular, he refers to the violence inherent in the system as 'unnecessary' because they do not provide positive feedback to the player. That is, there is no point to killing random people because the player receives no in-game advantage as a result. He then goes on to conclude that since there is no possible game design reason behind the violence, the inclusion of the violence is purely a marketing ploy on the part of the developer.
This seems like an unfortunate application of meta-gaming as design criticism. True, there is little advantage to killing of NPCs in GTA3 (although this changes in San Andreas) in the sense that your character receives no explicit benefit. However, this doesn't really account for any emotional pleasure that the player may receive as a result of engaging in murderous activities. I don't think it's so easy to dismiss this kind of visceral positive reaction simply because it doesn't represent a boon to the meta-game. Even if that reaction is regarded as antisocial or sociopathic, it does not mean that the design is useless or unnecessary.
As evidence of this, I would cite the fact that many people will play hour after hour of GTA without ever playing through a mission. This may come as a surprise to some of you. It has become apparent to me that people who play GTA fall into two basic camps: those who play through the missions and nothing else and those for whom the missions are secondary to, for the lack of a better word, fucking around with the game. The latter behavior is clearly a major method of playing the game. Yet, this behavior is not predictable if the violence and other random, non-'beneficial' acts is solely for the purpose of marketing.
Compare Harris' take on violence in GTA to Frasca's analysis of the role of violence in GTA3:
http://www.gamestudies.org/0302/frasca/
Frasca's comparison to flight simulators is apt. Although describing it as a 'sim' as such would miss a large portion of what the game does, GTA is built around the simulation school of design. The 'random' violence is a major part of this simulation. It's something simple that players can use to figure out the limits of their interaction with the game. Once those initial limits has been explored, the player starts to build on this. Nobody I know who plays the game runs around with a baseball bat, hitting people for hours on end[1]. It's too simple an interaction to provide any sort of meaningful response for long.
Instead, the player uses building blocks of previous actions to create more complex interactions with the game. The rules that the game provides can be manipulated to create increasingly complicated set-pieces of carnage that owe as much to Rube Goldberg as they do to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre[2]. In the end, driving a school bus off the top of a building onto of a flaming fire engine than then careens down a hill into a busy intersection is no different than figuring out how to land in a flight simulation or building a crime-free city in SimCity. It is the player manipulating the rules of the game for self-pleasure[3].
I'm not enough of a fool to think that Rockstar isn't taking advantage of the 'edgy' content of GTA in order to market their game. This is pretty obviously taking place and many companies are taking this strategy and running with it, usually without including the foundation of solid design that makes GTA worthwhile.
However, to conclude that marketing is the sole reason behind the inclusion of violence in GTA would be ignoring the fact that players derive pleasure (and more importantly, that games can predict this pleasure and aim to provide it) from elements of the game that also do not have an impact on the logic/code/meta-game, and so, in the end, I would have to say that such a conclusion would be incorrect.
Now let's talk about an area where I do agree with Mr. Harris. Assigning consequences to actions is a game design concept that has remained under-utilized to date and represents an incredible source of making play more compelling, especially when applied to role-playing games, such as GTA3.
And make no mistake, GTA has become a series more dedicated to player choice and creating an in-game persona than most 'traditional' RPGs such as Final Fantasy, which have become highly polished interactive stories, largely bereft of player agency beyond the logistics required to drive the narrative forward. Not that these games are essentially bad; they are not, however, truly 'role-playing'. Games like GTA and Morrowind are a resurgence of Western-style game design, focused on the impact that a player can have on a system, rather than the impact that the system has on the player.
Morrowind is also a good counter-example to GTA in that it has many of the attributes that would make GTA a better game. These attributes are largely tied to consequences and the fact that the world of Morrowind is persistent. Kill someone, and they stay dead. Become friends with Person A and Person B will always be mad at you. Although there are many glaring errors in terms of both the micro- and macro-logic of the game, it is a step in the right direction, the foundation for a world focused on long-term decision making as well as the short-term.
Persistence and consequence create a more compelling world for the player because it assigns more weight to a player's decisions. As much fun as it is to run about causing mayhem, it is far more interesting to know that your actions have serious connotations in the way that the game will play out afterwards. Consequence is the clear direction that will prevent the GTA series from continuing in its current downward slide. However, we should realize that the slide is continuing from an apex of excellent design.
------------------------------
[1] - Most of the people who presumably enjoy this kind of braindead activity are advised to play State of Emergency, as it's easier to find cheap.
[2] - Interestingly, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre has a slight connection to GTA in that 'Chainsaw' was at the forefront of media that began to treat violence as simultaneously extreme and mundane, creating situations where audiences were unsettled less by the actual violence and more by the fact that the violence was blase or even humorous, rather than horrific.
[3] - Not that the design is always so impressive. As an example of a misstep, I find the interaction with the prostitutes to be poor design not because it's not beneficial or because it's 'immoral'; rather, it's poor design because it's non-interactive, fairly lengthy and doesn't form a building block for other actions. It's a trick, something that you might do once for the novelty and only do it again if somebody is over and wants to be impressed/you want to impress him.