[...] Sometimes the marketing department is right when it tells the game designers they need to add more stupid guns and stupid “badass” characters if they want to be able to keep paying off their [...]

Unfortunately it is balls-out hard if you try the non-violent route, which constitutes more of a balance issue than anything else.

Fallout 3, on the other hand, I can partially agree with. VATS is OK, but there’s so much they could have done with it. If you could force an enemy to surrender by shooting him in both arms, or stop him from escaping (and returning later with help) by shooting him in the leg…

As for the “significant enemies” thing, I find myself agreeing with Gaynor, but not completely. Shadow of the Colossus, for instance, bears out his argument. On the other hand, I think the John Woo flicks have a particular aesthetic to them that couldn’t be achieved without the use of nameless mooks (see: Resonance of Fate).

But then Hideo Kojima already pre-empted this conversation. Notice that his inclusion of dog tags in the MGS series (which does its damnedest to raise questions about violence) pretty much stands as an ironic counterpoint to Gaynor’s assertion.

Thanks for your comments, but I think you have a slightly twisted understanding of what I’m saying and why.

The fundamental problem isn’t that violence in games is meaningless, but that violence is overused as a design crutch even where it’s detrimental to a game. Violence can enhance the experience of a game in a number of ways, and narrative meaning is just one of these ways; I mentioned meaningful violence only in regards to Fallout 3, as the core experience of that game is narrative meaning. By contrast, while I do think the awkwardness of violence is thematically consistent in Mirror’s Edge, that doesn’t make up for the fact that it hobbles the core free-running experience by breaking up the flow.

The quality of a game element can be broken into several factors, some of which are “fun”, “meaningful” and “interesting”. Any of these can contribute to the experience if they’re done well, but they can also detract from it if they’re done poorly. Mirror’s Edge is a perfect example, because the combat is quite meaningful and mildly interesting, but actively detracts from the sense of fun. YMMV, of course, but I’ve heard enough agreement on this point to be confident only a small minority of players really enjoyed it.

Re: “Running away from violence is the easiest way to succeed in that game.” Are you not frequently obliged to take down police officers? Well, I agree that that’s a desirable design, at least in theory: in the article I said more running away would make it a better game.

I support the violence in games like Call of Duty, as much as I’m tired of the subject matter. If you’re going to make a game about shooting, the most important thing is how well you design the shooting. To put it another way, I don’t want to play another first-person shooter set in a gritty war scenario, but if I am going to play another first-person shooter set in a gritty war scenario, I want it to be worth playing.

“If only you could talk to the monsters!” was an ironic, self-deprecating reference to an infamous line in a review of Doom. It’s supposed to be ridiculous – sort of. It’s noteworthy that you really could talk to a lot of the “monsters” in the original Fallout and Fallout 2, or if you couldn’t talk to them you at least knew their story, and I think it was a better game for it. The combat in the first two Fallout games also required more tactical thinking than the combat in Fallout 3. If you play Fallout 3 as a twitch shooter it requires more skill, but the critical consensus is that it’s often punishingly difficult to play that way; IIRC there’s a degree of randomness to your accuracy even when free-aiming. Worth noting that I played it on a console.

I agree, Gaynor’s declaration is a bit too general. It would be stronger if it was an additive rather than subtractive rule: “game violence is more meaningful if” rather than “game violence is only meaningful if”.

You’re also right that it ignores the meaning brought into the game by the player. However, we can take that extra step without necessarily discarding Gaynor’s argument. If we as players are troubled by our own actions after killing nameless bandits or pedestrians, we must be humanising our victims in our minds: giving them identities, in other words, just as Gaynor suggests, although it’s coming from ourselves rather than the game designer.

The more we imagine NPCs as people, the more meaningful our interactions with them will be. Conversely, it’s easy to dissolve the intended meaning of a strongly character-based narrative game, like Mass Effect, by treating the detailed characters as though they’re not people – for example, by trying to jump onto their heads.

If we can somehow completely set aside the idea that a human-shaped, human-loooking, autonomous game object is a person, the way we interact with it can still be meaningful, but on a different mental plane.

Thanks for the thought-provoking comment! I’m working through these ideas as I write about them, which is an enjoyable process.

I think the dichotomy of meaningful/non-meaningful hinging so precisely on whether or not the recipient of said violence is a “unique individual” is probably a touch strong though.

In particular, I think that at least some of the responsibility here lies with the player. While the semiotics of games (or whatever) is often about all these “disposable enemies” it’s not the case we have to think about them in that way just because the game treats them lightly. I’ve spent plenty of time feeling rather trouble by the bandit-genocides I inflicted in Red Dead Redemption, for instance, not that any of the bandits had sparkling characters.

Further, I think the “interesting character” perspective omit the issues surrounding violence against non-combatants. As you say, you can march up and punch or shoot pedestrians in GTA IV for no real reason – I think that this sort of violence can be quite meaningful simply through its unprovoked characters. As in, “Why did I go and do a thing like that?”

In short, it’s a bit easy to blame the games for not being “meaningful” enough. Unlike in Rambo, where the disposable soldiers are around for mere seconds most of the time, in games we often “live with the consequences”, whether we walk past the fallen bodies of our enemies or stomp repeatedly on them to hear that squishing sound…

Thanks a heap!