I’ve been thinking about killing in video games recently, especially after something Quintin Smith said to me about Uncharted on Twitter: “A character who moves like a monkey, slaughters hundreds and smoothes it over with a merry quip!” A few days later I came across another mention of Uncharted that pointed out the severe disconnect between the countless murders committed by the protagonist of that game, Nathan Drake, and the game’s chirpy characterisation and bright, unconcerned aesthetics.
A lot of interesting things have been done with player death in video games, though I’ve read countless more ideas begging to be explored further, but when “kill” is among the verbs at the player’s disposal, it’s generally treated in two ways: kill many people or kill fewer people. Some games include non-lethal weapons (a mechanic that seems most popular in stealth games, cases in point: Thief, Deus Ex, Splinter Cell), and some games feature a mission or two where it’s mandatory not to kill anybody.
I think the question of whether to kill a person in a game has huge potential, and I’m not aware of a lot of games that really make interesting use of it. Deus Ex is the predictable game for me to use as an example, but in fact the best example I can think of is Hitman: Blood Money, where unnecessary kills not only count against your score and salary, but change the media coverage of your assassinations which nominally alters the difficulty of subsequent missions. It could’ve been implemented more confidently, but I thought it provided really logical motivation for me to think like Agent 47 and try to limit my collateral damage.
Rock Paper Shotgun brought the blog Design Reboot to my attention this week, and though I have a very ambivalent opinion of it (I feel that the reboot posts are generally of little value to me, vastly preferring the occasional level design post), his ideas for Deus Ex spinoffs about Gunther Hermann or Anna Navarre contain some very neat ideas about turning the player’s killing into both narrative themes and gameplay mechanics.
I love the idea of a game with multiple endings chosen from how well you’ve restrained your killing throughout the game. I feel that for it to work best, a cold-blooded play style should be markedly more effective than a less-lethal approach, so taking the high road will be the difficult option. It’s important that the players be made aware that they’re heading down a dark path if they take the easy, deadly way through a mission, but I think sticking to your principles in a game like this would be very rewarding indeed. It’s what Deus Ex seemed to be doing up until its plot twist revealed it to be a sort of extended tutorial, and I’ve always thought the first act of DX was much more interesting because of that.
The way Monahan at Design Reboot proposes to tie the kill count into Gunther’s character development reminds me a lot of the role-playing system Cyberpunk 2020 where every character has a Humanity statistic that decreases every time a cybernetic enhancement is installed in his or her body. It’s used to represent the traditional cyberpunk theme of the transformation from human to cyborg and what it might bring with it of psychological problems and identity crises. The specific implication in CP2020 is that the more of a machine you become, the more you lose your human empathy, eventually becoming so disenfranchised that you go on a killing spree. This is very much the principle Deus Ex’s Gunther character was based on.
Since Quinns’ comment, I haven’t been able to shake the feeling that Uncharted could have been a far more meaningful experience if it had fewer fire fights, but made them matter more. The game already has a lot of elements that could replace combat as the core gameplay dynamic – adventure style environmental exploration, 3rd-person platforming, puzzle solving, and trap dodging. It also features reasonably robust melee attacks and basic stealth AI.
I love the fact that the pistol in Uncharted remains powerful and useful throughout the game, thanks to its high accuracy and stopping power and the scarcity of ammunition. I’m sure that if the firefights had been very rare but extremely lethal, and if the game had relied more on fist fights and stealth, Nathan Drake would’ve been more like his obvious role model, Indiana Jones. I rarely find myself advocating authenticity (realism, if you will) in games, but in this case I think a bit more of that would’ve made Uncharted a much more fun and exhilarating game.
For a very long time, I’ve wanted to experiment with an action game with very limited gun-play, where weapons are as lethal as you’d expect in the real world, where non-lethal combat such as a plain old bar brawl make up most of the fights, where few enemies try to kill you unless you produce a weapon first, and where killing somebody has serious implications. Short of a highly detailed law enforcement dynamic, tracking the emotional stability of the player character could be a splendid way to create such an aesthetic, and on top of that a potentially unparalleled way of tying the character development directly into the gameplay.
Above all, I’d just like to do something new and cool with the concept of killing in games, something that’ll make you rethink the traditional role of combat in action games, and I’m grateful to both Quinns and Monahan for getting me to think about these things in the first place.
I’ve been wanting that exact low-key, slow-paced action game for years, but I’m fine with waiting because I’m positive somebody’s going to make it one day.
It might work best with a Cowboy theme, come to think of it. If you go back and watch those old Westerns they create incredible tension from the knowledge that you’re watching two men, with guns, who might draw at any moment, but don’t want to risk it. Why not create a game where you’re a Wild West outlaw who has to amass money, but your unchangeable Wanted rating increases every time you kill a man? A kind of GTA with a glacial pace.
Oh yeah applying this to a western game would be a great idea, but really it could work on pretty much any type of games that allows for killing. The main thing is to make sure the game is still fun if you don’t kill anybody, but there are all sorts of ways to do that – stealth being the obvious tried and tested one. Alternatively martial arts, investigation, exploration, puzzles… the possibilities are endless, the problem is just convincing some money men that it will sell.
I’ve been playing TNM over the last few weeks, and I’m going for the non-lethal approach. I’ve not played any video games for a couple of years, and I basically “came back” for TNM. I had heard about the 7 year dev cycle, so I figured it would be as good as (if not better than) the original DX. I knew you could play DX without killing anyone except Anna and Gunther, however it didn’t seem to have that much impact on the story, apart from with a few characters at the beginning. In TNM, I really like is the way that non-lethal actually makes me feel like I’m sparing the lives of characters. After I knocked Zero Presence out, I was happy to see that he was back – thus showing a palpable difference, manifested not only with a simple conversation or two. At the end, I was very glad I’d only knocked him out, when I saw he was featured, alive and well, in the endgame cinamatic. I also stunned rather than killed practically all other enemies throughout the game, even before realizing that in the alternate storyline, they were my friends. TNM has really done the job of making killing characters feel wrong. The way that non-lethal is a real and worthwhile option is a major part of what makes Deus Ex, and laterly TNM, one of my favourite games.