 The most troubling thing about playing Spec Ops the line wasn't the moment I was forced into using white phosphorus and civilians. It wasn't the harrowing, metafictional condemnation for indulgence and violence, but when Lugo is lynched and murdered by the local population. It isn't even the moment I realized I condemned the whole of Dubai to damnation. It's the moment right after I finished playing the game that I realized I was still numb to the whole thing. I murdered hundreds of soldiers in an act of routine debauchery. It somehow my conscience was clear. Brilliant as Spec Ops was at recreating Heart of Darkness. I was more troubled by the fact that the game didn't really trouble me at all. Interestingly, this is an observation that the lead writer of Spec Ops, Walt Williams, had at a GDC talk of his that we have been desensitized to violence in games through violence in games itself. Listen. And right off the bat I want to say because it's going to maybe sound like I'm being critical of violent games. I want to say right off the bat that one, I don't believe that violent games make violent people and I don't believe that violent games desensitize us to violence. I do, however, believe that violent games desensitize us to violence in games. And I think that has to deal more with how we treat violence and how we treat our genres, which is that our genres are defined by action and that action is how you're going to be interacting with the world. It's going to be how you overcome obstacles, how you affect change, how you progress in your goals. If you're playing a platformer, you're going to do all that through jumping. If you're playing a shooter, you're going to do all that by killing someone with a gun. And you're using an action as a tool that's easy to disassociate from what that action is. And with a shooter, that action is killing another person. Understanding this desensitization, Williams and Yeager did a laudable job at reversing this trend. To do this, he argues that we should embrace ludenarrative dissonance, making the player feel complicit in violence, illustrate the de-evolution of characters as they fall to ruin, and provide a space where ambiguous moral decisions let the players judge themselves. Spec Ops does all this exceptionally well, and yet, there is still some mechanical disassociation. Gunning down enemies is just a task we do, and moreover, it is still somewhat fun. Violence in games has an obviously controversial history. Titles like Doom and Mortal Kombat have been taken to task by Pundit aplenty, and this was only amplified by the freedom games like GTA afforded. Fortunately, games were ruled as art objects with all the freedom of speech that affords, but still, the stigma of peddling in pools of blood still followed games in their wake. Games are perhaps violent for many reasons. One is perhaps obvious in that it is visceral and fun, but a more nuanced explanation looks something like this. Most games are inherently about action verbs, about rendering conflict through game feel, direct engagement. The only form of fictional overlay we can simulate with this constraint is either sports or well-violence. In the book Getting Gamers, the author presents psychological evidence for the intuitively gratifying nature of direct engagement, and because our medium is mediated by a single form of conflict action, violence is inevitable. This path-dependence argument is made stronger by how text-based adventures and puzzle games take a more cerebral form of conflict, and so don't require a fictional interface with mayhem. John Romero himself proposed another theory for violence in games, something we can call the clendiness hypothesis, that at an abstract level, we are just tidying up levels, we remove elements from the field of play, although we often leave a mess in the process. And perhaps therein lies the problem. It is as Walt Williams explains, just mechanical, we aren't paying attention to the fictional level of games because we are too busy playing the game to notice. Another problem is the disconnect between watching the game and playing it. What appears as wanton genocide is actually a game of pure strategic depth. This is perhaps more apparent in single-player games versus multiplayer games. In his foreword to the book Shooter, Clint Hawking, the creator of Far Cry 2, another game critical of violence, suggests that multiplayer games are more like sport, whereas single-player games are more about the fiction itself. However, there is an even deeper problem here. In Steve Swink's book Game Feel, he argues that making a game fun requires polishing effects, sounds, graphics, and zings that make a game pop. And so violence is not just abstracted away, it actually reinforces the mechanics. The latest Doom games are a prime example of this. Murdering demons is practically a symphony of destruction, as blood, brains, and guts spill everywhere as you sever creatures like a piñata. It is glorious, but it's fine though, right, because we're murdering the spawn of hell. Functionally, aestheticizing violence is no different to how movies employ this device. In a Quentin Tarantino film, blood sprays like an expressionist painting, making a Jackson Pollock process out of decapitation. Similarly, Jackie Chan movies take cues from cartoons and animated film. The violence is goofy and strangely non-violent. Exaggeration, amplification, whether employed for comedy or mayhem is desensitizing because it clearly isn't real. It is deliberately fictional in its construction. And so, violence is aestheticized out of controversy. Games invoke this same vernacular, whether Mario or Crash Bandicoot. I think violence is pervasive in games, and then the opposite, Tarantino-isms. Think Hot 9 Miami's indulgence in its own aesthetic, or the pools of blood left in your wake in Mad World. Violence in games is fundamentally in service of its mechanics, and so either we tune out the violence, or it only serves to reinforce the feel of that game. And so what? Well, this was the project of both Walt Williams and Clint Hawking, to de-estatisize violence to make the fictional context so undeniably discomforting that we pay attention to what we are doing. Both do a great job at this, making themselves genuinely disquieting to play, either through making the game less fun to play, or by giving it a gritty timbre, signalling themselves as more real, more consequential. However, it's also precisely because of their narrative weight and ambition that this may fall apart. Because both games are sojourned into the heart of darkness, we don't feel uncomfortable because there's a point to it. The fiction de-estatisizes violence, but the theme aestheticizes it once more. It's like how saving Private Ryan shows the horrors of war, while simultaneously being joyful to watch. It's the aestheticization of an anti-aesthetic, not a genuine anti-aesthetic. Other ways of doing this is to chastise players for committing violence, reframing its utility, or showing players the consequences of it. In Metal Gear Solid 3, sneaking not only makes the game easier to play, it also aestheticizes non-violence. Of course, Kojima's message with the series is a paradoxical one. It is an anti-war war game. An anti-violent, anti-violence, violent game? It revels in these contradictions, but also recognizes itself as mechanical text and so pushes the anti-war message at that level. Games like God of War and The Last of Us give violence another twist. They make it instrumental towards protecting children, imbuing our indulgence with parental love. Undertale did something more subversive, though, and perhaps became a cult sensation because of it. Indulging in violence in the game leads to a bad ending. There is a tangible sense of guilt for partaking in our inner demons. This hits home harder because it is hard to be non-violent, but it is still a rewarding gameplay path. We can use fictional consequences to recontextualize the aesthetics of violence, but only if players feel they are genuinely causing things. This is perhaps one place where Spec Ops fell short, as Williams suggests the illusion of causality is sufficient, but maybe it can't just be an illusion. So these games provide an alternative. They ask players to reframe success or to understand the implications of violence in Mehan. Problem solved, right? Sure, but this makes de-estheticizing violence only possible by presenting alternative values. We are still left with the uneasy reality of how violence is a powerful vehicle for game feel. The irony is that truly de-estheticizing violence may only come from a place of incompetence. The best attempts at video game anti-aesthetics have been mistakes. Take the terminal scene in Modern Warfare 2. A level so controversial, Infinity Ward actually gave players the option to skip it. In the level you will murder civilians to save the world, you are an undercover agent, but to keep the rules, you are ostensibly tasked with committing mass murder for the purposes of the mission. Even the tenuous justifications for violence we get in games didn't fly here. Many felt it was arbitrary, pointless, sensationalistic drivel that made me and I presume many others feel deeply uncomfortable. Yes, we finally de-estheticized violence, but at what cost? The integrity of the medium itself? Whether intentional or not is hard to glean, but when hatred came out, the developers couldn't hide behind being incompetent. They just made a game that actively incentivizes mass shooting. You are given points for murdering civilians as a supposedly disillusioned killer. Mechanically, the game is no different to most shooters, but fictionally, the objective is so crass, so vulgar, so devoid of any artistic merit that gamers themselves rejected this as exploitative drivel. It's the best criticism of violence in games, motivated by pure abject sensationalism. So how do we reconcile this with our understanding of violence? Can critiques of violence only come from games that are for all intents and purposes accidental? Well, to understand this, we need to understand what makes a game mean something. Ian Bogus coined the term procedural rhetoric, the idea that games communicate using mechanics, rules. Under this view, the system has intrinsic meaning, so hatred under this view endorses the killing of civilians. It is horrendous in all the ways we think. However, Miguel Saccard critiqued this position in his work, The Ethics of Computer Games, suggesting meaning not only comes from a game's system, players themselves are actively creating meaning, comparing the events of a game to their own values and constructing an emergent form of meaning. Essentially, just because games of sickening rules and fiction doesn't make it inherently bad, because players are not passively absorbing texts, they are participating in the creation of meaning itself. Walt Williams seemingly agrees with this too, when he states that we need to provide a space to let people judge themselves. Everyone's harshest critic is always their own subconscious. It's crime and punishment done only the way games can, by leveraging complicity and interactivity. Intentional de-estheticization requires deliberate work by artists to create scenarios that force players into doing perverse things, for a purpose they may not be aware of, or to provide a possibility space where choice is framed with sufficient context. In retrospect, the reasons Peckoffs may not have impacted me as much, is because I had already heard how subversive and critical a nuance the game was. The details weren't spoiled, but the revelation of complicity was, I didn't buy the game to indulge a power fantasy, I came for an interesting evolution of the art of video game storytelling. Ironically, this is perhaps what changed the experience for me. And so with this new knowledge of video game de-esthetics, we understand genuine subversion needs to be surprising. Take the game Manhunt. In this book, Sokart talks about how it is genuinely discomforting, because most players don't even have the meta context of it being a profound game. However, the game is just that, subversive. Unless you haven't played it in which case I've ruined it for you, so sorry. You play a killer tasked by another killer, to kill other killers, for the purposes of others' entertainment. You can commit executions to accumulate points for no real reason, and the executions are grisly to say the least. They make you want to take a shower. Why are you helping this antagonist with this horrific enterprise? Surely the right thing to do is just to kill with the least amount of fanfare. The game is genuinely disquieting in ways that many other games aren't, because it seems like snuff exploitation. A more recent game mired by an endless cascade of controversy is The Last of Us 2, which has similar ambitions to many of the games mentioned here, to de-esthetize violence. It attempts this by making killing enemies genuinely uncomfortable, reflecting the mechanics with a fictional world that is truly troubling, and reinforcing this across all levels of the game's theme. However, it also makes many of the same mistakes other games have made. It's gameplay is still engaging and fun to play, and its violence can waver between being uncomfortable and being fascinating in a sadistic way. However, what's more interesting is how the spoilers about the game's core plot, essential to its de-esthetization of violence, were leaked weeks before the game's release. Much like with me and Spec OX, the paratextual context of the game's story altered how players interfaced with it, illustrating how delivery, context, and genuine surprise are as much a part of critiquing violence as the game itself. And now of course, we come to my obligatory mention of the game Train by Brenda Romero. For those who don't know, you are tasked with getting people from one destination to another on trains, only to realize that the destination is a concentration camp. So here we might understand why the game is so celebrated. It is the masterful construction of a violence anti-aesthetic without using violence itself. It simply implies complicity, subverts our conventional understanding of games and leaves people profoundly affected. At least so I'm told. The funny thing about Train is that very few have actually played it, but the simple telling of its experience is sufficient to make us uneasy. And so I think Walt Williams is fundamentally right. Violence in games desensitizes us to violence in games, but the way to solve this is to get players to judge themselves for their own actions. Violence, sufficiently abstracted, is fine because it is hyper-real. But if we want to explore deeper themes, understanding the anti-aesthetics of violence is equally as important. If you survive to the end of Spec Ops, you can prompt Walker to put down his gun to voluntarily stop committing acts of violence. Perhaps this is a revelation we as players will one day have as well.