people always ask why games are so violent, so let’s give ’em an answer

52 min readMar 9, 2025

as always, the screencaps are ones i took and mostly meant to break up the article visually so you can keep your place. this is from the last guardian, which sony should put on the personal computer

The other day, I got tagged into a discussion about violence in games. If people want to know my thoughts on the matter, I should do my best to oblige them. What’s the deal with violent games? Can we make more compelling nonviolent games?

Alright, here’s the basic problem: a lot of people either believe that violence is bad and therefore should be minimized, or they are tired with what seems like the ‘easiest’ course of action in a game to perform, and would like games to be ‘about’ more things.

Either way, these people pop up all the time. They go “why are games so violent?” and then they disappear. Five minutes later, someone else does it. Repeat ad nauseum.

When you run into a problem like this — “are games art?” is another one — it’s because people want a very specific answer and they don’t even know how to articulate the problem. So they sit there asking a question, and what they actually want is for you to present them with a game that is just as good as, say, Baldur’s Gate 3 or Titanfall 2, but has zero violence within it.

Thing is, when people present nonviolent games — for instance, Forza Horizon 5 has zero violence within it and you can simply spend all your time driving around in circles having a blast — those people either refuse to play them, sighing loudly that it’s not enough. They rarely tell you what they want, and even more rarely do they put their money where their mouths are.

I remember this one critic (guys like him were a dime a dozen back in the day) going “there were almost no nonviolent games at E3” and people going “there was a farming game with a dubstep trailer, there were racing games, there were all sorts of nonviolent games.” He didn’t seem to care about those, only championing walking sims. Nonviolent games! Right in front of him! But they “didn’t count.”

Was it because his thesis was immediately disproven? Sure, going “you’re right, I guess there were a lot of nonviolent games on display” would’ve been a bit of egg on his face, but I think there’s something more at play here.

xenoblade chronicles 2: torna: the golden country

“are games art?” is a stupid question

Alright, let’s go with another, similar problem. Take the “are games art?” question. The people asking that question don’t actually want to know if games are art, and I already answered this like a billion years ago in an old essay with the answer “no, games are not art, they’re a medium, and some of the things in that medium will be art, in the same way that ‘books’ are not art, but there’s an awful lot of art in the medium of books. Phone books aren’t art, War and Peace is. Same thing with games.”

The question has been answered. It’s right there. No one has to ask it anymore. We did it.

Thing is, that doesn’t actually satisfy the people asking the question, because the question they are asking will never give them the answer they’re seeking; they’re asking the wrong question: what they want is to ask “are games art?” until a bunch of people take them seriously for buying and consuming entertainment products.

What the “are games art?” crowd want is respect. They want to have this latent background noise of “games are respected.” They want to have an equivalent to The Oscars for game awards, where there’s a certain level of dignity and respect and celebrity going on. They want to see game developers on the cover of People Magazine at the checkout stand. They want to go to college to do Game Studies, see games in museums, stuff like that.

And the crazy thing is, most of that stuff is already out there. You can see games in museums, you can get degrees in video games. I literally have one. And yet, to these people, games do not feel like they’re art, because to them, “art” possesses a certain kind of magic.

We’re not talking about the Walter Benjamin style of art here, where the physical presence of a statue or a large painting creates a specific, unique effect on the human brain that makes us feel a sense of ‘awe’ that art on the screen cannot recreate (the essay is called Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, and concerns the idea that mass production of art on the silver screen would lose the sense of magic that a big statue can create).

What these people want is the cultural cachet of art; they want games to possess a certain kind of… well, look, what they want is to get the kind of respect they think people who watch Martin Scorsese has. They want to be like “yes, I played Super Mario World 3,” and have people be like “wow, this guy has a whole lot of taste.”

What people? Their parents, mostly. I know that sounds glib, but the person asking “are games art?” is the person going “my parents hate that I like playing games and suggest I’m not a Real Adult because I like games.” They want what they believe other art has — some specific level of cultural prestige that gives them cultural prestige for consuming it.

But these fuckers never bothered to understand how and why art does what it does. They don’t understand the history or context of artistic prestige, what the magic is or how it works. Their lack of curiosity lets them think that art is some kind of special thing, so ‘are games art?’ is the question they’re asking because they want us to tell them “you are special for enjoying this thing that was built for you to enjoy. You are sophisticated. You are an intellectual elite.”

These people are still stuck at the idea that getting an Oscar is some kind of Objective Arbiter of Artistic Merit rather than an organization of a bunch of weird old people going “yeah uh, i didn’t watch all these movies so im just gonna give the best animated feature film to the one pixar film my grandkids saw this year.”

That is what they want, but it’s “are games art?” because they want to ask, but do not know how to formulate the question of “when will games be perceived as some form of high art, rather than pop art? When will they, and the people who buy them, get respect?”

So people will ask the question again and again and again in the hopes that some magical One True Game will come along and Make Everyone Respect Games because back in like 2009, some guy for ABC News asked if Metroid Prime was gaming’s Citizen Kane, as if Citizen Kane was The First Movie To Be Respected As Art, which wasn’t true to begin with. People have been demanding respect in the form of “are games art?” ever since, and that question it won’t be put to rest — because I’ve already answered it, I’m about to do so again, and let’s face it, I’m not the only one who’s answered this — until their mom stops telling them that having a job in games isn’t a real job.

These fuckers want “it’s art” to function like some kind of affix to something that gives it +20 Cultural Prestige and means that they’ll suddenly be Respected for buying and playing video games. Sorry, dudes, but the way art works, an art form takes forever to get respect, often waiting until another art form comes along. People used to think novels weren’t art, y’know?

Then they decided comics weren’t art because Frederic Wertham (the doctor who defended notorious child murderer Albert Fish in court) wrote a book saying that comic books were seducing the youth into a life of evil. People didn’t think movies were art either. Games are just the latest thing for old people to clutch pearls over.

The answer to “are games art?” is “art is anything produced for the primary purpose of aesthetic or emotional fulfillment, as opposed to a tool, which is created for the purpose of achieving an explicit material goal. Some games are art and other games are more like tools — like Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing, which exists to teach you how to type, as opposed to nourishing your soul. Both are equally important.”

That’s the answer. Right there. The question people ask every fuckin year, boom, there’s the solution. But these dumb fucks won’t be happy because the gut feeling that drives their question is “I want to feel like games are respected in culture more than they presently are.” They think that something being “art” makes it somehow truly important and respectable within culture. Nah, man. Doesn’t work like that.

So, when it comes to the question of “why are games about violence? Can’t they be about something else,” you need to understand that a lot of people are wrapped up in ideas about violence and nonviolence, the dignity of being nonviolent, and all that shit. They do not actually want to hear “well, there’s a lot of nonviolent games out there for you to enjoy,” because “you are asking the wrong question” won’t satisfy what they’re actually feeling.

I suspect that these people think something like this: “video games don’t get respect, and part of the reason is because they have names like Bloodfuck Hellstorm, so people look down on them culturally. Maybe if we had games that weren’t all that violent, games would be respected.”

i think this is a zelda game, like tears of the kingdom maybe?

You can present to them Mudrunner, a game about driving a truck and moving supplies in the snow, but that’s not what they’re looking for, even though it’s nonviolent.

These people will disrespect all the nonviolent games out there because it’s not the right kind of nonviolent. The question they’re actually asking is more like “why aren’t there more AAA cinematic RPG action adventure mash video games without violence?”

So even here, even now, as I present a bunch of nonviolent games to you, I suspect a lot of people will feel this doesn’t answer their question.

This means that the real answer: “hey, look at all these nonviolent games I’ve got; it’s a bit silly to question the prevalence of violent games when there are so many nonviolent games out there,” won’t satisfy the people asking the question because it’s not what these people actually want. These are not merely ignorant people who just don’t know about The Sims or Forza Horizon 5 or Stardew Valley or Beat Saber or whatever.

So when they say “where are the nonviolent games?” what they actually want is, for them, a big question mark, a game that looks… not like all the nonviolent games that actually exist. I will play Abzu and Cities: Skylines and Mini Metro and World of Goo and Tetris Effect and Microsoft Flight Simulator and Kentucky Route Zero and Bernband and Pokemon Snap these fuckers will still be saying “right, but where’s the nonviolent games?”

What they want is Dragon Age without Violence, but somehow just as engaging and interesting and fun. You ask “okay, if we strip out the violent parts, what engaging, interesting, fun gameplay do we put in there?” They generally struggle for an answer.

So here I am, thinking about how to answer this question of “why aren’t there more nonviolent games?” and I’m looking at all the stupid answers out there, like “game designers are lazy” (they are very creative), or “businessmen are mandating that” (businessmen don’t care about violence, they care about making safe bets on what sells, and they know violence has sold before).

I’ve read a lot of vague “it’s just a failure of imagination on the part of a bunch of people — wait, no, why are you looking at me? Why would I have an answer? Make something different! I don’t know what that looks like, just make something different!”

At the core, they’re feeling something like “as long as violence is so popular in games, they’ll never be respected” or “I don’t really care for combat that much, and I’d like to see more inventive design (but I don’t know what it looks like).”

Rarely is a person going “I have an engaging, fun way to handle nonviolent gameplay and I’d like to see more of it.” Instead it’s weird moralizing about the existence of violence at all.

So!

What I want to do is explore the problem that we game designers face when it comes to nonviolence and engaging game mechanics, why violence is something humans really seem to like, and hopefully provide you with a basic understanding of the challenges facing nonviolent game design.

Like “are games art” I can give you the answer to “why do people gravitate to violent games?” but I suspect what some of the people asking this question want is me providing them with the magic solution to making games nonviolent, and in doing so, we usher in a sea change of nonviolent games with violent ones falling by the wayside.

That’s not possible. It will never be possible. These same people will reject all the nonviolent games that are out there because to them, they’re not nonviolent in the right way, but if you ask them to articulate what that game looks like and if it’s actually enjoyable, most of those people wouldn’t be able to provide you an answer.

They want “Mass Effect but nonviolent,” because what appeals to them is walking around Citadel Station and talking to characters with all the production value that entails, but when you say “okay, so, let’s take Mass Effect and strip out the combat, what are we replacing it with?” most of them simply will not be able to provide you with a coherent argument for what a nonviolent Mass Effect looks like, and those who try will largely struggle to come up with equally engaging non-combat mechanics. If someone actually tries to build a game like that, they’ll find that it’s extremely boring unless they can be as pioneering as Hideo Kojima was with Death Stranding, a profound work of art which I wrote about here.

It’s like asking “why is there world hunger when we have ways to mass produce food?” If I answer the question, some people won’t feel satisfied because they really just want “oh! here! now world hunger is solved! No one is starving.”

It’s nice to want something good like an end to world hunger, but wanting a good thing doesn’t make you an insightful person. I can provide you insights on why we haven’t solved world hunger yet, but some fuckers will keep asking “why isn’t it solved?” even after hearing the answers because they just really want it to be solved. Understanding how to solve problems isn’t something that interests them personally.

Please do not mistake “these are the challenges facing you” as disagreement that your cause is noble or just. It’s a problem I take seriously and have spent a great deal of time working on, shipping multiple games with nonviolent mechanics and still not feeling satisfied, because this shit is extremely hard to figure out.

If you look at a puzzle but don’t know how any of the mechanics work, you’ll go “I have no idea what I’m looking at,” right? So if you go “how does the puzzle work?” then I am going to come along and answer you by explaining how the puzzle’s mechanics work; an explanation of the mechanics is not the solution to the puzzle. If you ask me how to explain the mechanics, I can do that. If you want a solution to the puzzle, all I can do is let you know how much of the puzzle we’ve figured out — but it isn’t one that’s been solved, especially if you’re a person who rejects all the existing nonviolent games out there.

i THINK this is pikmin 2 but it might be pikmin 1

Please don’t be the weirdo who hears “these are the challenges facing this partially-solved problem” and goes “you oppose me, then!” I’m going to go “oh, yeah, well, the base question is inherently flawed, but we can create more nonviolent games. There’s some problem with making those fun that we’re working on solving. Want to see where we’re at? Maybe you’ve got an idea to help with this?”

I’m going to help you get up to speed with the problems, because maybe you’ve got some super good ideas that will help, but I cannot solve this problem for you, because, trust me, a lot of people are trying to figure it out and none of us are there yet, as evidenced by the vast number of people who deem all the nonviolent games that do exist as somehow not being nonviolent in the correct way.

If you’re genuinely interested in the art of video games, how they work, why people like them, and the problems facing them, then this essay is absolutely for you.

All I can do is tell you “here are the problems still facing us.” Whether you choose to confront those problems is up to you. If all you’re going to do is complain about a lack of nonviolent games while they’re all around you, well, I can’t help with that.

What I’m going to do here is try to help people who think no one’s ever thought about this problem before to understand that first, yes, a lot of us think about this problem and very much would like to solve it, because, if successfully solved, it opens us up to a whole lot of new kinds of gameplay experiences.

I think we’d all agree that playing new kinds of games is an extremely good thing! It’s fun to try something new, you know? How amazing was it to play the first racing game where you got to sit in a car in 3D, for instance? What was it like playing a first person game for the first time? Imagine discovering nonviolent mechanics as transformative as those first experiences; that’d be cool, right?

So this is very much a problem worth solving. If you can help us out, well, here, I’ll walk you through the problem as it currently stands, getting you up to speed. Maybe we can solve this problem together.

i think this is breath of the kingdom or something

Before we continue, hey, I could use some help with medical bills and groceries. If you want to support the work I do, like this article about the biggest pitfall young writers face and how to get around it, then hey, hit up my tip jar.

I figure this kind of writing helps inexperienced writers the most — which means people who might not have the finances to afford my work if I kept it behind a paywall. A paywall would help me, obviously — I could guarantee a certain minimum that would ensure my ability to continue writing these articles — but the people who need my help the most cannot afford it. So I gotta rattle the tip jar. I know it’s not pleasant, but like… think of me like a busker. I’d rather play a song on the street and get a few coins in a hat than just run a gofundme or something.

I, personally, can only do this with your support; if I wasn’t doing this, I’d have to get a second job, and as disabled as I am, that’s really not great. I have to spend between $160 and up to an entire Nintendo Switch’s worth of my income on medical care every two weeks. That’s an extremely difficult burden for me.

So it’s either do this or get a second job, and a second job would not be ideal given my current disability. So when you send me a tip, you’re not just helping a disabled writer like me, you’re helping tons of students, disabled people, and others without access. Thank you.

paypal.me/stompsite

ko-fi.com/stompsite

@forgetamnesia on venmo

$docseuss on cashapp

is nonviolence morally superior?

Okay, let me back up. A big part of the neoliberal project has been to go around telling everyone that if you sit back and do nothing, things will take care of themselves. It hijacks a lot of religious views about being a good person by not being violent in order to do so.

So they tell you that, hey, Gandhi was nonviolent, MLK Jr was nonviolent, and you want to be like them, right? Just sit back, do some marching, hope things work out.

This is largely done as a means of defanging movements; they want you to sit there and do nothing but talk while they have dudes marching on Washington with guns. Heck, just before I wrote this section, I read an article where people were saying “D.C. insiders aren’t doing anything because they’re afraid of violence.” The nonviolent approach is, presently, allowing a lot of terrible people to make living in America a lot worse.

The guy who punched Richard Spencer embarrassed him so badly that his entire base, which is all about macho manliness, basically decided the guy wasn’t much of a man, severely curtailing his power. The Black Panthers were very notably armed; people fought for their civil rights, and they had to.

Right now, you are watching the Democrats sit around singing “we shall overcome” rather than actually fucking do anything because a whole lot of people have done everything in their power to make it sound like inaction is morally superior and disruptive action is not.

DOGE gets to walk in and fuck you up because you prefer not fighting back to getting fucking violent. Who won World War II; was it the people who sat around twiddling their thumbs, or was it the people who fought?

Think about how people say “you shouldn’t block roads during your protest.” Think about how the democrats decided not to make it harder for cops to be violent, but to basically sit around, tut-tutting and saying “murdering George Floyd was wrong. Anyways, let’s give more money to the cops.”

So while they tell you “hey, please, don’t protest, don’t take any action that might inconvenience us,” they will straight up give money to the people who actually do violence.

Violence isn’t always the answer, and it should always be a last resort, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be part of your ethical toolkit. You go around waving little signs like “this is bad” against a guy who wants to shoot you with a gun, and you’ll never guess who wins that fight. Hint: it’ll never be you.

Violence is a tragic necessity at times. Imagine telling Ukraine not to fight Russia. Just let the invasion happen. Just get exploited. Don’t fight — don’t fight back! The only people who benefit from that exchange are the people who want to use violence themselves, but don’t want violence used against them. It’s not that violence is wrong in their framework; they’re just hoping to trick you into thinking it is.

“Violence is wrong” is so often preached by the people who want to use violence against you, but want you to behave. “Protest but not in a way that might actually get me to change” or “strike if you must, but I should be allowed to bring in scabs to replace you so that a strike doesn’t materially impact me.” Those same fuckers will bring the cops in to kill you in order to keep themselves happy. Sometimes, you gotta kick up a fuss to make the world a better place. There is no inherent morality in nonviolence — hell, even certain branches of Christianity will preach nonviolence, but Jesus Christ himself, in their own Bible, literally went into a synagogue and started tearing shit up, violently, with a whip!

In fact, look for any religion that has tenets about nonviolence and then look for members of that religion causing violence; you will always, always, always find violence and a justification for it.

astro bot is ‘violent’ because sometimes you have to whack little guys

“Doc, are you suggesting that violence is an inherent good?”

No, I think it’s more complicated than that; instead, I am arguing that the people who argue against violence are often people who benefit from violence, and the people they demand nonviolence from are people they want to be subservient from them. It is “I have the right to do violence to compel you to do what I want, but you do not have the right to object to me.”

Anything, even mild inconvenience, speaking up, speaking out, taking action, doing anything, will be construed as violence by the people who don’t want you to do shit. Is society actually a worse place because people are throwing eggs at Teslas? I don’t think so — Elon Musk benefits from his brand’s goodwill, and he gets hundreds of millions of dollars to spend on an election. If people start damaging his brand through violence — since they don’t have hundreds of millions to spend buying a presidency — then he loses his ability to harm people. Ultimately, the violence results in less harm, just like punching Richard Spencer’s lights out results in less harm.

So, sure, I think it could be argued that violence may sometimes be required in order to achieve peacable ends. It’s an unfortunate side effect of living in a world where people are going to use violence.

The generic “violence bad, mmk?” quislings would rather tut-tut you for using violence than stop the nazis from trying to murder people. Maybe “letting nazis win” is not a moral high ground, so maybe be a bit more critical of them when thinking “violence is bad.”

BUT.

Rather than writing a big ol’ essay on violence, how it works, the situations that cause it, looking into armed resistance, talking about how anti-slavery efforts only worked because people were willing to violently oppose slavery, and so on and so forth, I’d like to talk about the other side of thing: humans need violence.

Crazy, I know, but hear me out. Humans are animals, and I don’t mean that in some insulting holier-than-humanity way, I mean humans are literally biological organisms built to work a certain way.

You ever been to a zoo?

Next time you go, I want you to look at how the exhibits are designed; they’re not simply empty concrete rooms that animals sit in, they all have enrichment activities, which are things designed to help keep their brains from going haywire.

Ever heard of cat depression? If you don’t mentally stimulate your cat well enough, your cat will get seriously fucked up; denying it the ability to hunt and kill prey, which is in its nature as an obligate carnivore (if you try to feed your cat ‘vegan’ cat food, you are literally an animal abuser; cats need meat to live healthily). A cat that is allowed to hunt can be immensely destructive to the local ecosystem, killing innocent creatures like birds.

Why do cats like cat trees? Because they’re natural predators and they like to hide in areas that give them good vantage points for prey. We humans understand that taking responsible care of cats means ensuring their emotional needs are met. They need to be able to engage in hunting, or hunting-like behaviors, to get it out of their system. Thanks to the power of lasers and cat trees and other cat toys, we’re able to keep our cats with good mental health.

Humans are the same way; we need a level of mental enrichment in order to function, and without it, we can end up doing things that are destructive. It’s like how a billionaire, who has no natural predators, often starts destroying other people’s lives just to feel something. That’s bad.

So, when it comes to humans, we find that humans really like action, and humans who sit around long enough will eventually resort to it at some point. People get restless without excitement. Some people ride roller coasters, others watch sports, I launch big rockets, and, yes, a whole heck of a lot of people play violent video games.

A long time ago, I read some studies that indicated a direct causation between an increase in violent media and a decrease in actual real world violence. If humans get their equivalent to cat lasers, humans don’t feel the need to commit violence elsewhere. As humans find healthy outlets for their basic animal instincts, violence declines. When people are bored and have nothing to do, violence increases.

Thus, making a violent video game provides people with an outlet, helping minimize the potential harm of a bored person whose hunter/killer instinct is looking for something to do.

People who object to violent content in games are often doing so because they’ve got a half-thought-through morality that basically goes “violence is bad, so just don’t do it.” They think of games as causing violence (if you want a really fun time, look up how nearly every “video games cause violence” study is partially authored by Craig Anderson from Iowa State University. His whole thing was basically “well, we showed some children video tapes and then saw children mirroring the behavior, so we think games do that and therefore games cause people to be violent.”) as opposed to being outlets for violence.

It’s a very backwards kind of thinking; people know how to be violent — children have been hitting children since long before video games, and as children have played games, they’ve become less outwardly aggressive, because the game gives them that healthy outlet.

We know that teaching abstinence doesn’t reduce teen pregnancy (as I recall, it actually increases it), but healthy sex ed does. Why? Because most people need that outlet, and they’re gonna get it. Just telling them “it’s bad” won’t stop it. Giving them ways to engage in it healthily results in a far safer, healthier society based on every bit of science we have on the subject.

Violence is the same way; if someone really likes setting fires, maybe we can introduce them to rocketry and give them a healthy way to focus their aggression. A kid who gets into fights all the time might be better served by being taught boxing. A violent game might be a good way to get out pent up frustration instead of a person feeling like they just really gotta fight somebody.

So! We find ourselves presented with people saying that there is a problem with violent games, who often ignore the breadth of nonviolent games that already exist without being able to articulate why. When we try to understand them better, they fail to provide us with anything particularly substantial, other than a handwavey “violence is bad or immature,” which, as I’ve just argued, may not actually be the case.

It seems like reasons they object to violence might not be out of a genuine desire to expand the possibility space within games and have a lot of fun experiences, but because they have a desire for cultural legitimacy and a belief that violence in entertainment is somehow depriving them of that cultural legitimacy.

If that’s the case, then yeah, no matter how many Disco Elysiums (disclaimer: I played an early build and offered feedback, so I’m in the credits under special thanks) and Daytona USAs and Mario & Sonic At The Olympic Games and Cooking Mamas you make, they will never be happy, because their actual priority is being respected by people, and they think the mere existence of violence is making them look bad.

— never mind that Raging Bull and Saving Private Ryan are considered incredible works of art because of their examinations of violence or anything —

What people like this want is not to be embarrassed by people for consuming an entertainment product; they want the act of consumption to be inherently respectable, and they’d rather the entire medium change for their personal self-aggrandizement.

How do we deal with them? I say we don’t. I mean, look, they’re ignorant. They want something that does not actually exist. They have a vague sense that actors are Respected for Making Serious Art, and they want that too. They haven’t figured out there’s a difference between high art (which rich people pay for) and pop art (which the rest of us pay for) and that high art is given its primacy because rich people want to seem important and use the cachet from high art to launder money and avoid taxes. Those clueless fuckers don’t really know why a Jackson Pollock is awesome, but they need it to have an aura of mystique around it so they can commit tax fraud.

There’s nothing you or I can do to make someone feel like games are more respectable. Geoff Keighley could do it by demanding a certain dress code at The Game Awards and not running ads during it, but that’s about it. Demanding respect by demanding nonviolence is a sucker’s game.

Me, I’m a person who likes violence in games. As a person impacted by violence in my own life, I explore violence in my art as a means of dealing with the life I have lived. I wrote Farmer’s death in Adios because in my own life, I was sitting there going “if I make the choice to do the right thing, I might die,” so I made art where I confronted that fear. If you don’t have such a fear in your own life, that’s awesome. I must explore violence because life is violent and I’ve been on the receiving end enough that I need to process it.

Since art is predominantly a thing we make to deal with our feelings — remember, art is anything produced for the primary purpose of aesthetic or emotional fulfillment — that means we’re going to have to deal with all facets of life including violence. Not all art is for us; I personally don’t need most literary fiction about a middle-aged liberal professor going through a mid-life crisis grappling with his sexuality, for instance, but some people do. So if you don’t need art that explores violence, that’s awesome! Go play Flower or Rock Band 4 or Unpacking or Hardspace: Shipbreaker (I did a bunch of writing for that game) something that is tailored to your needs.

I’m not going to stop eating peanut butter, which I need, because someone a hundred miles away is allergic to it. We’re different people; everyone’s needs should be met. Solidarity is about giving a shit about people with needs different than our own, which means that I support your artistic needs no matter how you need them, and you do the same for me.

Someone could write a very good article on the aesthetics of violence within my work, and I think the tongue-in-cheekily-named Waifu Death Squad will give you even more to chew on, but “violence bad” means someone might lump in, say, the gore and blood of Mortal Kombat with Adios’ “violence hangs over my head despite my attempts at a peaceful resolution. I must be brave in the face of this violence” and throw it all out as artistically meritless, and that feels like a tremendous waste.

Mortal Kombat lets people get it out of their system. Adios deals with the real emotional weight of it. Both, I think, are absolutely valid.

Buuuuuut…

People who hate violence because they think it’s puerile and don’t want to look bad are not the only people who object to violent games.

A large number of people who object to violent video games are people who love games and want to do more stuff within them! These people are saying “it sucks that violence is so common in games. I wish we could invent new kinds of games.” Some of those people might be reading this piece right now. You might count yourself among them.

While I think that yes, violence is a thing worth having in your games, you can look back on my credits and note just how much nonviolent stuff I worked on. For Hardspace, for instance, I wrote at length about stuff like “how do you take care of a cat in space?” and in Adios, I have tasks like shoveling manure for fertilizer and milking goats. I love nonviolent mechanics! I love mundane stuff! I’m always thinking about this.

And, uh, it’s hard.

Not impossible to solve, mind you, but the problem is so challenging that it hasn’t been solved enough to give you a $60 Mass Effect game without violence that sells 2 million copies.

games are about flow

So, back to walking sims. About two weeks after the release of Dear Esther, someone uses the tongue-in-cheek term “walking sim” to start describing them, and the genre name was born. Some people get mad at that because of some not-articulated desire to be taken seriously, and they have the belief that the bad name is why these games didn’t do all that well.

Here’s what actually happened: walking sims promised a bunch of experiences like nothing you’d ever seen before. Then people released a bunch, and players realized pretty quickly there wasn’t much to it, because walking sims were a genre advertised on subject but with very little matter to show for it.

People were excited… until they played the games.

I wrote about the problem with walking sims, which you can read here. The basic idea is this: most walking sims are solipsistic (you are generally the only other person in the world) experiences where you navigate a space, often listening to a narrator, and then the experience ends.

You may experience some light puzzle solving, but in general, the reason walking sims were popular was because people A) didn’t know what they were at first, and B) were very easy to make because they weren’t dealing with AI or many animations or anything. As people started to realize walking sims weren’t all that satisfying, they elected to stop playing.

It’s like the difference between picking up a rope that’s sitting there and fiddling with it, as opposed to playing a game of tug of war — something in your brain goes “wow, this is interesting” when you are tugging that rope and making tangible progress of pulling a resistant force towards its goal. There is a clear, satisfying outcome, a dopamine release when you pull just enough to cross the finish line.

With a walking sim, the experience is more like… you walk… you listen… and then it’s over. This is fundamentally dissatisfying to a lot of people. If you want to tell a story to a player without their participation in it, there may be other mediums better suited to that form of story.

What I tried to do with the immersive-sim adjacent games I’ve created, like Adios, is give the player a lot of verbs — I’m particularly interested in ways to keep players mentally engaged while the narrative is occurring. Without a significant R&D budget, there’s only so much I can do, but I think it’s pretty funny to be able to jokingly squirt a man with a goat’s teat when talking about the dangers of him working for the mob.

Plenty of games have fishing minigames, but Adios’ fishing minigame is deliberately placed in the game to give you something to be doing while your mind is churning over the implications of dying for the day.

Still, I think more people would agree that it’s a lot more mentally engaging to, say, fight a gigantic robot or something because of the amount of mental space it occupies.

Generally speaking, a satisfying game is one that occupies just enough of your brain that you’re focused on the task, getting into a flow state, and staying there until you feel done.

Unfortunately, this can be variable. Sometimes, I can boot up a game like Like A Dragon: Ishin!, which I’m playing right now, and the whole experience just purrs. I sit there, utterly engrossed, having the time of my life, moving from one task to the next, having a great time. Other times, maybe I’m exhausted and my brain feels a bit fried, so the game is demanding just a bit too much of me.

A lot of people think “I am a consciousness piloting a meat suit,” but that’s far from accurate; your mind is your body as much as anything else. When you are stressed emotionally, your body is stressed physically… and vice versa. A physically stressed body will not be able to enjoy things the mind wants to enjoy because the mind is part of the body.

I’ve talked to some doctors who point out that a lot of your neurotransmitters get produced in the gut, meaning that if your intestines aren’t healthy, you won’t be happy. Your brain is not separate from your body; it is an organ in your body, and all parts of the body impact all the other parts of the body.

That means that playing a game isn’t purely about mindset. I’m a diabetic; my blood sugar can impact my mindset just as much as my desire does. It’s all part of a complex system — each body part is dependent on all the other body parts for function, up to and including things like motivation and mood, the psychological aspects that drive play.

One of the biggest barriers to a flow state is when I get into a game I really like, but after finishing it, I want to play a new game, but that game has a different kind of flow state, and I need time to acclimate. You ever been there? Ever got into a funk after finishing a game because you need to switch to a different style of play? Think of it like an “oh, wow, I finished Cyberpunk 2077, and now I want to play XCOM 2, but for some reason, it isn’t clicking yet, even though I love XCOM 2” sort of problem. You’re shifting gears and it’s not always smooth going.

Because of the variability of the human body, there’s no single objectively good flow state; it’s a problem that depends as much on what’s going on in the player physically and emotionally (when you’re really tired, it can be hard to play a physically intense game, y’know?) as it is the game’s design.

As a game designer, obviously, I can’t really affect your choice of game or your physical/mental state before booting up the game; all I can do is try to make my game as pleasing as possible to play (because yes, even games that elicit negative emotions, like horror games, can be described as ‘pleasing’ to play in some way).

There are some factors we can influence, however, like pacing—if the events in the game are spread apart in a way that’s dissatisfying (for instance, a lot of text screens interrupting the gameplay to tell the player stuff; that often breaks you out of a mental flow state), the player will struggle to enter that state because we’re interrupting them.

A tightly-paced loop, like XCOM: Enemy Within’s missions being a satisfying length, then spending time shifting gears mentally at the base, then going back into another mission results in the player having that delightful “just one more” feeling. When I’m on a mission, I want to finish it, and when I’m back at base and prepping for a mission, I want to get ready to get back out there, repeat.

If you spend 45 minutes with annoying menus fiddling with your gear, that flow state gets diminished.

As an aside, this is actually a major problem with game designers on the whole; on paper, they want to create a breadth of activities and get players to use as many mechanics as possible. Some do this by enforcing a kitchen sink approach, flattening the overall game experience because it’s been designed to force the player to use every mechanic in every fight.

Others do this by having hard counters for everything, breaking up the pace of the game by forcing you to change gear before going into a fight. Far Cry: New Dawn and Far Cry 6 both struggle with this — players generally don’t want to stop the fun part of the game (running around, exploring, and planning ways to take out a facility, then doing so) to swap their gear and go attack another base.

“You have to swap your gear before this fight” generally is not something people find fun — a minority of players love in-depth builds on the whole, and interrupting the flow to manually go “okay, I’m going to need a different gun to get into this base, and I’ll need to equip different bullets, and I’ll have to change my armor…” is just deeply unfun, especially if you love the aesthetic of the armor you’ve got and don’t want to have to equip armor you think looks ugly just to have fun playing a game.

An ideal flow state is going to be one where the tasks never take too long, are just challenging enough to engage your mind satisfactorily, and just as the task is feeling too long, you get to take a break, pivot to something else, let your brain reset, and continue.

What is game design? The art of getting players to take interesting action.

What is well-paced game design? A design in which the player engages in interesting actions and, just as their interest wanes, they are given new interesting tasks.

What is a game loop? It’s when you have task A, task B, and task C, and you cycle through them for the overall experience. In XCOM’s case, it’s “manage the base” and “do the mission.” In a game like Dragon’s Dogma, it’s “pick up a mission, go to the mission target, perform the mission task, complete the mission.” Lots of possible loops.

So, okay, now we understand the basics of how to structure a video game: come up with a series of interesting tasks, and let the player do them just long enough to stay interested, then change things up so the player gets enough contrast so that when they return to the first task, it’s still engaging, and they aren’t tired of it.

What does all this mean?

Basically, in order to make a game engaging, then at a fundamentally basic level, you need to make an experience that the average player can boot up and feel pretty good about playing. Like cat toys, the goal is to give the player enough mental stimulation — but not too much — to get them into a state where the overall experience goes down pretty smoothed.

This is the basic philosophy underlying all game design: you are creating an enrichment activity for the human brain, so you need to work with our understanding of human drive, and a whole lot of human drive comes down to basic animal instincts.

As a game designer, you are making a space full of enrichment for the human brain.

On the structural level, your goal is to create a flow state.

But the funny thing about humans?

you’ve got to care

Here’s the secret to making a game experience go from “good flow” to actually good: you want the player to care.

A decade or so ago, someone wrote a book suggesting we could gamify all human behaviors through operant conditioning, because that resulted in a pleasurable amount of dopamine release and we saw, in the short term, that it motivated people to do things. The book’s author and discussions around the book basically argued that tapping into basic human psychology and biomechanics to produce a dopamine hit was like some kind of noble, higher calling that could save the human race.

Actually, it might have helped damn it.

You see, there’s actually a body of work out there (and it’s been out there a long time) that shows if you use operant conditioning on a mammal (and humans are mammals) long enough, they get fucking nasty. Dogs that were trained with operant conditioning would start attacking their handlers. People became sullen, irritable, and withdrawn.

Turns out gamifying everything actually fucks people up really badly after any meaningful period of time, which means that while it might be okay to use gamification to get a player from the beginning to the end of a level, using it to get a player to log into a game every single fucking day might actually fuck up the human brain. Like. A lot.

(y’know, this probably explains why people addicted to League are the way they are)

There is a way to counteract that.

Most of my essays are written around the idea of drive — after all, if game design is the art of getting people to take interesting action, then understanding how and why humans take actions in the first place is essential to making good games. If we can’t just engineer a predictable dopamine release because it turns people into Dr. Jekyll after a few months, then we need to think about other drivers.

As we’ve explored before, people say “most gamers don’t finish games,” but when people like the games, they tend to. My suspicion is that if we looked at games that didn’t get finished, we’d find that a lot of them waste time trying to go “get 5 XP for killing 10 wolves” rather than a compelling, engaging story that makes people want to know what happens next.

If you can get the player into a good flow state and keep them interested in what happens next, they’ll get to the end far more than if you give them a bunch of busywork tasks that are all gamified to get them to do stuff.

What’s more, a player who is emotionally fulfilled by a game’s story is way less likely to become a snarling jackass because their brain’s been starved of healthy neurotransmitter release thanks to the gamification wringing it all out.

If you offset the gamification with a varied, healthy emotional drive — think of this like a balanced diet that zookeepers give their animals to keep them healthy — you’ll have players who aren’t toxic fuckin weirdoes. Pure gamification without emotional nourishment will fuck a player up; emotional nourishment will keep them healthy.

It doesn’t have to be story, but story is an excellent, possibly even the best way, to keep people emotionally regulated when playing a game. It contextualizes why they are taking action and why they should care. If you can make the player care about things (the driver) and feel good doing it (the flow state), you’ll make a game people love, violent or not.

(there’s a whole thing we could get into here where we talk about how a lot of ‘data-driven’ studios like Bungie have really weird ideas of how to interpret data, so they’ll say things like “we see that players who play the game a lot are more likely to spend money on microtransactions, so we designed the game to hold you hostage so you’ll spend more money” when anyone who actually understands human beings and data will go “clearly, the players who like your game the most will both spend lots of money on it and play it a lot. how can you get them excited to spend more time and money on your game?” But no, Bungie tried to make Destiny into chores, burned out a lot of players, and had to lay off a ton of staff because they keep losing players and having to find new ones, and the amount of people willing to stick with Destiny for long is diminishing thanks to this stupid fucking bullshit. look, i got several thousand hours in that series; I miss it very much, but turning it into labor really did harm my ability to enjoy it — my very large-at-one-point clan literally left the game entirely! we just weren’t happy with it anymore)

So! Okay! Your game needs to get players into a good flow state, but it also needs an emotional driver to keep players emotionally balanced. This is the core of any great game… but… what next?

it’s time to talk mechanics

There are two very useful terms to learn when it comes to game design: “mechanics” and “verbs.” Think of a verb like “the thing you do.” Photography, fishing, driving, walking, and so on. Mechanics — though the topic is still in debate — are basically the rules for how you engage with those things.

The best definition I’ve ever heard of a game is that a game is “structured play.” Unstructured play might be having a bunch of action figures and slamming them into a story and making up a story for what’s going on. Structured play is like “Mario has to get to the end of the course,” or “The Spartan needs to take out these three objectives to allow the story to continue.” It can get all the way down to stuff like “you have these specific ways to interact with your environment.”

So think of it like this: you’ve got a game because you have some form of structure that determines how the player plays.

The fantasy of the game are its verbs — I fish, I walk, I talk, I pet the dog.

The mechanics are the specific implementation of how you do those things — the fishing mechanics are something like “click to cast the pole, watch the fishing bobber go underwater, click again to hook the fish, then hold down the mouse button to reel in, letting go when the ‘line’ user interface turns red, indicating the line is stressed. If you don’t let go in time, the line snaps and the fish gets away.”

Games are technology. All art is technology — painting is a technology, for instance — but games are specifically computer technology, and with things like Moore’s Law (the number of transistors on a chip roughly doubles every two years) and early computing’s massive leaps and bounds, a lot of people have this kind of… baked-in assumption that games must improve on the technology front every single year.

Now, obviously, the quality of technology doesn’t linearly progress, and it doesn’t make the art better art simply by being better technology. The Lord of the Rings: Gollum is not inherently better than A Link to the Past simply because it came out on newer hardware and drives more pixels, right?

That’s because art’s quality is determined by the impact it achieves on the audience, not the quality of the tools. Someone can have better tools and still make a shit game — raytracing won’t make your platformer more fun, it will just make the game look shinier.

I can play Halo: Combat Evolved over and over and over again. I wouldn’t touch Halo 4 again unless someone DM’d me (paypal.me/stompsite) $1000 to livestream the whole damn thing.

However, there is a first time for everything.

At some point, no one had ever made a game about driving a car. Eventually, someone did. As our ability to compute things expanded, we were able to make the cars look more realistic, but no one was ever able to make a leap as big as “the verb of driving a car doesn’t exist” to “the verb of driving a car now exists.”

While gamers and press often obsess over the idea of having these big mechanical leaps and bounds — heck, one of the worst pieces I’ve ever read was someone complaining that Resident Evil 8 was ‘outdated,’ without any meaningful explanation of what that meant, just “it has some mechanics that existed in previous games” while ignoring the fact that there had never been a Resident Evil game like it — as if “a new mechanic” is what makes a game inherently good or bad, we’re running into a problem:

It’s getting harder to find new verbs to do — new verbs that are fun — because we’ve… kinda… gotten… to a whole lot of them.

Kayaking? Yup:

Ping Pong?

Rock Climbing?

Drone Flying:

Structural building analysis:

Arguing in court:

Typing:

Y’see? A lot of verbs have already been explored.

So, the first step to making a nonviolent game would be thinking up verbs that aren’t violent, and then figuring out the mechanics to make those work.

In Adios, you see we tried a cooking game, but it didn’t quite work because it was physics based (my initial design for it was very different, but other team members asked to try something else, so we went with that) and game physics are, well… y’know, not exactly a solved problem.

In Tears of the Kingdom and Breath of the Wild, cooking is as simple as selecting a couple ingredients and clicking a button; the game then plays an animation of Link, the player character, throwing the food into a pot. Wait a second or two, you’ll hear a little sound and a jingle, and boom, the food is done!

In Like A Dragon: Ishin, the cooking mechanic is a series of minigames — tap in rhythm, hold a button while a bar fills up, tap a button when you see sparks on screen — and that doesn’t really replicate the experience of cooking either.

…and you know what else?

None of these mechanics are as fun or as satisfying as shooting a lizard man in the head with a sniper rifle and watching his brains explode everywhere, while Marcus Fenix says “…nice” like in Gears of War.

Why is that?

Well, to figure that out, we need to understand what makes for an engaging mechanic.

(Sure, some people will say “well, I don’t personally find that fun,” but we can at least discuss the general neuroscience of what makes something fun overall, in the same way we can explain why some humans really like eating salmon. Sure, I don’t love salmon, but that’s because of a childhood trauma and doesn’t invalidate the science of why salmon are considered delicious by most people.)

Here’s a good question: why do trap mechanics tend to suck? Easy, because a trap is something you place and expect not to see go off. That means there’s no feedback. If there’s no feedback because you are far away from the trap when it procs, a trap doesn’t feel satisfying, even if it works.

Ever navigated your Switch menu, with all the little cheery chirps and cute snappy noises as you navigate? Ever thought, say, your Xbox was a bit of a slog to navigate because it was sluggish and unresponsive? That’s because Nintendo is a toy company, and they pay special attention to the sense-pleasure of engaging with their console. It’s not just the hardware you’re interacting with, it’s the software, and they make sure that engaging with it is pleasurable in and of itself.

A big part of that is feedback, which is the way the system responds to user input. I press a button and the feedback is immmediate. It plays that little happy beep-beep sound when I select something, for instance.

So, hey, when you get to walk around a 3D space, picking various targets at a whim, and those targets explode in a way that both sounds and looks visually impactful, it will feel satisfying to your primordial lizard brain, in the same way that taking a sledgehammer to a watermelon or throwing a water balloon is satisfying.

You did an action, and that action had an immediate, visible effect.

Feedback can be presented in all sorts of ways, like screen shake (that’s when the screen shakes), particle effects (like blood exploding out of the enemy), UI elements like hitmarkers (when you shoot an enemy, the little shapes that appear around the reticle to indicate your bullet hit), sound effects (“ow! you shot me!”), hit stop (when the character freezes and maybe flashes white a bit to indicate they got hit), and a billion other things.

You should definitely check out Jan Willem Nijman’s “The art of screenshake” when you can, because it goes into how this stuff works in great detail.

But the core of any successful mechanic is going to be how good it feels to engage with. It’s easy to make “i click, a bullet comes out of my gun, the enemy spurts blood and dies” satisfying, because feedback is baked into the verb of “shoot man.” You are casting a spell with a single button press on a physical object. That’s easy.

With cooking or ballet or music performance, the satisfaction is not so immediate; cooking food is about the sense-pleasure of it, the way your kitchen starts to smell as the sent of nutmeg wafts into the air, for instance. When you feel amazing after doing a great guitar solo, it’s because you hit all the notes in time and felt like you were channeling something magical.

An average controller, in contrast, has about sixteen basic inputs — eight face buttons, four triggers, start, select, and two joysticks — and you, as a designer, have to design a mechanic that will be both immensely pleasurable with a minimum of button presses

It’s… just not the same to pet a dog in a video game by clicking once and watching a slow animation play out as it is to press X one time and slice instantly through a watermelon, with all sorts of seeds and juices exploding everywhere, you know?

If you make a game about dogwalking, it’s going to be a lot harder to take the verbs and make them fun. How can you get good, solid, immediately pleasurable feedback out of a lot of mechanics? Some people will have nice sounds that play and numbers that pop up — like, say, “GREAT!” when you hit a button press especially well in Ishin’s cooking minigame.

But… the cooking minigame is not so compelling that people would play twenty or thirty hours of it; I guarantee you people spend more time getting in swordfights, where they’re thinking dynamically — when to block, when to dodge, how to break an enemy’s guard,

I think this comes down to making decisions. Thomas Grip, one of the people who made the Amnesia games, wrote a really cool essay on the importance of planning and how that impacts the player’s ability to have fun. Planning, attempting to execute that plan, and reacting to changes in the environment that put wrinkles in that plan are all inherently satisfying.

This is, funnily enough, also what makes dramatics so compelling in storytelling. A story where a character sits still and just reacts to stimulus in the environment is extremely boring, because the character is about as interesting as an amoeba. A story where a character wants something, tries to achieve it, but something gets in the way, and the player must deal with that? That’s the basis of literally all drama.

Some people argue that some forms of storytelling do not have conflict, but they are fucking idiots.

There are weirdly orientalist people who try to blend a very Americanized understanding of Asia — either the “Ancient Chinese Wisdom” stereotype of someone calmly repeating Confucian proverbs or a very American idea of “Buddhism is inherently wise and nonviolent” who have this idea of Asia being a very calm and nonviolent place. They get weirdly orientalist about it, arguing that four-act structure is somehow inherently nonviolent.

Every story has some kind of structure to it — usually, a story is broken down into 3, 4, or 5 acts. Kishotenketsu is a form of four-act structure, introduction, development, twist, and conclusion. Sure, you can relay a series of events and break them into four chunks, but that’s not an actual story.

Look, people who argue kishotenketsu (4-act structure, as opposed to 3-act’s “beginning, middle, end” or 5-acts “exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution”), is somehow conflict-free storytelling are fucking idiots who don’t understand basic storytelling. It’s like arguing that three act structure is conflict free because it doesn’t contain any conflict in the words “beginning,” “middle,” or “end.”

It’s particularly funny considering that act 2 of a kishotenketsu story in Chinese is referred to as “hardship” while Act 3 in Japanese is often the “twist.” There’s nothing in kishotenketsu that’s conflict free. The movie Cloud is structured this way — we meet our protagonist, Ryosuke, who is an online reseller. Ryosuke quits his job to pursue online reselling full time. People decide to hunt and kill him. He is saved by a friend.

Boom. Conflict. It’s quite literally stupid to think that a four act structure is inherently conflict-free, and often, when people try to invent stories that are conflict-free using kishotenketsu as a structural formula, those stories tend to… well… suck, because they’re often just relating a series of events. What makes the story compelling is still the dramatic structure: who’s in a scene, what do they want, and what do they need to do to get it? “What do they need to do” is the conflict. A scene where a person walks into a room, picks up a glass, drinks it, and leaves isn’t all that interesting. If the person walks into a room, but trips and falls, breaking their hip, and now they have to get up… well, that’s interesting. And that’s a conflict with the circumstances.

Tug of War is boring if no one’s tugging at the other end; some amount of friction is required to make a story dramatic. The drama is what keeps the story interesting, whether that’s a simple conflict like “a character has a question and needs an answer” or a direct conflict like “two characters duel to the death.”

In games, we can think of good pacing (yes, see how we were always coming back to this?) as providing the player with a reason to do something (I occupy State X, and I must press buttons to enter the more desirable State Y), whether that’s “get from position A to B,” like in a Mario game (Mario levels are designed with kishotenketsu storytelling in mind, and all of them are conflicts between Mario and his environment), or “shoot all the enemies before they explode the hospital,” or “get a higher score than the other guy” or whatever.

A story is interesting when a character must be dynamic in order to do something. A character who sits still and does nothing and never changes is not a character anyone wants to watch. Games are the same way; a game is not interesting if all you do is sit there and interact with nothing. For a game to be interesting, you must want to interact and be capable of interaction.

Good pacing is about spacing the mechanics in a pleasing order to the player. A game where you just press a button once every 30 seconds is not that fun. A game where you charge into a room and fight two goons, but then a much larger goon kicks through the wall and attacks you, but then the floor gives way and you fall into a bigger arena with fire traps is a meaningful escalation of things for you to take action to meaningfully engage with.

Violence is, therefore, the easiest way to make a game interesting.

It’s also something that is often player-driven — remember what I said earlier? A player gets to pick what target to hit, things like that. Now contrast that with the cooking minigame in Ishin, where I am simply waiting to press a button at the correct time. Even in action games, people hate having to react to stuff — it’s why people complained a lot about games like Homefront having you just stand there while waiting for characters to open doors.

Waiting is not planning. To keep the player engaged, it’s best to get the player going “okay, I’m going to go along this path to avoid the enemy guards, so I can press that button over there that turns on the auto turret, which will cause the enemies to run for cover, but I will throw a grenade into cover that…”

And you could do that in a nonviolent context, because the actual things happening are “I am pressing buttons to make objects move around the environment in order to achieve my desired goal,” but moving a bunch of boxes on conveyor belts just doesn’t feel quite as good as explosions and blood flying everywhere. Particle effects and loud sounds just feel awesome, y’know?

Shooting or swordplay has agency — go where your impulses take you, over to the sound of enemies fighting, onto the roof so you can get a better eye on your enemies, whatever.

So! How do you create a series of mechanics that encourages the player to take interesting action? How do you get the player to be proactive, rather than passive? How can you ensure satisfying feedback when the player takes action, to let the player know that “hey, you did this and it felt good” for that smooth dopamine release.

And, once you’ve done all of that, how do you get the player to want to do more?

In a sword duel, you anticipate your enemy’s strike, but you also get to strike when you feel right. Your brain is satisfactorily engaged because you are looking to be proactive but you still have to be reactive — you can’t just sit there and tap X a bunch. With Ishin’s cooking minigame, you can’t really do that; you just have to react to the prompts.

With a hypothetical dogwalking game, how do you make petting a dog as satisfying? Shooting a bullet is nigh-instantaneous. A bullet strikes an enemy within a second of you firing it. Pet a dog? An entire animation cycle has to play out, and you don’t get to feel the resistance of the dog’s head against your hand, the silky fluff of its fur, any of the real sense-pleasure of petting a dog. You press a button and watch a brief scene play out.

When you shoot someone, progress is made. Four guys walked into this fight. Now there are three. Two. One. I did something. I made tangible progress. There were clear stakes — I will die if I don’t do this — and it feels satisfying to overcome them.

Violence, in other words, is perfectly suited to both the physical format of games (press a button and get immediate feedback) and the human brain (we are built around anticipation, payoff, and reaction).

Nonviolence, well… I know I’ve been using the Ishin example a lot because I’ve been playing it, but it’s far from the only game to work like this. I play a lot of city builders — ostensibly nonviolent games — and while I am planning and reacting in those games, they’re intricate, long-form “set-em-up” games. You’re thinking ‘how do I balance my economy?’ and building the structures and hiring the people that would allow you to make more money to grow your economy further.

A racing game has conflict without violence — you are trying to go faster than a set time or a competing driver — and games like Forza have introduced various points that pop up on screen to give you feedback. Photography games will usually dazzle you with a series of point popups after you snap the shutter.

Games like Mudrunner are about trying to perform various tasks — the moment of “fuck yeah, I did it” comes after patiently navigating your vehicle through mud and obstacles to pick something up, put something down, or move it in between places.

There are approximately one billion puzzle games, but one of the games people remember the most is Portal, a game with conflict in the narrative (between you and GLaDOS) despite mechanics that are mostly about either moving objects in clever ways, or moving yourself very fast in even cleverer ways.

So there are ways around passivity, and feedback can still be accomplished with loads of UI and UX making numbers pop up. It is possible to make fun games that aren’t about violence, and there are lots of them, as pointed out in this article.

Violence won’t go away, nor should it, because it’s genuinely not a bad thing, and it is also quite fun.

If you’re one of those people who thinks it makes us look bad or something, no, that’s you. Shut the fuck up, enjoy the nonviolent games, and leave the rest of us to our own devices.

If you’re one of the people out there who just genuinely wants to explore the possibilities that you feel are unexplored, well, more power to you, but people have gotten to a lot of the Big Verbs (walking, driving, etc) already. It’s possible you could reinvent those verbs, and if you can, that’s awesome, but don’t go in expecting a total paradigm shift; a lot of evolution on existing verbs results in gimmicks — unique methods for one or two games, but not systems that can be broadly applicable to the world at large.

Sure, Doom had shooting, and then someone figured out you could add reloading to the formula, but not every game has been transformed into a Receiver clone (Receiver being a game where you have to manually perform the entire process of reloading a gun). The big verb, “shoot,” has been largely solved. It can be polished and improved upon, and sometimes you can do neat little things with it, but overall, the big territory has been explored.

So, if you’re sitting there going “I want to make a nonviolent Mass Effect,” because you like hanging out and talking with your friends on a space station, more power to you. Are you going to use pre-existing mechanics, like stealth? Are you going to try to invent new mechanics? When you strip combat out of Mass Effect’s equation, what goes in its place? Can you make it as satisfying and engaging and fun as shooting a little robot guy and watching him explode?

It’s a difficult problem to solve. As a person who wants to do things in games that have never done before, trust me, I love thinking about this stuff, and I want to try to make more games that give you experiences you never have.

It’s just… sometimes, I find myself realizing that the reason some mechanics or situations don’t work is because of stuff like “you can put a character in a situation where the audience has information they don’t, but if a player has information, they will try to act on it” or “rapidly cutting between actions can pull the player out of a flow state” and, of course, all the issues we have above with creating a good flow state, a good set of interesting verbs and reasons to play, and, yes, individual nonviolent mechanics that are more than passive.

So many nonviolent mechanics are like “wait for the crops to grow,” or “wait for the economy to earn enough money to purchase a new building,” and so on and so forth. When they’re proactive, it’s often because they’re either about solving a puzzle (a conflict to be overcome!) or competing against time or another person (another conflict to be overcome!).

A game is structured play. Game design is the art of getting people to take interesting actions — creating a mentally stimulating form of structured play. It is not morally bad or wrong or embarrassing to make structured play that keeps the human brain happy.

Sometimes it’s okay to let a cat chase a laser.

That’s no problem at all.

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