Over the last decade and a half, lots of games have tried to get away from the violent-adventure focus, and this has been a fertile inspiration, leading to all kinds of cool mechanics. On the other hand, this urge sometimes manifests itself in the desire to model violence the same way as everything else, or raise certain systems to the expected complexity of adventure game combat. I’ve read a lot of statements about why this is desirable, but most of which treat distinct systems for violence as a type of privilege or focus, or at least a problem of designers reproducing the assumptions of early games. But I don’t think this is true. I think symmetry between all parts of a game is something game designers like, and game readers like, but that doesn’t necessarily lead to better play. I don’t think that the complexity and length of its parts determine a game’s focus, either. Look at Call of Cthulhu. SAN isn’t a long system, but it’s still the game’s mainmast.
But violence is kind of special. It doesn’t really matter how much we abhor it or don’t want it in stories. It is an exceptional mode of human activity, and virtually every creative field had developed a special craft for portraying it. The only exceptions I can think of off the top of my hand are oral storytelling and creative writing, but even those could be argued to devote special stylistic modes to fighting and physical suffering.
Over a decade and a half ago I took some stage combat training, and I arranged very simple fights for a few different local plays. Stage combat is labour intensive, providing perhaps the least efficient ratio of practice to performance time in an entire production. This is absolutely necessary though, because you want to make sure nobody gets hurt, and you don’t want the fight to look dumb. Audiences will accept some ridiculous stuff up there, but a fight is the place where tripping can destroy suspension of disbelief. I’m sure it’s all a lot simpler with well-trained actors and great equipment, but this doesn’t make it easier, exactly–it just moves part of the difficulty to training and prop acquisition stages predating the production.
But nobody assumes Hamlet is a play about fencing. You have to get that fencing, and its strange intersection with dialogue, drinking and getting poisoned just right, but it’s not about the fencing. Yet if you judged Hamlet the way people are sometimes prone to judge games, you’d assume Hamlet was basically about a boss-fight. And of course, if you return to the text of most plays, the time/effort formula flips, and you get “They fight.” That’s it. Each element has its own special technical requirements, but the level of detail is not necessarily a cue about how important it is.
Violence is also special because it’s a kind of “universal exceptional.” It is always politicized and culturally regulated. We have specific physiological adaptations for dealing with it, such as fight-or-flight, the startle response, and reactions governed by the hypothalamus and amygdala. And man, experiencing it is a bad trip. Violence injects psychological consequences into victims and perpetrators, and in many cases both will experience a strongly altered state of consciousness triggered by the event itself. (This is my pet theory as to why we will often enjoy the most ridiculous forms of choreographed fighting–real fights are pretty surreal to begin with.)
And of course, you could die or acquire a permanent injury. That matters quite a bit. When your life’s on the line, or your pretend-person’s life is, it evokes something distinct from other feelings. The desire to ask a game to account for the causes of these consequences in a specific way is understandable.
This distinction works the other way around. People who’ve talked to me about it know that I’m pretty leery of modelling social tasks as quasi-combat, or even as a challenge to exert your will over another, pretty much because the whole idea of dominance in that framework is not only incomplete, but based on faulty ideas about human nature. Unless you want your game to say something dismal about human nature, you’re taking the wrong approach. When we get rid of the desire to peg social actions and violence to the same framework, it frees us to take a look at what these other tasks are really all about.
