Is There More Than One Type of Violence in Video Games?

For decades it has felt like journalists, courts, and protest groups have had it in for violence in video games – it’s ironically become the format’s beaten dead horse. Scientific studies, thankfully, have shown that while there is a link between aggression and violent video games, there isn’t an association with criminal violence.

But is all violence in video games the same? They may sometimes share age ratings, but what if there is several types of violent games, with their own distinct effect on players?

I would argue that there is in fact two variations of violent video games; those designed for catharsis (the process of releasing, and thereby providing relief from, strong or repressed emotions), and those designed for competitive violence, a virtual contact sport.

Thinking about it, there is a massive difference between the levels of violence in games like DOOM, Wolfenstein, and The Last of Us, compared to Counter Strike, Call of Duty, and Overwatch. The former three I would identify as cathartically violence games because there is a meaning behind the violence beyond face-value to make it morally justifiable.

Let’s start with DOOM. I became somewhat addicted to this game in my final year of university because it provided me with an outlet for my frustrations and worries. It’s depiction of the hordes of hell attempting to take control over our universe for the bazillionth time is what made me feel morally justified to shoot and chainsaw my way through wave after wave of demons. Not just that, but the game encourages the player to become more and more violent.

If you have seen DOOM’s“takedown” kills then you will understand – these are some of the most graphic death sequences in the game, but the player will gain a small amount of health, armour, and ammunition for each takedown performed in order for the killing spree to continue. DOOM’s violence doesn’t just become morally ok, it’s almost practical in a way. It not just the mechanics that encourage the player to be more violent, but the music too. The music is broken up into calmer and more frantic chunks, and they switch between one another depending on how many demons the player is killing, providing a really interesting feedback loop.

We can see the moral justification angle with the latest Wolfenstein games as well. The game’s protagonist is the American-Polish, potentially Jewish, B.J. Blazkowicz of the US Army Rangers stuck in a world where the Nazi’s won World War Two. Not only did they win, but they continued their horrific programmes of ethnic cleansing and twisted medical research. Seeing such brutal scenes like Deathshead, the main antagonist, vivisecting live subjects, or a group of SS soldiers liquidating an insane asylum and its staff, affords the player the moral grounds to exercise their penchant for violence on the Nazis – these people deserve to die.

I’d also like to briefly talk about The Last of Us and its use of violence against the infected, the military dictatorship, the cannibals, and the murderous gangs of Pittsburgh. Whilst not necessarily cathartic, the levels of violence in this game, mushroom-zombies aside, are highly realistic; most violent encounters are avoidable and frantic, not aided by the way that the gun’s crosshair sways, emphasising the fact that the player is not a superhuman soldier and is pumped full of adrenalin. You are playing as ordinary people in an extraordinary situation, and each time the player is violent, it feels like part of a fight-or-flight response.

I remember vividly from my first playthrough pressing the button to perform a melee attack on a guy I had just stunned with a baseball bat. Excepting to simply punch the man unconscious, Joel instead slammed his head repeatedly into a nearby fridge, the controller vibrating with each blow, until he stopped moving. He needed to stop moving so Ellie and Joel might live. The ferocity, the visceral feedback, and the games unapologetic necessity of the violence made me put the controller down.

So that’s the case made for cathartic, meaningful violence, what about the competitive angle? Curtis Jackson-Jacobs, in the Sociological Review’s Violence and Society, defines a fight to be “a stretch of serious, competitive, hand-to-hand violence”, and this definition works with both street violence and sports. And that is where I will focus my argument for competitive violence in video games: E-Sports and multiplayer.

Games like CounterStrike and Call of Duty have been using violence as a competitive tool in a way that makes the games feel like a virtual contact sport (a huge oxymoron), with the hand-to-hand element of Jackson-Jacobs definition of fighting being fulfilled by the use of controllers, keyboards and mice filling in the roles of handheld weapons: they transfer the input of the players hands and fingers into the virtual arena.

Then there is the very obvious competition parallel. The violence in multiplayer shooters is “undertaken…for the sake of trying to win a contest”. Take Team Deathmatch as an example, where the measure of success is the number of kills a team gets, with the most valuable player being the player with the most enemy kills attributed to them. Dying in this game mode is akin to being taken off the pitch after being injured, or the downtime between rounds in boxing matches: it puts you on the side line briefly to reset and re-evaluate your strategy.

Then there are other modes like Search and Destroy, where the deaths of the enemy team aren’t necessarily the goal of the players, but it aids their main objective. This relates to another one of Jackson-Jacobs ideas, the idea that in a competitively violent situation, both sides have offensive and defensive goals: the terrorists in CounterStrike have a defensive goal of arming and defending the bomb site, but they also have an offensive goal of killing all the counter-terrorists.

And now we have the last point to contend with from that quote: can the competitive violence of these games be qualified as “serious”? I’d argue yes, demonstrated by the amount of incentive to win there is in E-Sports events with their cash prizes, their sponsorship money, and the thrill of working and winning as part of a team.

In the realm of multiplayer games, the amount of time people spend obsessing over their kill/death ratios and the fact that some are willing to cheat in public matches in order to win are big arguments towards the seriousness of the violence. Where the violence becomes less serious, however, is in terms of realism. Despite firing off hundreds of round in a match, there is minimal blood and gore, nothing to make the player pause and wonder why they are doing this. I suppose this sanitary approach to the effects of violence is order to keep the game sports-like, where the second there is blood the players involved are whisked away, so the match stays being “just a game.”

But this is just how I see things. At the end of the day violence in video games is not the drama it once was, and I think the community would like to move on from it to bigger, more difficult topics. That said, the expansion and normalisation of violent video games is possibly something that warrants further attention from academia and critical circles. Hopefully this essay will open up some discussion between you and your friends. Thanks for reading.