User Blog:
What's In A Game? - Killing in the Game Of Followup

 A couple of weeks ago, I posted a little talk called Killing in the Game of. In short, I was posing the question of why do we constantly play in games where we play out things that are otherwise abhorrent. Why our heroes are actually just criminals.

Almost immediately afterwards, some of my friends in the industry started going on about a number of excellent examples, on both sides of the fence. My favorite example given is called Power Kill. Essentially, it's a 'game' within a game. It's a scorecard, a list of things you look for when you're playing. Check it out.

That having been said, I pose the question: How do we fix it? Or better still, is it a problem?

I grew up slaying orcs and dragons just like everyone else in the hobby. Don't get me started on the racism in the orcs. But I never really thought about the killing. Why is it cool? Why is it fun? As I grew up, I played games through high school. In those games, we killed to shock. We rampaged with monsters through the Chuck E Cheese. Our characters burned babies in order to negotiate with enemies. In college, I played more indie games. We were ninjas delivering burgers. Sometimes we were deeply philosophical characters exploring the meaning of existence. After college, I mostly LARPed. I played political gurus that backstabbed their way into power. We killed the cops that investigated our work.

Then I grew up. I had children. I've had friends and family attacked, robbed, murdered and raped. I thought through it. I used to play the parallels to these characters. I was glorifying the acts that destroyed these peoples' lives. I knew a specific person, an absolute jerk. He dealt light drugs. Eventually, he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. He was high, and walked into the wrong house. He was shot and killed. The paper lauded his killer as a hero. But in the end, the dead guy had children. Those children now have to grow up with a single mother, with a dead father. They'll live under the stigma that her father was shot while high, his face plastered all over the news.