A couple of months ago, if I started a new game—no matter what it was—I'd start off on a high difficulty. At the very least, I'd go for normal, but only if it was clear that normal would provide a challenge. I reasoned that nowadays ‘normal' is geared toward a more general audience which may be less familiar with games than I am. And, more importantly, pssh. Of course I can do better than normal!

We've internalized difficulty like that. I hear it all the time: games are getting easier, oh the good ol' days, they're gone, gone! Sometimes, without difficulty, some people start to wonder if what they're experiencing can even be considered a game, like with Dear Esther or Proteus.

But something curious happened recently: I noticed that playing games at high difficulties started to feel grating. I realized that playing normal/high difficulties often makes me feel like I wasn't doing it because I was having ‘fun' per se, but more because I felt I had something to prove. I'd want the better achievement for a high-difficulty run-through; I'd be able to tell people what I did and sound that much more impressive.

Part of the recent change came from being absolutely torn down by Persona 4: Golden's highest difficulty. I'm at a point where going through one level in a dungeon might take an hour, if I manage to survive and avoid getting one-hit-killed. I'll often preemptively kill myself if I didn't do amazing in a skirmish, if I spent too much SP or got knicked enough that it would affect me in the long term.

I remember doing something similar in Super Meat Boy when I saw that I wasted an errant second on my run: it wasn't good enough. I could do better. Except unlike Super Meat Boy, Persona 4 has me feeling delirious. Oh, have I died for the tenth time in a row without making any progress whatsover? Have I spent hours in the same place with nothing to show for it? Haha! I don't even feel a thing anymore. Alrighty, back on the horse we go.

In an effort to retain what little of my sanity was left, I decided that any other titles I was playing concurrently to Persona 4 should be played on easy. Despite that decision, hovering between ‘normal' and ‘easy' on games like Far Cry 3 and Hitman: Absolution still felt wrong. I hesitated. Thinking back on it now, it reminds me a lot of being at a party and not knowing how to relax and just have a good time.

It wasn't until I started watching videos by popular YouTube user Criken, where he does all sorts of idiotic things, that the joy of easy mode really ‘clicked.' Maybe being sloppy and stupid could be fun. It's not so much about wanting to bulldoze through everything without thinking; games facilitate that at normal difficulties too. It's about having the ability to be creative and silly without penalty.

So now my Agent 47 runs around with ‘weapons' like radios instead of guns. Turns out, radios can be just as effective as whatever might typically be in a hitman's arsenal. Imagine my glee when I hocked said radio straight at a guard's head, and everyone screams and points their guns at the radio as if they could kill it? Or when I threw a glass bottle at the wall near a cop, they become alarmed and call dispatch about a suspicious sound... only to then stare at a wall for like two minutes?

It's so absurd, and I'm loving it. Compared to trying to stealthily navigate a level—which was what I was doing prior—what I'm doing right now feels way better.

In the case of Far Cry 3, easy mode is helping me muscle through a story that has clearly gone off the rails and is kind of bad, and, to my horror, still probably has a few hours left for me to experience. Far Cry 3 is not alone in this regard: all too often, I'll find myself wading through a game that goes on for longer than it needs to. I don't feel that very many games respect my time, and easy mode helps alleviate that.

More importantly, I'm moving into a place where I'd like difficulty, but not in the way most games give it to me. Mechanical difficulty is not the only type of difficulty there is.

I want to play more games where I have a hard time putting the pieces together on what happened, like Thirty Flights of Loving. I want games that challenge my values and force me to make difficult decisions, like the The Walking Dead does. I want games with challenging themes and ideas that make me feel uncomfortable, like with Analogue: A Hate Story. I want to play games where the characterization of those I interact with is a tangled web of inscrutable desires and motivations, like in Dragon Age 2.

Physically going through the motions of pressing buttons, at this point, is easy. I know how to do that, I've played a ton of games that have refined my skills and reaction time. Until more games give me reasons to make those actions complicated or messy, I'm plenty happy seeing what a game can offer me when I stop being so serious.

Image Credit: Shutterstock

Sometimes what you need is a little realism in your power fantasy. If you feel that Far Cry 3 is missing some crucial realistic bits, maybe this mod is for you.

Here is the "extremely in-depth Realism Mod" by Ubisoft forum user Panzerjager1943. According to the creator, this mod includes:

-Damage is based on actual weapon terminal ballistics tests
-Sway in sights and aiming are factors of the weapon's weight
-Recoil is a factor related to actual weapon recoil, incorporating bullet weight, powder, velocity, and weight of weapon
-Accuracy is based on actual Minute of Arc extreme spreads for the most realism
-Reload time is 25% slower on Assault Rifles, LMG's, and SMG's
-All weapons have realistic magazine capacities, including with Extended Magazines
-All weapons have vastly more maximum range
-Weapons have proper rates of fire (most especially that PKM.)
-Weapons have a new attachment setup that is a modified version of Leechmonger's attachments mod

You can find it here.

Not sure how to mod Far Cry 3, need a little guidance? The initial post in this thread has some tips and resources you can check out.

And remember: this realism mod will probably pair well with HUD-less Far Cry 3.

The images you're about to see are the work of Bruno Gauthier Leblanc, an Ubisoft artist who we've previously featured for his contributions on Splinter Cell: Conviction.

Today, though, we're looking at things a little more tropical in nature. Namely, his work on Far Cry 3.

As you can see, many of these designs made it through to the final game with nary an alteration. And in case you missed it during the game, you can also get a good look at Jason Brody's face. Just in case you didn't think he was smarmy enough already.

You can see more of Bruno's work at his personal site (thanks CAW!)

"So what is this game?"

Seems like a simple question, right? Usually there's a simple answer: "It's a platformer where you save the princess by jumping through deserts and oceans." "It's a sci-fi shooter. You blast away aliens." "High-school simulator meets dungeon-crawler."

Far Cry 3 is a little bit harder to define. Maybe that's why I like it so much.

I started playing the third Far Cry over the weekend, and although I haven't gotten very far just yet—I've played maybe three, four hours?—I'm already in love with the Rook Islands and all of the things you can do there.

Kirk already did a great job describing the feeling of playing Far Cry 3 in his review, but I wanted to write up a few quick thoughts of my own.

What I like most about Far Cry 3 is that it defies video game genre. It dodges conventions. It's not just an open-world adventure, it's also a shooter. And an RPG. And a stealth game. And an animal hunting simulator.

Some have called it Skyrim with guns, but I think it's really more than that. Far Cry 3 is Skyrim with guns, and paragliders, and skinning, and driving, and boating, and tigers, and drug trips, and no draugr. It's a game where you can sneak up on enemies and silently snipe them with a crossbow, or explore the jungles of a LOST-like supernatural world, or just run around with an assault rifle blowing up everything you can see. It's a game that defies and combines genres to the point where it becomes something unique, something unlike just about any other game out there.

And in today's gaming world, where marketers and business executives are constantly looking to stick their games with catchy little subheads—"it's Call of Duty meets Dragon Quest, you see!"—I love seeing something that shies away from convention. Even if there is a little too much dubstep.

This YouTube video by Criken is amazing. It's basically a collection of random happenings while playing Far Cry 3. Included are:

• Sharks who play dead after being run over
• Sharks who are actually dead after locals that don't give a damn run them over
• Throwing rocks at sharks. Also at domestic abusers.
• The water not discriminating against human or beast alike in its ability to straight up kill after contact (does nobody know how to swim on this island?!)

• And much more. I love absurd humor like this.

  
  

Far Cry 3 is a heck of a fun game, and lovely to look at. But those gorgeous sunsets and mountain vistas are marred somewhat by the intrusive screen-clutter that covers the game with waypoints, pop-up reminders, and other unwanted text.

I'd been playing the game with a fairly scorched-earth mod that removes every single HUD element entirely. I like it, but only because I'd played the game before; it'd make things unplayable for a newcomer. Last week, Ubisoft let us know that based on feedback, they were working on a patch to let players remove elements of the HUD.

That update went live last night in the 1.04 patch for PC users, and among other things it promises to allow "New options the hide the HUD are now available in the option menu."

I of course immediately downloaded the patch last night and gave it a go. And indeed, you can now turn off the game's HUD in the options menu. Go to the "gameplay" part of the potions menu on the PC version and you'll see this:

Looks good! And it's very nice to be able to turn off all of the annoying pop-ups and notifications, particularly the one that reminds you about the next story quest every few minutes.

But… and here's where I prove that I'm NEVER HAPPY I guess, but there's still no option to turn off the Grand Theft Auto-style mini-map. And we all know how I feel about Grand Theft Auto-style mini-maps. It seems surprising that it's not an option, given that mini-map toggling is an option in so many other open-world games, including Ubisoft's own Assassin's Creed III.

Still, a welcome improvement. I think I still prefer the more extreme modified version of the game, but I'm weird. Good on Ubisoft for listening to user feedback. I've asked Ubisoft when console players can expect the patch, but haven't heard back. It's likely that it's coming, but at a somewhat later date.

Don't get me wrong, I loved Far Cry 3. It's a magical game. But at the same time, the further I got through the game's story, the more uncomfortable it made me feel.

Yeah, there's the racist stuff, but also just the sense that, oh dear, one of the best games of the year is actually being made worse by its story, which is sabotaging all the good will the more open-ended sections of the game had built up.

Reaction to this has been so bizarrely unanimous amongst those who have played the game that you'd think the writers and designers behind it would be saying "OK, lesson learned!", but nope, they're defending their decisions to the death.

In a long and constantly fascinating interview on Rock, Paper, Shotgun, John Walker chats with Jeffrey Yohalem, the game's author, about people's concerns, and how the developers went about putting the game's story together.

It's well worth a read, but the one thing that struck me most was the dismissive manner in which Yohalem shrugs off complaints about the game's lack of message, or even allegations it's a wee bit racist. He says there's subversion to be found in the writing, that the entire game is a commentary on things like old-fashioned Western racism, the "noble savage", and that the reason people aren't seeing that is because they're not looking hard enough.

Um, no. If your audience isn't getting the message, even those looking for it, then it's your delivery that's failed, not the mind of the audience. He says Far Cry 3 subverts with things like obvious tropes (like "dumb" natives), but... presents nothing but obvious tropes, assuming some simplistic naming conventions (the island is called "rook" because you're being played, etc) make it all OK. Which they don't.

I understand the team, and Yohalem in particular, had something to say with Far Cry 3. They just didn't say it very well. Hopefully, instead of trying (and not doing a very good job) to defend their decisions, they can learn some lessons, apply them, and maybe steer Far Cry's narrative a little closer back towards where it was with Far Cry 2, and a little further away from... whatever the hell Far Cry 3's mix of tribalism, romance and insanity resulted in.

Far Cry 3′s Jeffrey Yohalem On Racism, Torture And Satire [Rock, Paper, Shotgun]

2012 was a banner year for stealth games. From January up through December, we got to play a healthy variety of games involving dozens of different types of sneaking, skulking, lurking, and sklurking. (It's a thing.)

You could say that these games… crept up on us.

We really… didn't see them coming.

Jason and I have already talked at length about why we love stealth games. While many video games set a series of systems in motion and toss you into the middle, stealth games operate a bit differently. They're about staying outside of those systems, creeping about the periphery while poking here, prodding there, and deciding how to engage. You really play with stealth games, and that's what lends them their unique rhythm and makes them so satisfying.

It's also why we come away from stealth games with such great stories. Every stealth game I played this year, I came away with a handful of stories, moments that captured the best (and sometimes, worst) sorts of stealth-game unpredictability.

Rather than just run down all the stealth games that came out this year, I thought it might be fun to share some stories, then open the floor for y'all to share your own tales. Here goes:

Mark of the Ninja

Klei Entertainment's Mark of the Ninja was interesting because it was both a tight, polished stealth game, and something of a treatise on stealth games themselves. Helped along by its two-dimensional design, the game gave clear visual feedback for every aspect of sneaking—footstep audio burst visually outward from the protagonist, while lights illuminated exactly where they were pointing. There was never a question whether you were hidden or visible, and the enemy artificial intelligence clearly signaled its status and intent. My moment from MotN comes from early in the game, when I was tasked with sneaking through a building and freeing several of my captured compatriots. I decided I was going to do the entire bit nonlethal, and that was where I discovered the most rewarding way to play Mark of the Ninja: Without killing anyone at all. As I freed the final captive without being spotted, I felt the kind of satisfaction I rarely feel by playing nonviolent in sneaking games.

Journey

No, seriously: There were so many stealth games in 2012 that even Journey had a stealth segment. This marks what I think of as the "low point" of the protagonist, the darkest, tensest hour. As the robed wanderer fights its way across a snowy field, it is hunted by those terrifying flying fish-golem monsters. I've rarely felt such unexpected dread, and even replaying the game, I fear this section.

Ghost Recon: Future Soldier

I don't think I felt more uneasy about stealth than I did in Ghost Recon: Future Soldier. As I mentioned in my review, the game is at its best when you're pulling off carefully orchestrated stealth-kills with your entire team, slipping through an area undetected. But no game has made me feel as uncomfortable. Particularly during the early Africa levels, as my stealth-cloak enabled cybersoldier squad wiped out wave after wave of ill-equipped third-world junta soldiers, it became clearer and clearer that this battle was horribly uneven. So, it's not so much an emergent stealth moment that I remember, more a feeling of how totally overpowered my team and I were.

Dishonored

It is very difficult to pick a single stealth moment from Dishonored, a game in which I've forgotten more classic moments than I experience in most games. But one comes to mind: In the mission in the Golden Cat brothel, you're tasked with taking down a couple of n'er do-wells located at various points throughout the building. One of them is holed up behind closed doors near to a body of water, and there are a number of ways I could sneak in to get him. But the way I chose was a doozy: I possessed a fish, swam through a small passage and into the room, then slowed down time and burst from the water in slow-mo before stabbing the dude in the neck. It was one of those moments that you see in movies, and yet I got to do it myself. In real time. Pretty much my Ultimate Dishonored Moment.

Hitman: Absolution

Here's a game I liked more than some, but I'm still playing it to this day, and still enjoying it quite a bit. If there's one thing I retrospectively could have talked about more in my review, it's how Absolution does feel different from Blood Money in many of its levels—it's much more of a traditional stealth game than its most recent predecessor. That said, there were still so many times when I felt that old Hitman groove—particularly during the mission "Shaving Lenny." Outside of Lenny's BBQ, I snuck over to a storage shed and took out the guard inside, before slowly but surely taking down guard after guard, and returning to the shed to stash them all. Over the course of the next twenty or so minutes, that shed became my macabre base of operations, the place NPCs went to decompose.

Assassin's Creed III

This game is the one to get a mention due to bad stealth. Perhaps chief among the many ways Assassin's Creed III disappointed me was the fact that the game's stealth was, for lack of a better word, busted. Two memories stick with me, and both involve bushes. The first involved failing the George Washington eavesdropping mission for the umpteenth time, entirely because for some unknown reason, Connor stood up for a moment while prowling in the bushes. The second involved taking out Pitcairn during the Battle of Bunker Hill. The infuriating thing about bushes in the game is that the moment you've been spotted, you simply can't crouch down again. The game ejects you from cover, and you have to find another way. This works okay in some sequences, but is a disaster in others, particularly if detection means failing the mission. The sneaking bits were tense, but for the wrong reasons. I wasn't worried I'd get spotted, I was worried Connor would do something dumb of his own accord and fail the mission for me.

Far Cry 3

More than perhaps every other game on this list, Far Cry 3 is a game that inspires stealth stories. I have a bunch: The time I lurked outside an outpost, luring dudes away one by one using pebbles, in an attempt to get my second no-alert outpost clearing, only to fuck it up at the last minute and get spotted by a roving patrol, have them trigger the alarm, and get killed. Or another time, when I shot the lock off of a tiger cage and had it immediately charge straight for me (and shortly afterward, managed to get a bear to clear out an entire outpost for me). Or the time, as I shared at the start of my review, when I hang-glided in behind enemies and snuck in to take them down, only to have everything go wonderfully wrong. Far Cry 3 was, as much if not more than Dishonored, a stealth game that was at its best when things went awry.

Those were my most memorable moments of sneaking in 2012. What were yours?

In a fit of frustration over Hotline Miami and the way gamers discuss violent games, I ended up talking to game critic/provocateur Cara Ellison. She adores Hotline Miami, you see.

Originally I meant to consult her about a different article, but our conversation was much more interesting than what I wrote. So we're publishing our correspondence instead, which touches on the bullshit surrounding the discussion of violent games (which has gotten even more complicated lately), whether or not we confuse loving winning to loving digital murder, and more.

From: Patricia Hernandez
To: Cara Ellison
Subject: murder

Cara, something I read last month is haunting me. I keep returning to it. There's an article on Midnight Resistance where Liz Ryerson dissects hyper-violent Hotline Miami and its reception. In it, Ryerson asks "how can you rhapsodize at great lengths about the joy of violence in a videogame without sounding like a complete psychopath?"

The article is compelling—she doesn't suggest that violence shouldn't be in games, but she does urge us to take a look at why it's there and how it affects as as folk who probably aren't about to go commit murder. And for once, this discussion isn't being anchored by the suggestion that games will corrupt us forever... just, that we do an awful job at examining what the violence does or mean, even though we'll go at great lengths at describing how enjoyable it is.

I think it's worrisome that we don't talk about this stuff. We're so sure that the value in the mechanics of these games is self-evident enough that they don't warrant examining—really examining. Like, beyond the idea that it feels good to kill someone. That part is the easy, obvious part.

I can't stop thinking about Ryerson's question though—can we, do we sing praises of the joy of violence without sounding psychopathic? I decided to check out reviews of Hotline Miami and found that by nature of having to explain how the game works—which involves playing as a killer-for-hire— sounding unhinged is an inevitability. The more a reviewer likes the game, the more true this is. What's up with that?

There was one review that pinpointed the game as a ‘murder simulator,' but stressed that playing the game doesn't make you a bad person. Insecurity?

What's curious about this is that many people pose that there's little time to think while playing, but that in-between missions, or after you shut the game off, that changed. But by the time reflection finally came, well... who knows?

Maybe Hotline Miami doesn't have to make a statement, that's fine. But we can. I want to hear about what the reality of what we're doing is and what it means in the wider societal context in which it exists, or what it might say about us, and not simply a mechanical breakdown. I come to you, as resident Hotline Miami lover.

I find myself frustrated when I read much of the discussion around the game, because there are no statements, no conclusions. How valuable is an unanswered question? When we don't make statements about what the game makes us consider, how, in effect, is it different from a game that doesn't make us think at all?

Lovingly murderous,

Patricia

Dear Patricia,

This is an interesting question, moreso as it is something that I have never found myself worrying about. I actually think that the more stylised you make the violence the further you separate yourself from the game's imagery, and the less important violent actions or themes are. The more abstract you get, the less you are attached to the actual idea of what is happening. Hotline Miami's violence is almost a post-process realisation that you are murdering people. The characters are not people you identify with—they are abstracted, little top-down dudes. Hotline Miami is extremely stylised, and does its utmost not to be hyperrealistic.

Hotline Miami is a beat, a rhythm, a process, a series of tiny challenges to overcome. It is only after the control is taken away from you by the game, and you throw up, then the realisation really connects with you that you are controlling a guy whose job it is to kill people, and the pleasure that you are getting from the crunch of a baseball bat is that of an assassination.

Hotline Miami's job is to present a a room full of guards to you and have you puzzle out how to solve the problem of them. You get a sense of achievement from offing those guys one by one like you would being Mario bopping Goombas on the head in quick succession—and after, you think, woah. The game is trying to tell me that I am not just a puzzle-solver here—I am a murderer. The cutscenes emphasise it—"Why are you doing this?" The cutscenes make you think about what you have done in a way that pushes me to feel like I am in the mind of a killer, when really I feel like it is a strategic puzzler at heart?

Why is Hotline Miami framing me for murder after the fact?

Yours bloodlustily,

Cara

Cara,

Speaking of sounding unhinged: framing you for murder, huh? Heh. That's curious—because, as you said, the game makes sure to remind you you're a murderer with the cutscenes, but it also it tries to distract you from that idea with its stylization. In addition to that, it detaches you from the situation when it suggests that you're not in complete control of your actions—that you're being controlled by a shadow organization.

I feel conflicted. Much of the discussion about the game lauds the fact that it asks us whether or not we enjoy hurting people. THAT is psychotic: so what we're saying is, most games don't make us think? ....we have to be prompted to think? That idea doesn't reflect very well on us. That's funny, considering how easily we get mad when the media/non-gamers look at these violent games, and how easily we can say that they're not looking closely enough.

I'm not even sure that Hotline Miami is so different from just about any other violent game—if we stopped to actually think what's going on. It's not necessary to have hazy, vague cutscenes between levels of a game asking you if you enjoy killing to dare to wonder on your own. The fact that we've needed to be asked, to me, is alarming.

Granted, it occurs to me that most games work hard to make sure we're distracted from what we do. I mean, they have to, right? It would be horrifying if we felt the weight of every single murder in the games we play.

But now that you brought up how Hotline Miami goes back and forth on reminding you and distracting you about being a murderer, I feel that much more conflicted! What is the game trying to do? I can't tell if it's a purposeful tension or the sign of a muddled game. My cynicism gravitates me toward the latter.

If the game is framing us for murder, why do you think that most people endlessly praise how good digital murder feels? Are they actually talking about something else they enjoyed with the game without realizing it? Assuming we're actually being framed, the game sure tricked everyone into thinking that they're guilty.

Conveniently innocent,

Patricia

Patricia,

I don't think Hotline Miami is a good game because it is violent—it is pure mechanics working to give a chemical response in my brain that is the rush I get when I feel achievement. I find it difficult to connect my knifing a guy in Hotline Miami to the idea of doing it in real life—there is an interface that is giving me feedback that creates that abstract feeling of winning when some pixels collide.

I tell myself I have completed a task with my hands, and my brain gives me a biscuit (or a cookie, as it is there in the States). There is an obvious progression to reward in the framework of this virtual painting, whereas most well adjusted adults know that there is no excuse for violence in the framework of real world society and there is certainly no reward for it. The opposite—there is serious punishment and great societal distress. Knowledge of the rules is important wherever you are.

The cutscenes in Hotline Miami are interesting, because they are actually there to remind you that the game is about horrible murder lest you forget that it is about horrible murder. Why?

Because it's based on the film Drive and stylised violence can be made to look cool. But really, the process of winning or the mechanics that underlie that game are nothing to do with violence. You could have a totally abstract set of squares and triangles bumping into each other, exploding, sort of like a slappers-only Geometry Wars, and the same satisfaction would pop out. Am I making excuses? I hope not. I am just trying to analyse my own brain's processes.

I think when people talk about the glory of the violence in Hotline Miami, they are confusing it with the joy of winning and projecting the frame back onto the game. It's interesting to note that I personally also confused the feeling of winning with what the game wanted me to feel was the glory of murder—when actually it is the same feeling you get when jumping on a Goomba (which I guess is still murder but wouldn't traditionally be thought of as that).

Lots of people in Hotline Miami reviews have done that. I actually dance more around the issues of violence completely in my preview here because I don't think I saw enough of the cutscenes to press the 'violence' frame on me. I wrote more about the rhythm and music back then.

In our Rock Paper Shotgun Verdict the violent style seems much more praised, as I'd played it for a long time by then. Note the contrast—and we still have very little to say about what it actually says about violence because the game's mechanics are primarily our fascination.

Note also how we all get het up and excited and confuse the rewarding mechanics for a judgement on our penchant for violence. At one point I say I love the 'purity of the knife', which is to say, that I like how the knife mechanic functions in the game, and then say that I am worried it makes me look psychotic. This is what the frame of the game narrative wants me to think.

Then later I get so excited talking about the game that I ask for camomile tea. The remaining part of the euphoria of this game is in the 80s neon art and the exceptional soundtrack. It is easy to confuse all of these for a fetish for violence, because the game constantly asks you to actively confuse your pleasure of the game for the pleasure of murder, and then a cutscene points to you and says 'THAT IS FUCKED UP'. And you don't disagree. Or...

We come back round to this: if I am worrying that it is making me look psychotic, that is a good thing right? But if I am not, perhaps I need to worry about my attitude to violence. Is that what we are saying? Are games then, just what we personally read into them? Aren't they just a mirror of ourselves? If you are a violent person, would you look at this game as a come on or a dampener? I don't know. I played GTA from age 12 and I have never been tempted to be violent towards anyone.

Busted,

Cara

Hey Cara,

Aha, here we come to the big hangup when it comes to this conversation: personal responsibility. I suspect we as a community shy away from this discussion because the assumption is that we're trying to crucify each other or feel guilty about what we do—that the apex of this conversation is "should I feel bad or not" or "does this make me a potential murderer or not."

While I don't discount the value of figuring that stuff out, it's too easy to hand wave. People go "well I'm not a bad person, so as much as I might pause, I'm not going to change my opinion that these things I enjoy reflect poorly on me/say something awful about me."

There are other ways of discussing what violence means or says in a game. I put forward Liz Ryerson's own conclusions with Hotline Miami:

"Games like HLM cut to the core what of what a pretty big chunk of life in the modern world is about. People feel that they have no control over their own lives. They want to be able to exercise that control somehow, somewhere. They want some sort of release—otherwise they feel like they'll just explode. videogames have come to fit the desire for release like a glove. Games have done this so well, in fact, that they've created a significant culture of people who use playing games for the sole purpose of feeling in control over the rest of the world."

They're puzzles, as you said, which we solve. This reading makes sense to me.

As other examples, I think of how Merritt Kopas has written that the way games can lie to us about what violence is, because they only focus on the physical kind—not the structural kind of violence (sexism, racism, etc) that we cannot always perceive on a granular level.

I think of Cameron Kunzelman discussing how XCOM's usage of torture reveals that many of us have normalized the behavior, rationalized torture in our heads before the game even starts—so when the engineer spouts his lines about us losing our humanity and the way many reviewers took this to mean the game was critiquing something, it falls flat.

"I knew immediately that I was going to have to torture aliens and genetically modify my soldiers in order to play that game. The possibility for cooperation was always-already closed off, though I can't articulate why. I just knew. There is no question. The ethical question, then, is a beautiful failure. Why have the debate in game? Why pretend like there is some kind of grey area that the player is having to navigate? Is is supposed to make me ask questions?"

These are the types of discussion about violence that I want to see—screw whether or not games might make us bad people. We're too close to that discussion to really be able to say something critical, we repeat the same platitudes over and over, and I don't think we'll ever really 'solve' that issue. We never move on from it though, if we talk about violence at all.

I'm curious, though: if what we're doing doesn't matter because it's simply the frame, then why do games like Dyad—absolutely, positively not 'violent' in the traditional sense—package their games under the same language? Rowan Kaiser notes that the terms for what we do in the game are really combative: we lance things, we hook things, and so on. The game looks like you're on drugs for christsakes.

It seems to me the packaging is either important, or somehow along the way we've forgotten how to think about things outside of that framework.

Violently troubled,

Patricia

Patricia:

I think you hit the button when you said that it is the packaging.

Our culture is obsessed with looking at games, this interactive medium, as if it were the interactive part that corrupts us, when in fact it is in a long line of media that we have worried over. When novels first appeared, they were a corrupting influence—women's brains would overheat, they said—and anyway, newspapers and journals were the only thing worth reading. And then it was movies, rock and roll music. A short time ago, rap music was the thing that was going to kill me.

Games do not exist in a vacuum. The biggest problem, as the end of Hotline Miami attests, is our predilection for, or perhaps our lack of concern over, violent media. Of any kind. Violence is so prolific in our entertainment these days that it's becoming an important question: why are we seeing so much of it? And why, such as when the Rockstar Hot Coffee debacle happened, are we more outraged by being shown an act of love in a game, than we are by someone being shot in a game—an act of hate?

We are just seeking cathartic shelter from it, a way of dulling its poison by working through it in Hotline Miami.

You can make the symptoms go away—remove violent games from supermarkets, take away rap music and gangster films. Burn copies of Puzo's The Godfather on a pyre. You can do all of those things—I mean—if it really is those that are at fault. For a violence free society—sure—burn the fucking lot. I never want to see it again if it created this mess.

But as long as there is fear, resentment, neglect and a weapon on the table, people will hurt other people. Either we take away the fear, resentment and neglect in society, or we take away the weapon.

Games are a distraction. From the horrible real world, and from where the actual discussion lies.

Cara

Cara,

Video games aren't the only things to be criticized as agents of corruption you're right, they just happen to be the flavor of the era. And yes, this conversation is much larger than video games, and should be pursued in that larger stage as well. We just happen to be game journalists!

Even so, I hope that in the future we don't need a game blatantly prompting us to think, or a tragedy doing the same. Well, no. You've probably noticed how many people have posted similar sentiments recently, about the necessity to reflect.

As I said earlier, there is no use in an unanswered question ("what does the violence mean/reflect?") I hope we actually voice what it is we're thinking about.

You know, everyone keeps telling me games are a distraction. It feels important, almost, to convince each other that they are distractions. But when I'm playing, ah, I don't feel distracted at all.

Bless map editors. They make wonderful things possible—wonderful things that normally couldn't exist.

MP1st brings our attention to Youtube user ShadowZack, who took it upon himself to recreate a few famous maps in Far Cry 3.

These maps hail from franchises like Call of Duty, Battlefield and Counter-Strike. The one above is Nuketown. Here are the rest:

There is one more map to check out, here.

This looks really rad—if I was playing Far Cry 3 on PC, I'd play these. Alas, console gaming. I can't even take the HUD off my copy of Far Cry 3... not yet, anyway.

Battlefield, Counter-Strike, And Call of Duty Maps Recreated In Far Cry 3 [MP1st]