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When Does Gore Get In the Way of Gameplay?
Wired is running a story inspired by the level of gore in the recent Wolverine game that wonders: how much is too much? It mentions a study we discussed in February which indicated that violence tended to interest gamers less than other characteristics.
"... the longer you play a 'twitch' action game, the less you notice the cultural content — the gushing blood, the shrieks of agony. You're too busy focusing on the gameplay. I noticed this with Wolverine. For the first hour, I found the deranged bloodshed both shocking and exciting; it made me feel like I 'was' Logan, the grunting, killing-machine character from Marvel Comics' X-Men universe. But as I became more expert, the cultural shell of the game boiled away. In a sort of staring-into-the-cascading-numbers-of-the-Matrix way, I found myself looking past the visible aspects of the game and savoring the underlying, invisible mechanics of play. ... The game became pure physics and algorithms: Vectors, speed and collision detection. The gore had become mostly irrelevant."
I hated an inconvenient truth. all i want him to do is shut up.
but really in most violent video games can't you turn the blood and gore off?
Its not my fault, someone put a wall in my way.
I'd be suprised if even a significant minority of people past their early teens would ever be put off a game for not being violent enough.
Its gameplay; enjoyable mechanics and repeatability, that count. For me, at least.
For me, gore doesn't add anything at all, save for when it's used sparingly, to the point where it is so unexpected that it shocks. However, if ever there was an example of a game which didn't need gore to shock and terrify then, for me, nothing can beat Silent Hill 2. Such were the psychological shocks that there were points when I would be playing this alone, at night, and decide I'm better off playing something a little more fluffy to wipe the images from my mind. Sure, it had gore, but it was delivered to compliment the terror I was already experiencing from the suggests the game was making.
THE HONOUR OF THE KNIGHTS - CC Licensed Sci-Fi Novel
...about all the energy your souped-up overclocked PC is using.
Well, he did INVENT the Internet after all. I say we give the guy a break. Maybe just ask him to stand next to the screen instead of in front of it? (first post, btw)
I thought Tipper got over this during the PMRC fiasco.
If you're properly focused on a game you don't really notice the extras. For example when playing guitar hero my friends occasionally point out something that's happening with the band in the background (even when they're playing), but I don't notice anything but the notes (even when I'm not playing). Those that focus on stuff like blood flying around probably aren't actually focused on beating the game. Still, it's better to have some gore than none at all otherwise how will you know that you've scored a hit? Likewise for realistic graphics, it does add to the immersion to have realistic lighting even if you're not paying much attention to it, and sometimes it is nice just to kick back and admire the scenery (the sunrise and sunsets in GTA IV were pretty awesome).
which is totally what she said
When he shows up at my house and makes me turn off my Xbox because it's carbon footprint is too large.
the developers decide to write a "screenwiper" package that wipes the blood and guts off of the user's screen so they can see well enough to shoot?
God, schmod. I want my monkey man!
You eat vindaloo, you know it's going to be hot. You expect it, you get used to it.
If you really want to shock somebody, put a scotch bonnet in their chocolate cake.
Hitchcock knew this perfectly well. A whole movie of rising tension, and then suddenly, WHAM, a shocker image.
Same for gore in video games.
I piss off bigots.
Gore is pretty much irrelevent however I do think it has a place. For example I like the Hitman series. In the 1st one there was bullet holes/decals on the bodies I liked this as it allowed me to see where I hit as opposed to yes i hit or no i missed. I was rather annoyed at the future hitman installments removing this, for me it was all about the perfect head shot in the 1st one, right between the eyes.
I did think the manhunt series was boring mainly due to the limited number of death animations and the excessive gore.
I do prefer games that have some gore over those that have none, for example when a rpg shell blows someone to pieces it is more realistic than them just falling over. It's all about the realism the game creates the more realistic the more I enjoy the game (assuming the gameplay is there).
When there is no more electricity from the evil polluters!
Conservative, mod down for violating
Now he's knows why nethack is still going strong. The gore is a bore.
Man, I hate it when that happens...
Al Gore invented game play. And then the Internet.
I don't find what is euphemistically called "graphical content" exciting or scary - it just annoys me. To me the entertaiment value is in the actual content of the game, movie or whatever, not in whether there is a lot of internal organs draped over items in the vicinity; I realised how much it actually irritates me when I watched the "Watchmen" movie. The story line is not too bad for a superhero movie, but why do we need to spend that much time on Hefty Smurf splatting people's guts around?
"Ga Ga Ga Gore ... Gore .. The Gore is a Bore ... Gore .. The Gore is a Bore
Ga Ga Ga Gore
EveryGamer knows it ain't the Gore anymore!"
whua-whao-blua-blao....
About the content value of this story.
Is Seth MacFarlane a gamer?
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
It's essentially the same eye candy as the pretty lensflares and shiny reflections: They're cool for the moment, but they get old quickly.
When the fluff is off, what's left is gameplay. Gore or no gore. It doesn't "get in the way" more than other graphics elements do. One could argue that high resolution and better blending/shading made it harder to make out the enemies against the background, because they blended better. Did that get "in the way" of gameplay? No, it was just another graphics element. You enjoyed it for a while, but after you got used to it, what's left is whether the game is interesting or plain boring.
It's the same for gore. Blood and guts will excite you for an hour or two, then you get used to it, and what's left is whether the game is fun to play or not.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Never?
It's also sort of similar to something I call the Zen of gaming difficulty - The hardest setting to learn on any game is "easy", while "impossible" is the simplest to master. While playing through Easy mode for the first time, you have no ide what you're up against, you face bosses for the first time, get surprised by twists and turns and keep having to look at your manual because you forget how to do your special moves. As you get better and tackle the hardest setting, you only have the tiny variations and subtle nuances to overcome, at which point you are pretty much a master of this game.
Without it, a game comes off as a cartoon. I don't notice it so much when it's there and have never found it a bother, but when it's not there, it's noticeable. If you shoot somebody in the head with a shotgun and they just fall down without a drop of blood, something is wrong. It's just plain not realistic.
"The game became pure physics and algorithms: Vectors, speed and collision detection."
This is just how I feel about Hunt The Wumpus!
Or perhaps "Rogue" would have been a better example?
Gore in games are great but it does not make a great game for me; personally i prefer good game play and innovative physics of the characters and environments for example the new Red Faction game
that is used in food. Enough to accentuate the flavour, but too much and you overwhelm what you are trying to improve.
All of which overshadows the basic premise: If your game sucks, then no amount of T&A, or gore, will help improve that.
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
But the lack of gore was one of the many problems the movie had. Until the girlfriend was "killed" there was basically no blood. Sad for a movie where a guy with a bad temper and knives for hands is the star. So I suspect that the creative control is not very centralized; thus any blanket statements about gore shows that each game is separate from all the others in decision making. Either that or they stole all the gore from the movie.
you insensitive clod!
When I play fighters like MvC2 and 3s I don't think about the lack of gore despite them being aggressive fighting games.
But then in Typing of the Dead, if the gore of the zombies blowing to pieces wasn't there, I think it would lose something. In that game I never ignore the gore, its part of the game itself and belongs there.
If the gore in Wolverine starts to feel irrelevant, its probably just poorly done. Its a game pushed out to coincide with a movie release. I know it has a different storyline to it, but people should be grateful it doesn't make them vomit just looking at it.
1 (short ton / firkin) = 89.1432354 slugs / keg
Is a painful demonstration of how not to write. Ugh.
I grew up with a mild seizure disorder and noticed that the introduction of visually stimulating 3D content in games gave me headaches (probably what the medical community calls auras) for the first couple of hours/days. This applied to new games, new maps, etc.. However, once I grew accustomed to the graphics I noticed that my headaches went away. As an example, I can play Counterstrike Source for hours without a problem (other than guilt for wasting that much time), yet I get a headache within 15 minutes of playing Half Life 2.
that's the thing about inconvenient truths, they're inconvenient, you can't turn them off, even of you ignore them they don't go away ....
...desensitization when such "gore" goes unnoticed. It's not a good thing either. It means a person is no longer bothered by such things. I'd only hope such things still bother them in real life but at that point probably not. A person like that can do something bad to another person without even a second thought and no conscience. Don't want to be around that person in real life either at that point.
Is this because he invented the Internet?
This is one of those questions that's impossible to answer in a generic context.
If you look at something like Dead Rising, it just wouldn't work well without gore. Compare to something like Viva Pinata and it'd be pretty fucking stupid with gore.
He made it, he should fix it!
All those violent games are full of explosions!! Explosions that emit tons of greenhouses gases. Do the frakkin math! If there are 700,000,000 explosions in video games today (a conservative number) and each explosion emits 300 tons of CO2 . . . JESUS H CHRIST!!! We're all dead. Now. By 2 pm if we don't stop it. NOW!!
I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
When he won't leave me alone with the intern I want to play with.
Look at the new dragon age trailer, the roleplaying game from Bioware that is expected this fall. (and which unfortunately looks quite lame)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4GiSRuAHxG4
Now THIS game has a lot of gore. Wolverine just doesn't.
Al gets in the way anytime he's in the room. Have you seen the size of that guy lately?
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
When Does Gore Get In the Way of Gameplay?
When I'm in a total brawl on Team Fortress 2, and there is so much blood and body parts spraying all over the place that I can't even see, let alone hit the target's I'm going after. Yea, then, it's "in the way".
...gore never got in the way of enjoying Close Range!
I'm not cool enough to have a
When his wife goes all PMRC on your industry?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Umm, some of you have limited tolerance for gore. It's OK. You don't have to write articles suggesting that there's an objective level of gore that is too much. That would be a false implication, Mr. Thompson.
...as I became more expert, the cultural shell of the game boiled away. In a sort of staring-into-the-cascading-numbers-of-the-Matrix way, I found myself looking past the visible aspects of the game and savoring the underlying, invisible mechanics of play. ... The game became pure physics and algorithms: Vectors, speed and collision detection.
The interesting experiment would be to remove the gory skin from those underlying, invisible mechanics and replace it with some sweetness-light-and-OMG!-ponies!! skin. I'm talking about the exact same mechanics with different art.
Would we still enjoy the game as much? I'd like to find out.
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
If you're playing a shooter, gore might make sense. If you're playing Tetris, not so much.
Violence, like anything, loses its effect when it's overused. If the blood is repetitive and gratuitous, the brain is ultimately just going to edit it out, and for entertainment purposes the player is left to deal with whatever underlying gameplay mechanics or story remains. I think gore tends to be used to try to compensate for a lack of these bedrock elements, which is unfortunate.
Horror is a genre where gore is almost criminally overused. Gore in horror is like sex in comedy--it's what you tend fall back on when you run out of real material.
Yeah, Mortal Kombat.
I can't think of a single game that was successful to such a high degree based only upon the amount of violence in it. Not only that, but for the first 3 or so titles the only differences between characters were their 2-6 special moves and their finshers. They were still wallowing in awful, shallow gameplay and raking in millions while 3D fighters were coming in, and didn't even get things right on the 3D front for a long time.
Oddly enough, the only place (apart from gore) that Mortal Kombat shines is in the story department. Those guys at Midway actually try to make a decent comic-book-ish plot out of things.
I believe many, if not most, gamers are desensitized to violence. So there's already an exaggerated expectation of how violence should be depicted, mainly that there should be gushes of blood everywhere and bodies torn apart. Even, myself, who is not keen on gore finds any game with bloodless violence to be quite tame.
Your average non-gamer, however, is likely to have a very different reaction. The simple act of pointing a gun at a character and shooting them is troubling to a lot of people. I'm not suggesting that gamers are going to resort to real life violence or anything as absurd as that. But certainly there is a thrill they get out excessive violence.
I personally have no problem with gore in a game if it's an integral part of the story. The problem I have is when developers get gratuitous with it for no clear reason other than, I suppose, to sell more games. It's not all that dissimilar to developers constantly objectifying and over-sexualizing women. I like watching hot girls as much as the next guy, but when it becomes the rule, not the exception I think there's a problem. In some ways I see all this as appealing to the more immature attitudes although I'm sure some people will disagree.
...if it impacts FPS. If there are so many gore effects that the game starts to chunk, then there is too much gore. Other than that, who cares? I'd like to see FPS's get to the point where there are blood splatters on walls. Why you ask? When you come across a dead body in a hallway for example, especially if it is on a new map, the blood splatters could give you a hint about where the person got shot from. I'd like to see bloody footprints and other visual cues about where wounded enemies went. Would that be too much gore?
I think it is the best in games where the gore is over the top and people are still alive and shooting away. Much like in Gears of War 1 and 2. I'm looking at the bright side of this article where it isn't blaming the gore for child violence.
Just because you are wrong and I called you out on it doesn't mean I am a Troll.
Just like when he forgot to give air to Laurie when he teleported her to Mars, it emphasizes the fact that he is nearly totally disconnected from most aspects of humanity.
He blew his enemies up in showers of gore presumably because it happened to be slightly easier than the alternative, even if it spattered a roomful of traumatized bystanders. He knew enough to stop the "bad guy", but beyond that he just didn't care either way. Now that's chilling.
For that reason I was very glad that they left the gore in, even though in the movie it looks worse than the equivalent scene in the comic.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
When you play a game, you aren't actually causing the gore to occur... it's simply a pre-programmed reward for accomplishing a certain pre-determined task. It's the same methodology used to train dogs and teach children responsibility. You only give a reward to act as an incentive to perform a task until that task become second nature to the subject. Once that occurs, the task is simply carried out on demand for the sake of performing that task.
In a sense, you don't really ever "play" a game... the game "plays" you.
8==8 Bones 8==8
When it comes to video games, the 2 parties are typically polar opposites of each other.
Democrats want less gore, more bush.
Republicans want more gore, less bush.
There are a huge number of yeast infections in this county. Probably because we're downriver from the bread factory.
...when the framerate gets choppy as a result.
In other news, when can we mercilessly mow down hundreds of zombies with as much gore as possible in a video game?
All this so-called "next-gen" is total bullshit as they still can't handle the power of all those pixels and sprites...shitty draw distance, disappearing bodies, grumble grumble...I want a game where i can kill so many motherfuckers they stack up like the corpse wall in 300!
Quake 3's truly excessive gore -- blowing your enemies into fine clouds of bloody mist -- just never gets old.
Yes, it melts away into physics and mechanics while you're playing. However, at least for me, each kill is still that much sweeter because of the gratuitous gore, and the announcer's "Excellent. Impressive."
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
We call this fixation. In motorcycle racing, it happens when you become overstressed, over stimulated, or your being asked to split your attention on too many things.
It's usually a sign that you're in over your head.
The nice thing about gaming though, is that you can fixate without ending up in an accident. :)
Look, there are studies that have shown that people have different abilities to suspend disbelief. People who are better at it are more tolerant of gore and violence in films as well as games.
Your statement is clearly true for you, but it's not universal. But there are people who enjoy cartoonish violence.
I repeat what I said in a previous comment. Games are about having fun. If it's not fun, don't play it. If you want the violence to be realistic, and it's less fun without it, then assuming you're a normal person, you probably are just better at suspension of disbelief, and the violence for you is no problem.
I don't like it when it's immensely gory. I can tolerate a certain level of violence because I realize I am playing a game and ultimately all I'm doing is causing lines of code to run. But for me, there comes a point where the level of gore and violence are so realistic that that knowledge doesn't help any more - the images are too compelling and I have to work too hard to remind myself it's not real. That is when I stop having fun and I'm not going to play any more. And why should I?? It's just a frickin game!
Love, Squeedle
Your subconscious is now so desensitized to gore and violence that it is filtering it out from your perception. You are now warped.
POKE 36879,8
There are some games I can't play at a high volume or with most family in the room - those are the games with bad language evey minute.
"You know you don't act like a scientist, you're more like a game show host." Dana Barret