Armed conflict

I have this vision in my head of a game from the very distant future. This game is a simulation of married life between two elderly people. They've been married for forty years, and your partner is now suffering from Alzheimer's. The game tasks the player with maintaining a healthy relationship with their partner while simultaneously giving a deeper insight into the human condition. The game, in essence, is a videogame version of Away From Her.

This game can't exist right now for a number of reasons, not least of which is the current inability for videogames in general to move beyond simple binary commands as their primary input structure (i.e., a button is either pressed or depressed, or a motion is made or not made). The number of combinations of button presses can create the illusion of control or of more sophisticated interaction with a game, but it's still simply that – an illusion.

I can see technology improving in a way that allows for deeper interaction with the medium in the future. That I'm not especially worried about, unless we see a desire to continue to placate the "traditional" gamer (and thus, stick to "traditional" control schemes). There's something I'm much more worried about, and we've dug this hole ourselves – the question of conflict.

All media is concerned with conflict of a sort, and so-called "great art" is borne of this conflict. The intersection of form and the deconstruction of form in visual arts; the much more literal (no pun intended) narrative conflict in literature; the tension between songcraft and experimentation in music. In gaming, conflict can be handled as in narrative conflict, but more often than not, devolves into perfunctory good vs. evil conflict, and the easiest way to demonstrate that is through the use of fighting and/or killing.

This is true of nearly every game I've played. There is physical violence in nearly every genre of game. It's the part of a game that one actually gets to participate in almost 90% of the time. There's a massive, overarching plot in Red Dead Redemption, but more often than not, the solution to your problems is through the use of violence (even in their binary "good or bad" character alignment setup, good actions often lead to a shoot out or physical confrontation of some sort). That game is maybe not the best example, as that style of conflict was prevalent in that time period and to remove or change it would destroy the temporal continuity.

Maybe a better example is any Final Fantasy game. Do the plots of those games necessarily demand constant confrontation with wildlife or roving bands of fighters or with random, giant bosses? No. They don't. You could have an entire Final Fantasy game that made sense without a single physical battle. People would hate this game because they've been trained to think of games as something to conquer, something to defeat – and the best way to do that, in a narrative-based game, has been and will probably continue to be, killing or defeating whatever gets in your way. And as long as the economics of videogaming continue the way they do, with a primarily teenaged male-dominated demographic who have disposable incomes and a hormone-influenced virtual bloodlust, it won't change.

I don't believe that physical conflict needs to be eradicated from the medium. Far from it. There have been terrific games based around this central conceit, including both of the games I've already mentioned. However, there's no denying that it's a crutch. It's the path of least resistance for a developer to shoehorn in some "game-y" bits into their videogame. The story and the actions you're performing are often so dissociated that for people who haven't grown up with the medium and adjusted to its quirks, can be extremely offputting.

As with films, books, and television, there has to be a variety of experiences and a variety of experiences that aren't tailored towards one particular group of people. I would play the videogame version of Away From Her if the gameplay was intrinsically tied to the narrative and simultaneously showed me a way of thinking about things that I hadn't thought of before. That's what I want all games to do, whether they use physical conflict or not. If we're committed to telling many different stories, we're going to need many different ways of telling those stories, or the medium will become simply an exercise in recycling.