author website: lunarbaboon.com
Even if I don’t want to end violence in fiction (it’s a very effective theme of conflict) I do think there’s too much out there that normalizes the extremism of it, and especially the fetishization of death.
In the one hand, you have fiction where large groups congregate around arenas where prisoners fight to the death, and applaud the bloody carnage. I firmly believe there’s not nearly so many of this kind of spectator as fiction implies.
On the other, there’s fiction where, even amidst a chaotic and violent conflict, the heroes labor to save even singular lives of people lost or separated from the destruction - retaining focus on the preservation of life as the goal, and violence as the unfortunate but necessary method to achieve that.
We’ve also seen this in Marvel vs DC Movie universes - where DC has reveled in mass death and destruction, while Marvel, even if their large-scale spectacle makes it seem unrealistic, emphasizes the narrative point of characters going well out of their way to keep people safe; 90% of Cap’s signature Avengers “Why should I listen to you” plan being around how to keep the aliens away from innocent people.
I’m glad Game of Thrones has had a bit of this analysis too. There’s some very well-planned and tragic deaths in there, but also plenty that just bought into the theme of “anyone can die” without building any useful or engaging narrative theme.
To make the point in an unnamed game: This game showed one interesting person as the main character. After one chapter, it killed them off in a surprise twist. This was well-written and unexpected…but then I realized on my next play I just wasn’t interested in continuing - not out of sadness, but boredom. What they’d gained in shock value, they’d destroyed in stakes.
Odd aside, it’s my test in a horror game to see if I should actually take threats seriously. If you see something creepy- can it kill you? Some games it’s just creepy stuff that can only scare you- but if it can’t hurt you then no big deal and loses all risk and threat.
Amnesia did this really well imo. The first half of Rebirth has no direct threats, but many many things that make you feel uneasy. You won’t know offhand when you’re finally in a “lethal” situation, and it hides its failure states a bit so that you’re never sure if you could have avoided an encounter.
The end result is something very close to the one-chance experience of being a character in a horror movie, complete with unrealistic escapes.
Amnesia is one of my all-time favorite games. F.E.A.R. should have been scary, but all the scary parts were completely non lethal, so I just laughed and ran through them. Layers of Fear was similar in that a lot of the time it was creepy, but not lethal. It’s kinda like checking if friendly fire is on or if fire damages the player. You need to set expectations in games or play with the player’s ideas of what is and is not safe.