Guns and Swords and Blood and Death

In Tomb Raider Anniversary (the excellent remake of first one, with the pyramid tits and two-foot draw distance), Lara Croft has made it all the way to the lost city of Atlantis. Whilst constantly hunting an ancient treasure, she’s avoided primitive traps and gunned down bears that want to wear her skin like a grizzly g-string: she’s determined, confident and independent.

And then Larson Conway appears. He’s a gruff blockhead with a plaid shirt and a Southern accent. She’s got her guns trained on him, but he isn’t nervous. She’s an archaeologist, right? She’s a pacifist, right? She’s a GIRL, right? Lara drops Conway with a barrage of bullets – she realises that she’s too determined to let this guy hamper her progress, crosses the moral threshold, and marks the birth of the video game conscience in one powerful cut scene.

Well… not exactly. Or at all. Fast forward to Tomb Raider Underworld and Lara is now a killing machine. She guns down nameless, faceless goons without a moment’s hesitation and then fumbles for a shotgun to blast the face off a panther. After one murder, what are 563 more?

So what is it with video game heroes and senseless, mindless murder? I’m 20 years old, and so far I haven’t killed anyone – not even by accident – and I don’t particularly intend to for the rest of my life. It’s not something I have circled on my calendar or a post it note I’ve stuck to my monitor, and it’s something I generally try to avoid. But in terms of videogames, I’ve killed a lot of people. Probably about a million by now, seeing as shooters are my favourite games.

Take Grand Theft Auto: The Lost and Damned; according to Rockstar’s stat tracking services, I’ve killed 489 guys in 10 hours. Rival gangsters, vicious coppers, random pedestrians, foreign tourists, old age pensioners and even my own team mates, a couple of times. As the morally ambiguous biker, Johnny Klebitz, I’ve killed more people than Sylvester Stallone has in every Rambo film combined (439, if you were curious).

This is not so much an ethical epiphany on my part, but an overwhelming disappointment that games are self-limiting in the fact that almost every hero has a gun or a sword or two guns or two swords.

Why must every encounter end with bloodshed? In Far Cry 2, can I not bribe the guards to let me past, rather than fill them with lead? Can’t I try lying to them, intimidating them, negotiating with them? Mirror’s Edge has an achievement for completing the story “without shooting an enemy”, but that doesn’t mean outsmarting them, hiding from them and ultimately avoiding them altogether. It means kicking them in the shins until they fall over instead of gunning them down. Brave, but far from ideal.

How about a game set in Iraqistan, but instead of being a grizzled soldier or an anxious recruit, you play as a photojournalist whose job is to take snaps of war and torture, and stay alive in the process. If you come across enemies, you can’t simply pull out your AK-47 and mow them down, you must jump in your jeep and drive off into the desert, bullets whizzing past your head. How much of an impact would be caused if your camera changed the tide of war faster than a pistol?

There are plenty of exciting careers and adventures that could be turned into excellent video games, without narrowing the play mechanics to “shoot”, “reload” and “take cover” – Fireman, Astronaut, Storm Chaser and Deep Sea Diver, just to name a few. How about a policeman who’s more likely to use handcuffs than a firearm and more likely to stop a car with a spike strip than a rocket launcher?

I’ll probably never get sick of shooting people, but I just hope that the games industry will grow up and tell stories without the ever present framework of guns and swords and blood and death.