Hack and Slash

I was watching a YouTube "Let's Play" video of a computer role-playing game (RPG), and in the specific episode I was watching, a major plot point is the suicide of one of the non-player characters (NPCs) who was driving the game's storyline. The creator of the video dutifully warned viewers in the video description of the event, and noted that it may be triggering for some viewers. Fair enough.

But RPGs, whether on computers/consoles or tabletop, are often remarkably violent in their overall presentation. One of the primary adventure types for fantasy tabletop RPGs, of which Dungeons and Dragons is the prototype, is the dungeon crawl, which, in a number of contexts, resembles nothing so much as a heavily-armed home invasion conducted against a community. Tabletop RPG players have coined the term "murderhobo" to describe this, since it evokes what many characters in Dungeons and Dragons turn out to be: itinerant wanderers with no fixed abode who tend to use wanton slaughter as a solution to every problem they encounter.

This over-the-top level of carnage originated early in the hobby. A measure of the blame may be laid at the feet of one of the creators of Dungeons and Dragons, Gary Gygax. Between endorsing player characters operating in a medieval moral space that strikes us as bloodthirsty today and being a poor writer (and thus failing to adequately describe the risk-reward system he appears to have had in mind), he created a generalized milieu in which killing things was often the best (of not only) way to get things done. The puzzle and problem-solving aspects of the game quickly fell by the wayside.

And as video games have become more sophisticated, matching the increased power and memory of the systems they run on, more open gaming styles have become the order of the day. Gone, for the most part, are games in which killing non-player characters not specifically called out as enemies a one-way trip to a "Game Over" screen. Even games that enact consequences for random NPC kills tend to go easy on the players in such cases; after all, the point is for players to enjoy themselves in a fictional world where the consequences have no real-world bearing.

But unless a game has something particularly egregious in it, and that usually means some sort of link to current events that really bothers people (terrorism and school shootings come to mind), little attention is paid to the high virtual body counts. A player can while away the hours using magical powers to have NPCs literally eaten alive by rats, for instance, but it's one scenario in the same game in which the non-lethal option for a mission results in a woman being given over to a stalker that drives attention.

Of course, role-playing games aren't really the culprits here. In my estimation, the link between heroism and violence is a strong one and so what would otherwise come across as gratuitous violence in other situations is seen as acceptable and praiseworthy, and so it's not thought much about, especially when it's sanitized. Bad things happening to specific characters is often seen as upsetting to many, especially children, but more generalized gunfights and brawls are par for the course.

It all strikes me as strange. Maybe it shouldn't. Perhaps I'm simply more squeamish than most people, and so what's normal to them seems excessive to me. But still, I wonder if a less drastic model or heroism wouldn't be good for us.