Is it just me or do most games have ''violence'' that is kind of comic, how can we have violence / explosions etc. that make the player sad/ angry / shocked / frightened etc. rather than able to say haha- blood''n''guts! or cool what a good explosion effect! anyway enough of this! Back to work.

By making the targets of violence meaningful, which means characterizing the victims properly.

Imagine an RTS game in which you were embodied on the field of war. You had men underneath you - individual personalities and abilities which you were responsible for. Apart for deploying them as ordinance, you also interact with them, boosting their morale, shielding them from "higher ups", protecting your own so the depleted War Office doesn''t reassign your best to other, strange companies. You get to know these personalities - their histories, their families, their fears.

Then one of them dies. The game lingers (not dawdles!) to allow you to experience the impact of the loss. You can''t just "replace a unit"; a specific set of skills and a specific perspective are lost. Your other men refer to the absence, with emotion, often trying to avoid saying the name of the departed comrade because it''s too painful.

Suddenly, it is neither comic nor glamorous. It''s personal and meaningful.

In a lesser way, you could make people feel the lose of a game character by making that character useful. For example, in an RTS, I build units, and have them rush - if they die I can quickly and easily replace them, but if I have only a set number, protecting my units, and not wanting them to die, becomes very important.

You could also use Oluseyi''s approch, and make each character have a personallity. FF7 comes to mind - I was sorta sad when Aries died - she was a cool character in the game, and had the only Healing limit break in the game. So I didn''t want Aries to die because I liked the character, and I found her skills useful.

I''m not sure how effective this would be, but you could keep the violence to a minimum, and only have explosions/gun fights at key moments in the game.

I always feel sad when the little puppy in ADoM dies

We''ve discussed ways to make the loss of characters more powerful for the player in other posts. It seems to me that this thread is focussed more on the visceral experience of violence.

I think most players are fairly immune to gore by now. If you had Aeris die in a FPS game, I guarantee than a substatial number of players would shoot her corpse in the face a few times before leaving the room. God knows I''ve capped Natalya in Goldeneye more often than poor aim can account for.

How, then, can we reintroduce the shock factor of violence? There are many approaches. Here are three, right off the top of my head:

First, make it less common. Most games have so much ambient violence that the player gets into a "battlefield mindset". You''re so busy vaporizing aliens and dodging plasma grenades that when Captain Keyes dies your only response is, "Damnit, Keyes! Pay attention!" Even in FFVII, it took a lot of lead-up (several games of it, in fact) for someone to really be shocked and hurt that a major character would drop dead for ever in an RPG. (Why you couldn''t just chuck a pheonix down at her is open to debate. She''d been killed by worse things than swords before then.)

Second, Show consequences. Take a lesson from Mystic River. Clint Eastwood has been responsible for more ass-kicking violence than most Hollywood personalities, but the two deaths in that movie were more powerful than any pile of alien ninja criminals you''ve ever seen. The victims were characters, the consequences of their deaths were shown, and the audience was given a sense of loss, not just a sense of relief that that guy wasn''t shooting at James Bond anymore.

Third, make mistakes permanent. I don''t want to ressurect the game-save issue again, but if I had to live with my decisions I''d be more affected by the events in the game world. Knowing that the girl''s death has cost me nothing more than a quick-load and five minutes of catch-up softens the blow a little bit. Make it the player''s responsibility to keep characters alive, and when they die, make it the player''s fault. What''s more, make it impossible, or at least very, very difficult to undo their death. In Tactics Ogre, it was a long time before you could revive a fallen character, and even then it took some work. You had to cast a difficult and rare spell, and you had to do it before the end of the battle. Since some battles took forty minutes or more, only the most anal players would actually reload and try again. Losing characters affected the game, but you could still fight on unless your main character ate it, and often you would, but you would always know that it''s your fault that Canopus died, and later on you will miss him when characters ask where he is, or you are unable to take certain story paths.

Another (that is, in addition to all comments already given) way to make the violence more meaningful is to make death less immediate, at least for NPCs (it''s not "entertaining" (can''t think of a better word at the moment) for a PC to suffer a long drawn out death). Watch a good war movie (We Were Soldiers, the opening of Saving Private Ryan, Band of Brothers, etc.) and notice that the deaths are horrifying not because of the blood and guts, but because there''s nothing you can do but sit and listen as your friend, who''s just been shot, cries for his mother as he lies there bleeding to death. Of course, I''m not sure you can get the entire effect in a game, since part of it is that the words "that could be you a week, a day, ten seconds from now" are running through your head. In games and most movies, people die far too quickly and cleanly for it to have much impact.

Good observation, Way Walker. Having your buddy drop like a sack of potatoes is enough to elicit a sigh, and maybe make you swear under your breath, but it ends his participation in the scenario. If you had the chance to carry him out of there, or drag him behind cover and bandage him, and thus save him for later fights and plot value, then he''d still be a very real element of the game, and worthy of emotional investment.

That''s good thinking. The same principle could apply to enemies, so you''d have to be careful about just shooting until everyone falls down and then putting them out of mind. "Checking" a body or covering the area where an enemy went down, just in case he manages to send a few more bullets your way would be a profoundly effective gameplay element.

You shoot the bad guys, see that your buddy is hit, grab his drag-strap and start hauling him toward a broken-down car, when suddenly one of the "dead" enemies starts shooting at you again. Do you use your hurt buddy for cover? Do you keep dragging, and return fire with your sidearm? Do you drop his and grab some cover yourself, hoping to neutralize the threat and go back for him later? This simple feature complicates a gunfight considerably. Maybe your pal is bleeding. Maybe he can still shoot a little, and can cover you while you bandage him. This is such a sweet idea, expecially for multiplayer, that it boggles the mind.

This was done, to a lesser extent, in ''Fire Emblem'' for the GBA. Any character you lose is gone forever or will be real hard to get back again (again, IF possible...). Then, you have the option to ''carry'' a character at the cost of cutting down the unit''s movement and attack factor. So, when one of your units (all of which are unique and with whom you''ve been interacting for hours) is badly hurt, will you risk another of your units to get him/her outta harm''s way, or will you accept his/her fate? Not that easy to decide... except if you''d rather reload your game from the beginning of the scenario than playing (role-playing?) fair - the dreaded game-save issue!!


"Senri no michi mo ippo kara (A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step...)"