The “Long Tail” is an economic term that describes long-term revenue generation, the ability to earn money years and years after something’s initial release. Games, or products in general, that design their monetization model effectively to capitalize on the “Long Tail” end up becoming a very effective source of consistent income. For example, one benefit of games released digitally is that so long as your game exists on a digital storefront, it will have the ability to be bought for as long as that storefront still exists. Participate in one or two seasonal sales, and suddenly your game can be brought back into the spotlight and earning money, even if you’re selling it for 50% off. Or, you could develop and release Downloadable Content (DLC), a smaller add-on to a game that brings new content to a year-old game, exciting existing fans and potentially grab new players as well.

                The current rise of live-service games is the latest “Long Tail” monetization strategy trend in the gaming industry. A lot of games are promising long roadmaps, releasing a baseline game that features online features that developers promise to keep online and updated with new content every so often. This can be very enticing model for both players and stock holders. Players will be able to purchase a game and get a lot of value out of it for months or years, being promised fresh, new content; a game that promises to stay fun and relevant for years after a purchase. For investors, it’s good to know that a single product could have the ability to generate revenue for years after its release date without going on sale and stay on the top of market trends.

                However, how is this going to work when there are dozens upon dozens of live-service games on the market, all of them vying for the spotlight, all of them fighting for your time and money? Is it wise to design and develop a game that is very focused on “road-mapping” and “Long Tail” in a market that’s oversaturated with other games that are trying to do this? How is one working human being going to enjoy more than one live-service game, especially when competition is dropped during flooded time frames? The recent marketing fumble that EA pulled was costly: they released Anthem and Apex: Legends within weeks of each other. As a result, EA ended up competing with itself, losing lots of potential customers for Anthem to Apex: Legends, especially since one began to emerge as the objectively more polished game.

                Gamers are humans, usually, of the working class doing around 40-hour work weeks. Some of them are parents, some of them have weekend plans and obligations, some of them work much much more than 40 hours a week, and to stay healthy and sane, they also need to sleep for a third of that week. How then, is a single gamer going to be able to get value out of a game that demands hundreds or thousands of their hours to get to a point of satisfaction? Was it not cruel and inhumane for Star Wars Battlefront 2 to lock away iconic characters like Darth Vader behind barriers that needed literally thousands of hours to unlock? Isn’t it unreasonable to expect a customer to be able to juggle more than one or two live-service games at a time? Their free time is sparse and precious. When the market is oversaturated with “Long Tail” focused games, what ends up happening instead is a spread-out player base, and a selection of games that are all competing against each other for more and more of a gamer’s free time.

                Clean and concise, completable games are becoming more and more rare in the gaming industry, game design focusing more on replayability, procedural generation, gigantic explorable sandboxes, and competitive multiplayer. 2-3 hour experiences are treated like scams, 5-10 hour games as underdeveloped and lacking, 10-20 hour games considered “short”, and 30-60 hour games the normal, expected amount that a game should come with. There are a few demographics that this new gaming landscape discriminates against:

1. People which have sparse or scattered opportunities for games.
2. People who want to play a game at a social gathering.
3. People who want to get the full value of a game without having to commit large quantities of time.
4. People who want closure from a game.
5. People who like to play a variety of games.

Of course, the video game industry is diverse and there will always be a game that exists or will exist soon that satisfies gamers of all kinds of circumstances and tastes, but the high-visibility marketplace, the high-profile news-header game landscape is an important part of game culture that is hurting the gaming on the whole because of this oversaturation of long games. Producers and investors may confuse ‘oversaturation’ with ‘high player demand’ and encourage the development of similar games, rather than trying new things and advancing the gaming industry. It discourages potential gamers or casual gamers from playing games due to intimidation from time commitment, or overshadow games that would actually suit their wants or needs. It stagnates the AAA scene, which a large portion of the player base watches closely. It makes it difficult for games journalists to accurately review games since they take so long to play to get a good picture for. It skews player opinion about video game length towards longer games, casting games with shorter playtimes in a negative light, even though video game length has nothing to do with their quality. And more dangerously, it obfuscates and normalizes monetization in games and delivery of broken or subpar goods with the promise of continuous upkeep and improvement, leading to a very anti-consumer environment.

It should be a gamer’s choice when they decide to clock in hundreds or thousands of hours for a single game. Designing a game that requires a player to play for hundreds of hours in order to get enjoyment out of it is not smart from a marketing perspective (at least when the market is filled with games like that) nor is it creative from a designer standpoint, considering how little you would be contributing to the medium (does your game really need to be an open-world sandbox rpg or battle royale with “optional” monetization schemes?).

What if you still really want to make a “Long Tail” game right now, and want to avoid the marketing and game design problems that come with it? Here are some things to consider:

1. Encourage or enable short play sessions of 15-30 minutes so that even busy people can play. The ability to pop in and out without falling too far behind players who play for long hours can be very attractive and pro-consumer.
2. Have a reasonable amount of mandatory content that can last for decent but completable number of hours, but a lot of compelling optional objectives for players who do actually want to sink hundreds of hours into your game.
3. Be inclusive of local co-op/competitive gaming so that during social gatherings, your game isn’t off the table as an option. Also, try to let casual or non-gamers feel welcome to play.
4. Be fun from start to finish. If your core gameplay loop is fun, players might not mind moving through your content slowly, or being forced to grind.
5. Monetize fairly. Most gamers now have a sharp nose for anti-consumer business practices.
6. By the time you release a game, it should be 100% completed, nothing less. Roadmaps and DLC should not include missing content or major bug fixes. Gamers should be purchasing a complete product, unless it is clearly labeled Alpha/Beta.

While brainstorming ideas for a game, I realized that there was an assumption that I was making about dice in general. I assumed that the outcome of a die-roll was random, that players had no control over the die itself, and the act of influencing the result of a die was cheating.

I decided to turn every one of those assumptions on their head and design a game based off of that, a game where the player could take control of the die.

I scripted a controller for a 6 sided die, giving players the ability to add rotational force to move the die, sort of like Monkey Ball. Unlike Monkey Ball, however, I didn’t want players to be able to roll forever, so I tweaked the weight and forces of the die to make it just agile enough to roll, but also cumbersome to punish mistakes.

Now that I had these mechanics, I wondered what sort of setting or narrative they implied. The phrase “control your fate” sounded very fitting, so I built a world around that.

“You were so average, so mundane, So Boring before you died. 
Morally apathetic, Consciously uninteresting.

I have the good, the bad, the morally ambiguous, the spiritually dubious, 
the strong man, the weak bully, the Worm… 
but then there’s YOU.

You’re in Limbo right now because I can’t figure out if you deserve 
to live in heaven or burn in hell for you Boringness.

So, how about it? 
Give me one last laugh. Let me see you claw and scrape for something 
for once in your life. Today you decide for me whether you go 
to Heaven or Hell.”

You’ve just died, and you were so boring that God is having a hard time deciding where to categorize you.

There is a board game that’s being played that you directly influence with your rolls. Each tile has a moment from your life that was either heavenly or hellish (no matter how mediocre or insignificant) and it’s up to you to land on the right spots to show God your good or bad side.

The bright white obstacles below the board game is what you navigate through when you throw the die. The further you get through the board game, the harder the terrain gets to navigate. With more time, I would have liked to dig into the design of the board game and the terrain to make more interesting difficulty spikes.

https://chimichangle.itch.io/game-of-chance

I was volunteering for the event so I could not participate, however, the theme was especially compelling this year so I did it in my own time anyways. During discussions about the theme, I came across a pitch: You’re running away from home, but home is running after You.

There was something very poetic and potentially meaningful in this analogy. I decided to develop the idea further. Why would you be running from home? Definitely out of fear. Definitely because the idea of being alone and away from your home is more comforting than the idea of staying another day, and suffer through whatever that might entail. I quickly recognized then that I could create an emotional analogy using gameplay.
“What does home mean to you?”
To some, it means danger and anxiety.

This game is meant to evoke the anxiety of running from home, the fear that your past might catch up to you, and the freedom that comes with making it out of a bad situation. I needed to make this house menacing, uncanny and unnerving. The last thing people expect a house to do is move, let alone chase you, so I set up the beginning of the game to be tame. Players start in front of the house; they can examine it, but they can’t enter, the door rejecting their advances. As they lose interest and walk away, the unnerving music and sounds also die down, but at a certain point, they hear the sounds of wood violent snapping and groaning behind them. If they look back, they can see the house lumbering towards them, the music and clicking sounds increasing in intensity the closer you were to the house. If they don’t run hard enough, or if they fall off the road into oblivion, they fail to escape and start over again. “Maybe tomorrow will be better…”

Overall the game was received well during playtests. Players were usually surprised when the house started to move. It had its flaws, however. I needed ways to encourage or force the player to look behind them, otherwise they could just completely ignore the house and race all the way to the end of the road without looking back once. One idea was to make it so that players had to walk backwards, away from the house, while also making sure not to fall off the road. Another was to make the speed and approach of the house dynamic and based on how the player is doing so that I could more easily control the experience that the player had with the house (kind of like the dynamic difficulty in Resident Evil, where if you’re doing well, the game starves you of bullets, but if you’re not, you get fewer spawns and more ammo).

https://chimichangle.itch.io/home-away-from-home

The design of this game began with a simple idea: What if you could see only in a ring around you, where you could see faint blue outlines of the building you’re inside of.

The building you are in has no doors; no entrances, no exits, save for a curiously placed elevator in the center of the mass. The goal is to wander this space, half blind because of the weird way that you see things (I call it Goldilocks vision), to find the keys to unlock the elevator and escape. Goldilocks vision would contribute not only to the aesthetic, but also the gameplay mechanics. What would happen if players could see really far away things, even through walls, but stumble around, bumping into things close to them. Or, if players could see the things in their immediate proximity, but be blind to objectives further than a few meters away? I wanted to see what sort of gameplay would arise from this visualization model, and somehow build a game around it.

Visual References:

Prototypes:

Using Shadergraph, I created an effect where there is a two-tiered visibility check for any given rendering of an object: the boundaries of the inner and outer edge of the ring.

The beginnings of the visual aesthetic. Made in Shadergraph.

A demonstration of the “ring of visibility.” Combined the two shaders together.

An important milestone where I decided to allow the player to expand and contract the Goldilocks zone, allowing the player to decide what they wanted or needed to see.

Added UI and office props to give players more context. I wanted players to feel like they were driving a drone, navigating a deserted office space, tasked to look for clues. I think a huge part of its success as a visualization method is the ability to see pipes and fillers that most games would exclude (understandably, to conserve resources). As I had hoped, being able to see through walls close to you became both a boon and a drawback. You could scout far ahead of you, at the cost of probably bumping into the objects close to you. Level design took on a whole new level of intricacy; I had to think about verticality, hidden objects, and tricky placement of props and objectives to direct player attention and give them interesting things to look at.

Hopscotch Pros: Easy to learn, easy to remember and set up, reasonable test of dexterity for youths, aerobic exercise, trains balance, flexible framework for twists in game rules, masterable, simple and abstract.

Hopscotch Cons: Repetitive, Interest and difficulty curve plateau quickly (occasional spikes when marker lands on double square), losing a turn feels bad, only one player can play at a time, even though it is multiplayer there is no player interaction, inaccessible to those with leg impairments, no aesthetics/flavor, uses dominant leg a lot because the rules prohibit alternating (no switching is tiring, imbalanced muscle and balance training), different shaped markers make it easier/harder to land them accurately, sometimes it takes too long to play.

Brainstorming:

1 Underwater/lowgravityscotch

2 Monkeybarscotch (using arms)

3 Unicyclescotch (hopping)

4 Rockclimbingscotch (skip handholds, only leap climbing allowed)

5 Pool Islandscotch

6 Table Leapingscotch/the floor is lavascotch

7 Wipeoutscotch (if you think about it, Wipeout is a lot like hopscotch)

8 DanceDanceRevoluscotch

9 Nostalghiascotch (Hopscotch while holding a candle. Make sure it doesn’t blow out!)

10 Joustscotch

11 VRscotch

12 Wheelchairscotch (a leg impaired accessible version)

13 Handstandscotch

14 Fingerscotch

15 Oobleckscotch

16 Jugglescotch

17 Jockscotch (any sport but with only hopping)

18 twitch plays hopscotch (with Toribash)

19 Beanbagscotch

20 Goldenbrick roadscotch (do it to Wizard of Oz songs!)

21 LARPscotch (involved one legged live action rpg)

22 RailroadExpresscotch (very long hopscotch, everybody hops in a line)

23 JohnHenryscotch (work together to draw the hopscotch faster than the train can hop)

24 BranchingNarrativescotch

25 Bedevilscotch (be gently poked by sticks from all sides as you attempt to hopscotch)

26 PeetaMallarkscotch (use slightly burnt bread as a marker)

27 SingingInTheRainscotch (requires umbrella and several lamp posts)

28 Biblescotch (hop while carrying a large wooden cross)

29 Birdboxscotch (blindfolded, but also don’t do it it’s probably dangerous)

30 Fastscotch: Time limit to complete course

31 Slowscotch: Must spend time in each box

32 Throw first, draw boxes laterscotch

33 Draw as you hopscotch

34 Co-opscotch (2players, legs tied together)

35 Competitive Monopolyscotch (square owning)

36 Concurrentscotch (Everyone playing on their own spaces, race)

37 Twisterscotch (players navigate to a specific color without knocking over others and themselves)

38 Backwardscotch (hop backwards)

39 PermanentlySkipscotch (the square your marker lands on you must cross out)

40 Jengascotch (erase the square your marker lands on and add to the top)

41 Spectatorscotch (Set up one in a busy area and see who is tempted)

42 Longjumpscotch

43 Interferencescotch (concurrent, throw markers at eachother’s tracks)

44 Snakes n Ladderscotch

45 Stonepathscotch

46 Riverrockscotch (dangerous)

47 Roulettescotch (circular, with added gambling element)

48 Balletscotch (ballet varient for children, pirouettes encouraged)

49 Fractalscotch (have fun drawing it, then hop along your creation)

50 HipHopscotch (do freestyle dance the whole route)

51 Russian Squatcotch

52 Drumscotch (freestyle without a drumkit piece that your marker is on)

53 Propscotch (hide and seek but with hopping)

54 Scotch (a hopping scotch drinking game)

55 HopScotchtape

56 Copscotch (GTA where you run from the hoppers)

57 Sascotch (Sascuatch)

Best Ideas:

LARPscotch – Using available foam swords, I tried sparring while only using one leg and it was honestly very fun already. With added flavor justification and game mechanics, it could become not only a good variation of hopscotch, but yet another fun activity to use foam weapons for.

Jengascotch – It would need to be a variation, but this idea could work. I tried it with the traditional hopscotch set-up, but it would quickly reach a theoretical limit for one legged jump distance, turning it into a prolonged one-legged long jump contest. With a more puzzle-like configuration of squares (and something other than numbers), there might even be strategy involved.

Roulettescotch – A real roulette table would be difficult to carry around all the time, but a giant round one made of chalk and road would be interesting. Players could play as the balls and suddenly you have a set up that’s fun and weird, easy to understand, but also dangerous to teach to minors susceptible to gambling addiction! This combination makes Roulettescotch much more marketable during sales pitches.

JohnHenryscotch – I distinctly remember the story of John Henry, especially since I was exposed to it multiple times in elementary and middle school while learning about American folklore. I feel like I would have loved to have roleplayed as him and lay the tracks (squares) lightning fast while racing the manifestation of a growing capitalist industry (a hopping friend). This also supports much more than 2 players because several people can work as a team to lay the tracks.

Idea Development:

LARPscotch –

Rules and Set Up #1: All players have 1 two-handed foam staff (stab and smack legal) and one brightly colored spell packet. Make a 4×4 grid using chalk/tape on the floor, creating an arena that accommodates a decent amount of shuffling.

Players start in the far corners of the arena. Each player has 3 hit points. An unblocked swing deals 1 damage. Spell packets may be thrown at the ground to lay a spell rune (it occupies the whole square in which it lands), which when stepped on deals 1 damage. Packets may be picked up to be rethrown. Be careful not to step on your own!

A player loses when they have 0 hit points, have two feet on the ground at any point, or if they leave the arena by any means. The goal is to be the last person in the ring. All LARP fighting rules are in play, which means no grabbing, shoving, face and groin attacks, and both hands must be on the staff while swinging.

Playtest #1: The intended audience is young adults – middle age, so I made use of what I had readily available and played with some college friends.
Unfortunately, I forgot that LARP rules are extremely exploitable because points are and damage are scored with every separate instance of contact, so wizened players can just repeatedly lightly tap someone as quickly as they can to deal way more damage than what should be feasible and realistic. The hope was that players would be playful and respectful, have some fun flourishing and engage in swordplay. In reality, the point system breaks down the gameplay and people cave to their instinct to win and rush in to tap an exposed area three times as quickly as possible.

Analysis #1: Having HP made people think about exploitative winning strategies, and the childlike fun was quickly stripped away. Removing the spell packet, players would begin to completely ignore the spaces. Attempting to negotiate a turn-based system was silly. All hope seemed to be lost, until two late arrivals came, saw the set-up, and spontaneously decided to spar.

Playtest #2: Without rules, aside from an assumed arena, one foot hopping, and respectful boffer play, the intended experience was achieved. Players had fun dancing around and pretend spar, twirling, losing balance, engage in interesting fake combat.

Analysis: On its own, the game looks interesting enough to inspire spontaneous play. Without rules aside from one legged combat and a small arena, player seemed to be encouraged to just have fun, rather than do what it takes to win. This might just be a toy at this point, or a game with a few explicit rules and many many more implicit, unspoken rules, ones defined by the players. It was truly fun to watch and play however.

Problems: Initially, this variation was intended to solve the following problems about hopscotch:

Repetitiveness, games taking too long, no player interaction, no aesthetics/flavor, imbalanced markers, dominant leg overuse, low skill ceiling.

With the last iteration, the game seems to have fixed all of these problems, aside from the markers (spell packets were ultimately removed). Games went very quickly, each player would evolve their personal sparring techniques, there is plentiful player interaction, imagination and props aided in adding flavor, and players could exercise a lot more, engaging their core and their hand eye coordination.

JohnHenryscotch –

Due to bad road conditions I could not playtest this game. I still want to elaborate on it however because the more I think about it the more appealing it sounds.

Rules and Set Up: Split into two teams. One player will be the Steam Powered Track Layer. The other players will play as the Railroad Workers.

First, decide on the beginning and end points, and draw one set of parallel lines ( || ) from start to finish for the Steam Powered Track Layer. Then mark a point where the Mountain begins. The goal is to build your side of the rail all the way to the end before the other team can finish theirs.

The Steam Powered player may never have two feet on the ground. To build their track, they must draw a horizontal line ( |-| ) through the middle of the track and mark one rail ( |-‘| ). Then they may hop forward and draw another.

The Railroad Workers may have any amount of appendages touching the ground, but in order to build their track they must make a square and mark both sides ( |,_,|) before they can continue.

Once the Mountain is reached, both teams must exert more effort to build the rails. The Steam Powered player must mark both rails ( |’-‘| ) before moving forward, and the Railroad Workers must make two squares and mark each end ( |,-|- ,| ).

Analysis/Problem: This game would solve the problems with no player interaction, plateau of difficulty curve. It would also have a higher skill ceiling, asymmetry for increase interest and replayability, teamwork building. It would have a clear goal, relatively easy to remember the set up and rules, and very famous folklore roots, perhaps a game playable right after learning about John Henry. A problem I can foresee is imbalance, mostly due to not being able to playtest this. Both teams have very different advantages. Repetitiveness is still a problem but hopefully with the new skill ceiling, asymmetry, and the Mountain, the interest curve won’t plateau like regular hopscotch.

       I tend to play games starting as a pacifist. Violence does not make me squeamish, nor do I believe that violence and killing are strictly immoral. I have just become wary of how a lot of games handle killing.

       I first became aware of this discomfort while I played Tomb Raider (2013). It started out fabulously; It was compelling to watch the tensions and character dynamics, and see how Lara interacted with people before she had ever picked up a gun. I fully empathized with her when she retched after being forced to shoot and kill someone for the first time in her life, a gut-wrenching feeling that many soldiers in the army have had to deal with in the real world. Whoever it was, maybe they were an asshole, maybe they were a psychopath or a deranged cultist, but regardless, that person had lived for at least 20 years, a literal lifetime’s worth of memories, feelings, and relationships, and Lara snuffed it all out with a single pull of a trigger. It was a very memorable scene and I looked forward to seeing how else they would elaborate on her character, expand on her guilt and developing morality. Unfortunately, 4 hours later, I realized that none of that scene mattered.

       Every encounter, I tried to avoid as much conflict as possible, playing as stealthily as I could. After watching that extended cutscene, I knew how she felt about killing one person, and it would have been cruel to subject her to more. This was an unsustainable game plan, however. The level design and game mechanics wouldn’t let me sneak past certain enemies or stay hidden for long. Even if I got through a section unnoticed, there would be a scripted encounter where the cultists somehow magically knew exactly what I was doing and where I was going. After every encounter, I tallied up the dead bodies of the people I had to kill. By the end of the game, I was forced to kill over 500 men. Who the **** were they? Why and how were they on this godforsaken island? Why were ALL of them 5’ 10” white males in their late 20s or mid-30s wearing jeans or sweatpants and hoodies (occasionally with their hood up)? Did they not have families, friends, hopes and aspirations? Why did it feel like every single one of them was a clone birthed from a tube, born with the sole purpose of finding Lara and screaming “there she is”?

      10 hours in, Lara could kill easier than breathing, but in her cutscenes, she still pretended to be sore about killing, that she felt a twinge of guilt, a bit of hesitation every time she ended someone’s life. Lara Croft’s game designers forced her, and in consequence, me, to become a mass murderer. I was appalled. After I finished the game, I browsed through popular games in recent memory that I recalled did something similarly terrible: Bioshock: Infinite, Red Dead Redemption, Uncharted, Assassin’s Creed, World of Warcraft, Battlefield, Call of Duty, Hatred…

       The list is nearly endless, and it keeps growing. I wince every time a new game comes out that just makes the problem worse. Uncharted 4 has you kill hundreds of company bodyguards for the sake of cinematography and action, under the guize that it is actually a touching story about reconnecting with family. Far Cry 5 pits you against all of small-town America that respawns periodically, a town that is unfazed and infinitely able to supply you with more cultists to shoot (and also mind controlled zombies who are actually just regular people…). World of Warcraft makes you kill hundreds of kobolds, but for what? The Greater Good, or was it just because the innkeeper was going to offer you 10 silver and 100 exp? The poor ratfolk just didn’t want you to take their candles.

       I love games that treat living beings with respect. As I said before, I am not afraid of violence. I gladly take up arms against worthy foes or established scum or complicated predicaments. I want to love, hate, fear, desire what I’m fighting against. I need them to have a face because otherwise, I would be a sociopath, killing people for just monetary reward, instead of perhaps because we couldn’t find common ground in a high stakes argument, or because I was protecting my kin from danger, or because they wouldn’t budge when I said I needed to pass through the gate. Death must be used as a plot device, as a means to advance character, as a way to garner empathy from the audience, as a way to increase stakes, as a way to bring change to a world, positive or negative. Death and the act of killing should not be the only purpose of your actions.

       This practice in games is insidious. I loved games because I thought they expanded my range of empathy, allowing me to experience situations that I couldn’t in life, but instead, games were numbing me to the sensation of death.

        I’d like to carefully examine the player fantasy of a few games to help prove my point, using Uncharted 4, Hitman, Borderlands, and Battlefield V as examples.

Uncharted 4: To play an interactive action-adventure blockbuster cinematic as an ex-treasure hunter, and see how Nathan Drake tries to deal with the dull lifestyle of marriage and going straight.

Hitman: To play as a hitman born and designed to kill by blending into a crowd and cleverly devising a plan to silently assassinate his targets.

Borderlands: To be a badass outlaw with radical abilities (and a bit of heroism) on a planet with no rules.

Battlefield V: Playing as a soldier in World War II, while also having high octane, action movie drama.

        Uncharted 4 is a highly story-driven adventure, focused primarily on embodying a specific character, intended to have a critical role in the story, and expected to go through changes and facilitate the telling of an engaging story. Uncharted is also about treasure hunting and puzzle solving. To Nathan Drake, killing is necessary to accomplish his goals, as his adversaries have put him and his family in an unreasonable and dangerous situation. This, however, breaks apart the larger the pile of bodies is that Nathan leaves behind. He is supposed to be a man who has cut his ties with the criminal world and gone clean, and yet somehow I’m supposed to take satisfaction in his quiet summer beach house and loving family gathering knowing that I personally witnessed him kill almost the entirety of Shoreline Defense Corp?

        This was a game that had a specific player fantasy, one which “entertaining gunplay” was not necessarily a core part of. One thing that many players enjoyed, however, was the stealth mechanics where Nathan worked with his brother to take down enemies, and the amazing grappling hook that allowed Nathan to pull off quick maneuvers to reposition or land on enemies. I set the game to Easy and played it the whole way through with only my fists, a grappling hook, and a single magazine in a handgun, and it was an amazing experience, allowing me to much more closely follow the original player fantasy that I had hoped the game was designed to emulate: Indiana Jones, the game.

        Next, Hitman is actually a game with a player fantasy that involves killing, centered around a character who was born, taught, and designed to kill. Why then, in this game, do I kill great magnitudes fewer people than I do in Uncharted or Tomb Raider? Why do I believe that this game about a born and bred sociopath treats killing and death with more respect than these two games? The first, more clear answer to these questions is because the game rewards tactical and clean play. The fewer loose ends you have, the higher your score will be, which naturally reduces the number of unintentional deaths that occur. You’ll have to choke out unfortunate witnesses, but otherwise, the list of casualties is usually limited to the target of your contract. Interestingly, the game also plays with the character of the people that you’ve been tasked to kill. Sometimes it’s a pompous, rich asshole, or perhaps this time it’s your manager Diana, someone who tried to escape this life, someone who cares deeply for Agent 47, knowing that he can change, that under his cold, sociopathic veil lies a heart of gold.

       Hitman could have been a game just about assassination, and I would have begrudgingly accepted it as a game that handles death adequately, basically being a single player version of a competitive shooter like Counter-Strike, where the focus of the game is on the gameplay, the act of shooting and the player fantasy of killing with style. However, Hitman takes it one step further and respects the marks that you hunt down, and excuses the deaths of the rare innocent here and there because that’s just the unfortunate nature of his occupation. Agent 47 is also shown to have a lot of internal struggle over his purpose, several times adopting animals, tending to gardens, and attempting to settle down in a church, only to ripped away from his wants; death, an unrelenting driving force in his story and character development.

       Borderlands is a video game set in a world that has embraced nihilism. You’re stuck on a planet whose occupants have gone mad, and just living in that space is probably making you go mad as well. Psychopaths are pit against psychopaths; death is the culture on this planet. This game’s fantasy is about violent absurdity, and so its treatment of death is not only more respectful than how it is treated in Tomb Raider, but also more appropriate, fitting and entertaining.

Battlefield V is an action-packed FPS game that thrives on its wild, player-driven gameplay. It’s very fun for its target audience. There is a large variety of powerful tools that players can utilize. The gunplay is exciting, and the ability to destroy environments leads to numerous entertaining youtube clips. I, however, believe that this game is insulting and disrespectful in regards to the way that it treats the lives of soldiers and of death, somehow being more immoral and detrimental than Borderlands, worse than the game about wonton genocide and fun exploding bodies (and I’ve already stated how I actually think Borderlands is respectful for how it treats death, thanks to its lighthearted nature and self-awareness). Why does Battlefield V try so hard to be thought-provoking and sensitive when its gameplay is so blatantly the opposite of the slow, quiet tone that they keep trying to set? How could they have thought it was okay to tell me “Until you’ve pulled the trigger on the enemy, you’re not ready for war, you’re only ready to die”, while literally marking blurry silhouettes of the “enemy” in the distance with red triangles above their heads, as if war was so ****ing simple? How could they think that their game was deep insightful just because of slow, black fades with quotes like “The war would thoroughly explore man’s potential. Finest Moments. Darkest Hours,” and then show off a release trailer like this? If the game wanted to be a serious take on World War II and the struggle of soldiers in one of the cruelest conflicts the world has ever seen, sure, by all means, do so. An earnest attempt to depict the loss of life and innocence of soldiers over the course of the war or the acts of cruelty that people are forced into under the pressure of death and destruction would have been impactful, and a meaningful contribution to the tradition of respecting the World Wars. Instead, however, Battlefield V is just a tone-deaf game that completely throws out a major aspect of its player fantasy (being a soldier in World War II) in favor of actiony gunplay and competitive shooting.

       Games have as much a right as film and literature to feature violence and death. However, games, game developers, and gamers will have to mature collectively to catch up in depth and sincerity.

       Here is a list of some games I respect along with brief descriptions of why I believe they handle the killing of other sentient beings well. Perhaps by presenting as many positive examples I can, we might reach a better understanding of the commonality between them.

Witcher 3: There is one side quest that fully, completely rewards you for playing mercifully towards peaceful monsters. It teaches a valuable lesson, that just because we label them as monsters, they’re no less worth preserving than humans, elves and dwarves. It’s a side quest that felts extremely validating to earn the approval of.

Prey: The game begins by asking you a few generic philosophical questions. They’re gentle and pretty easy, but the answer to each question gains new meaning as you unravel more of the plot. Do you push the fat man over the rails to stop the trolley from killing the people tied to the tracks? Y/N? Now that you’ve answered that, please put it to practice on that flesh and blood fat man over there, your brother and business partner, and lifelong friend.

Metal Gear Solid V: [Spoiler] There is one scene where you have to personally contain a quarantine for a parasite that is spreading in your crew, people that you handpicked from the battlefield. It drives people half mad for sunlight, a mechanism to lure its host towards others to infect. You have to examine the sick one by one and shoot to kill if they are infected. It is most heart-wrenching when they stand straight and salute you, knowing what has to be done, loyal to the end.

Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance: Jack has fundamental ideological differences with the main antagonists of the game. Neither party will budge, and so philosophical debates have to be won by force. Eventually, one of the bosses you fight (actually a character who you can play as in later levels to see his point of view) has very similar motivations to Jack. Both of them want to save the world, its just that they have a different but incompatible way of accomplishing it. “No more talk, draw your sword and let history decide who’s right.”

Fire Emblem Series:The enemies that you fight tend to be obvious forces of evil, but the reason why I include this series is because of how the games make you feel about the members of your party. A lot of the time, new, special members can be recruited from the battlefield, however, death is permanent for every character in this story. Players learn to take a lot of care when they place their soldiers, making sure not to expose them to excessive danger, adding a nurturing element to these war games.

Fallout Series: As you roam the atomic scarred land and scavenge for resources, sometimes you might stumble into an area thinking that it’s just occupied by barbaric raiders or something, but after you loot the place and their dead bodies, there might be notes or logs or audio logs that they made, and you might realize that you just wiped out people just trying to survive, people running legitimate businesses, or people just trying to protect their territory.

Hotline Miami: This game is practically a condensed version of this blog post. It’s a flashy action game where you’re gunning down people 90 miles per hour, running room to room to psychedelic lights and music. When you complete a level, however, the music is cut off and you have to walk slowly and silently back out of the building, giving you lots of time to look at the string of bodies you’ve left behind you. Not to mention the ending, but I’d rather not spoil it.

FTL: Faster Than Light: Before you finish off a ship, almost all of the time you can choose to spare them. The monetary rewards are almost the same, and sometimes the rewards change, like if you were attacking a slave trader. There are even special encounters that test what sort of ideals you have for a galaxy led by the Federation.

NieR: Automata: I can’t do this game’s philosophy adequate justice with less than a paragraph to work with. Just know that it is a 40-hour philosophy experiment dealing with existentialism and the nature of life and death.

Spec Ops: The Line: This game sets itself up as a B-rated clone of games like Call of Duty, but halfway through you start to realize how it’s subverting the genre, and how it’s critiquing not only FPS games but also you, the player, for playing these sorts of games. It’s absolutely worth your time to play or watch an analysis video on, and I think it’s a valuable and classic example of game-as-critique.

Undertale:Whether you choose to be pacifist, genocidal, or something in between, the game is keeping track. The environment and its characters respond to who and how often you kill.

Bayonetta Series: You’re usually fighting weird and perverted renditions of Angels, a twist to the usual assumption that Angels are a force of good. They’re sentient as well, and the reasons for fighting them are clear: there’s something sinister going on, and they’re a part of it, spreading their twisted influence to unassuming humans that still believe that Angels are worthwhile to worship. Also, there’s a lightheartedness that puts emphasis on Bayonetta’s humorous and sexy style more than anything else.

        And many more! Fighting is one of the fundamental ways to resolve a conflict, and it’s a core component in accomplished works in all mediums of storytelling. I am not advocating for a reduction of violence in video games, I’m not here to report the evils of video games to your local politician. I merely ask for game developers and players to find deeper meaning in how violence can be used.