When Does Gore Get In the Way of Gameplay? 141
Wired is running a story inspired by the level of gore in the recent Wolverine game that wonders: how much is too much? It mentions a study we discussed in February which indicated that violence tended to interest gamers less than other characteristics.
"... the longer you play a 'twitch' action game, the less you notice the cultural content — the gushing blood, the shrieks of agony. You're too busy focusing on the gameplay. I noticed this with Wolverine. For the first hour, I found the deranged bloodshed both shocking and exciting; it made me feel like I 'was' Logan, the grunting, killing-machine character from Marvel Comics' X-Men universe. But as I became more expert, the cultural shell of the game boiled away. In a sort of staring-into-the-cascading-numbers-of-the-Matrix way, I found myself looking past the visible aspects of the game and savoring the underlying, invisible mechanics of play. ... The game became pure physics and algorithms: Vectors, speed and collision detection. The gore had become mostly irrelevant."
can't you turn Gore off? (Score:5, Funny)
I hated an inconvenient truth. all i want him to do is shut up.
but really in most violent video games can't you turn the blood and gore off?
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They really need to start making the bodies expel fluids from appropriate orifices, bugs start gathering on corpses that you've left to rot, bowels spill out from appropriate locations, but cut down on the over-the-top gore. I prefer realistic gore, not gore for gore's sake.
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Re:can't you turn Gore off? (Score:4, Insightful)
The best feature of Soldier of Fortune was the gore. You aim for the shoulder and blow the guy's arm off and he can't shoot you anymore, voila. You can tell, just by looking, whether you hit the guy critically or not. If his neck is spurting blood, you know you don't need to put another bullet in him.
The game's big selling feature was accurate weapons and dismemberment, so if you don't like those things, play something else.
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Madworld [gametrailers.com] has lots of gore! You can't top it!
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I somewhat agree with you - but I always want the option to turn gore off. Lets say a little kid comes over with some relative or something, and isn't exposed to that sort of stuff. Kids will naturally gravitate towards videogames and therefore, me. (when I'm playing them) I want to turn it off so I don't warp his mind. :P
I find excessive gore to be pointless, but dismemberment is handy in first person shooters.
What really blows me is when I'm playing a TBS, and after killing something gore goes everywhere.
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sigh (Score:3, Insightful)
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that's the truth!
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"that's the thing about inconvenient truths, they're inconvenient, you can't turn them off, even of you ignore them they don't go away ...."
Yes, but he was talking about "An inconvenient truth", not an inconvenient truth. You know when the media wants to accuse somebody of taking bribes they say "John Doe took bribes" within quotes and not plain , John Doe took bribes. You can manipulate and get away with the first, with the second you can quickly get slapped with a lawsuit.
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It's Lieberman [intelligen...ontent.com] who keeps getting in the way of game play.
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Turning off the blood isn't enough. There should also be an option to replace all guns with walkie-talkies.
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Being able to turn the gore off is mainly for Puritans
... or those with weaker graphics cards.
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Yeah, it'd be nice if there was a slider, rather than a toggle. Full up would be normal, full down, none, but some actual degrees in the middle. I don't want to play with none, but some games, it just gets distracting from the game itself, which is a problem.
Silent Hill 2 (Score:5, Informative)
For me, gore doesn't add anything at all, save for when it's used sparingly, to the point where it is so unexpected that it shocks. However, if ever there was an example of a game which didn't need gore to shock and terrify then, for me, nothing can beat Silent Hill 2. Such were the psychological shocks that there were points when I would be playing this alone, at night, and decide I'm better off playing something a little more fluffy to wipe the images from my mind. Sure, it had gore, but it was delivered to compliment the terror I was already experiencing from the suggests the game was making.
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So basically you just said that the game wouldn't be complete without augmented gore. So true!
Many games would be "compelete" without the gore, ala any FPS where you can turn off the blood and gibbs (Quakes, Counter-strike, Duke Nukem 3D, and many more). You can usually play these games unimpeded with gore off, and if you never saw the gore before you wouldn't know any difference. Many people think the gore&blood on/off setting is for kids, but it's primarily used by the best of the best in the Quake
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Re:Silent Hill 2 (Score:4, Insightful)
However, /my/ argument is the opposite. When I shoot someone in the forehead, I expect some blood (at least). I'm sorry, but when a game model simply falls down after a headshot it makes the gameplay cartoonish.
I guess the question how much blood and gore would happen in real life from these things. I mean some of these games it would seem to me that you don't need to shoot them as they would die from hyper tension in a few minutes. As the human body isn't really design to explode when it suffers an injury even a big one. Even if you get shot in an artery you will have a little stream of blood squirting up a few feet. Not a splatter of blood that consists of gallons of blood.
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Even if you get shot in an artery you will have a little stream of blood squirting up a few feet. Not a splatter of blood that consists of gallons of blood.
It's quite amazing how much blood can come out of someone and they not die. And it's also quite amazing how many square feet just a pint of blood can cover if it's smeared around. Finally, how many people have you shot with a .50 cal or explosive ammunition?
Re:Silent Hill 2 (Score:4, Informative)
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Personally, cartoonish or not, I've never really found that gore added anything to the gameplay.
It's an eyecandy that after a while fades into the background. If the story has me gripped, I'm wondering where things are going, and casting the brain into the bigger picture. The fights are incidental; they actively get in the way of where I want to be (which is a highly valid story device; after all, you opponents are all about stopping you being where you want to be).
If I'm playing a game, and still notice
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A game where the blood added something was Onslaught for the Wii, you fight alien bugs that have acidic blood, if you shoot a bug that's too close to you it splatters all over the screen, you have to wipe it off (which leaves you unable to shoot for a moment) if you don't want to take damage.
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Of course, if you ask me, no violence is too much [youtube.com].
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What research? Citation needed there.
Could it be that people prefer games with violence because without it, something is obviously missing. It's also condescending to the player, implying a person isn't mature enough to see a more realistic portrayal of a violent act.
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Re:Silent Hill 2 (Score:5, Insightful)
It's the "Psycho" effect. No horror you can see can be worse than the horror your mind makes up itself. Suspense is often much more terrifying than a shocking display.
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I really noticed it a lot when I was watching the movie Punisher: Warzone, it just shows everything and it was kinda funny because of it.
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You've got to admit that a few of those scenes were just incredibly well done though, from the exploding mid-air jumper to the snapped neck when the impaled body's head was used as a stepping stone.
I watched that movie back-to-back with Sin City with a friend to compare the first to the stylized fake gore and extremely suggestive dialogue of the second.
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When he comes in bitching and moaning... (Score:1, Funny)
...about all the energy your souped-up overclocked PC is using.
For God's sake (Score:2, Funny)
I thought Tipper got over this during the PMRC fiasco.
Exactly (Score:5, Insightful)
If you're properly focused on a game you don't really notice the extras. For example when playing guitar hero my friends occasionally point out something that's happening with the band in the background (even when they're playing), but I don't notice anything but the notes (even when I'm not playing). Those that focus on stuff like blood flying around probably aren't actually focused on beating the game. Still, it's better to have some gore than none at all otherwise how will you know that you've scored a hit? Likewise for realistic graphics, it does add to the immersion to have realistic lighting even if you're not paying much attention to it, and sometimes it is nice just to kick back and admire the scenery (the sunrise and sunsets in GTA IV were pretty awesome).
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I hear that from a lot of people, but I usually call them unobservant.
If you have to focus so hard on what you're doing that you don't notice what's going on around you, then you're way more intense than me. I beat several games on the hardest difficulties all while enjoying the scenery and replaying sequences on purpose just to get the full effect of them.
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If you've ever played Guitar Hero or Rock Band on Expert difficulty (especially on the drums, 99% of the guitar tracks are too easy for me these days but there are still a couple of drum tracks I've yet to complete on Expert on GH World Tour), or WipEout at the higher difficulty levels, then you'd understand the level of intensity that I enjoy my games to be at :P I don't see any point in admiring the backgrounds when I should be looking ahead for the notes that are coming along or judging when to turn to h
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My brother in law plays Guitar Hero on expert difficulty and gets extremely high scores while duelling simultaneously with a light saber at points.
My wife could carry on a conversation while acing the hardest difficulty of Amplitude (precursor to GH) which was much harder in some ways.
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I didn't point out that my friends who notice stuff going on in the background struggle to play Guitar Hero on even medium mode, that was kind of integral to my thinking on the matter - but once you start to learn the songs off by heart or otherwise get really good at whatever game you're playing, you can probably go back to admiring the graphics.. it all depends on what type of game you're playing too.
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I often say to people who haven't picked up on it yet that good graphics are evident when you don't consciously notice them anymore.
I notice in one game that the grass I'm running on sucks really bad while fighting a beast. In another game, I don't notice how incredibly well they did the grass effect because its so fluid and well-created that I recognize it simply as grass.
There are situations where not noticing the graphics are in fact the proof that they are better, and if they were worse, that's when yo
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I agree with that, it's much more noticeable when something is wrong than when it's right :)
The GH background could definitely do with some anti-aliasing, Rock Band does it much better - and that's just Rock Band 1. I've not seen Rock Band 2, and probably won't until I live somewhere where the neighbours aren't bothered by my incessant drumming!
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One thing that some games have is periods of lower intesity, GTA (disclaimer, my GTA experiance is with GTA3, GTA liberty city stories and GTA vice city stories) is a good example of this, sometimes you are in a firefight or working to a tight time limit or trying to keep car damage to an absoloute minimum or trying to get away from the cops.
Other times though you are just driving (or even walking) from place to place and can relax a bit.
Fixation (Score:2)
We call this fixation. In motorcycle racing, it happens when you become overstressed, over stimulated, or your being asked to split your attention on too many things.
It's usually a sign that you're in over your head.
The nice thing about gaming though, is that you can fixate without ending up in an accident. :)
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I wasn't saying you should, it does sound a bit gross. Was just pointing out that I don't even usually notice that kind of stuff in games after I actually start playing and stop admiring the shiny new graphics.
Oh, That's Easy! (Score:5, Funny)
When he shows up at my house and makes me turn off my Xbox because it's carbon footprint is too large.
When (Score:5, Insightful)
the developers decide to write a "screenwiper" package that wipes the blood and guts off of the user's screen so they can see well enough to shoot?
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When you stop noticing it, it's too much. (Score:5, Insightful)
You eat vindaloo, you know it's going to be hot. You expect it, you get used to it.
If you really want to shock somebody, put a scotch bonnet in their chocolate cake.
Hitchcock knew this perfectly well. A whole movie of rising tension, and then suddenly, WHAM, a shocker image.
Same for gore in video games.
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If you really want to shock somebody, put a scotch bonnet in their chocolate cake.
Um, we're talking about food, right? Right?
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Yes, duh:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scotch_bonnet_(pepper) [wikipedia.org]
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That's pretty much how I felt about Phantasmagoria. You spend a bunch of time wandering around an old house nonchalantly, and then you get a cutscene of being raped or watching a woman get a bunch of entrails stuffed down her throat. The game wasn't all that fantastic, but it perfectly got that horror-movie suspense-and-stab routine.
Gore is semi-irrelevent but still has a place... (Score:5, Interesting)
I did think the manhunt series was boring mainly due to the limited number of death animations and the excessive gore.
I do prefer games that have some gore over those that have none, for example when a rpg shell blows someone to pieces it is more realistic than them just falling over. It's all about the realism the game creates the more realistic the more I enjoy the game (assuming the gameplay is there).
"Gore" (Score:2)
When it shorts out the monitor (Score:1)
An Inconvenient Truth (Score:2)
Al Gore invented game play. And then the Internet.
Just a nuissance (Score:2)
I don't find what is euphemistically called "graphical content" exciting or scary - it just annoys me. To me the entertaiment value is in the actual content of the game, movie or whatever, not in whether there is a lot of internal organs draped over items in the vicinity; I realised how much it actually irritates me when I watched the "Watchmen" movie. The story line is not too bad for a superhero movie, but why do we need to spend that much time on Hefty Smurf splatting people's guts around?
it had a purpose in Watchmen (Score:3, Interesting)
Just like when he forgot to give air to Laurie when he teleported her to Mars, it emphasizes the fact that he is nearly totally disconnected from most aspects of humanity.
He blew his enemies up in showers of gore presumably because it happened to be slightly easier than the alternative, even if it spattered a roomful of traumatized bystanders. He knew enough to stop the "bad guy", but beyond that he just didn't care either way. Now that's chilling.
For that reason I was very glad that they left the gore in,
It's just graphics. (Score:2)
It's essentially the same eye candy as the pretty lensflares and shiny reflections: They're cool for the moment, but they get old quickly.
When the fluff is off, what's left is gameplay. Gore or no gore. It doesn't "get in the way" more than other graphics elements do. One could argue that high resolution and better blending/shading made it harder to make out the enemies against the background, because they blended better. Did that get "in the way" of gameplay? No, it was just another graphics element. You e
When does gore get in the way of gameplay? (Score:1)
Never?
The sound of one hand dragon punching (Score:3, Interesting)
It's also sort of similar to something I call the Zen of gaming difficulty - The hardest setting to learn on any game is "easy", while "impossible" is the simplest to master. While playing through Easy mode for the first time, you have no ide what you're up against, you face bosses for the first time, get surprised by twists and turns and keep having to look at your manual because you forget how to do your special moves. As you get better and tackle the hardest setting, you only have the tiny variations and subtle nuances to overcome, at which point you are pretty much a master of this game.
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I played Gears of War 2 through with a friend over a Christmas holiday. Once we were done I decided to replay it alone to get the full-screen cinematic experience. As we'd already completed it on the second hardest setting I thought I'd bump it up to "Insane" and be a real man. I stopped playing after a day or two. Some of the set pieces were just ridiculously difficult, and a lack of checkpoints meant you had to play for 5 minutes before you even got back to the point w
Gore is Necessary (Score:5, Insightful)
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EXACTLY!
Mod parent up.
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Should a game not ever come off as a cartoon, though?
Game = Juvenile distraction
Ditto cartoon...
Not that there's anything WRONG with that, per se, but if you're looking for a real-to-life experience, you might want to put the controller down and go find one.
Games and cartoons are intended to distract us from the drudgery, and are quite good at what they do.
And I say this as someone totally addicted to WoW...
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It's the western idea that games and cartoons are juvenile distractions that needs to be changed
What on earth for? Why should we all live under a pretensive purple sky, when it is perfectly fine for us all to agree that the sky is in fact blue?
Please, elaborate.
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What on earth for? Why should we all live under a pretensive purple sky, when it is perfectly fine for us all to agree that the sky is in fact blue?
Please, elaborate.
The idea that some forms of art are "more serious" than others is closely tied to culture. Certain cultures can have "serious" comic books or puppet shows, whereas here in the West these things are generally considered kiddie fare. Conversely, these foreign cultures may be amused by the West getting so worked up about football, and consider i
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Neither is the flashing of ships in overhead 2D SHMUPS when you shoot them, or the 'unrealitic' explosion you may get (which looks maybe *better* than a real explosion would be).
That reminds me... (Score:2, Insightful)
"The game became pure physics and algorithms: Vectors, speed and collision detection."
This is just how I feel about Hunt The Wumpus!
Or perhaps "Rogue" would have been a better example?
Game Physics and game (Score:1)
Gore is like spice- (Score:3, Insightful)
that is used in food. Enough to accentuate the flavour, but too much and you overwhelm what you are trying to improve.
All of which overshadows the basic premise: If your game sucks, then no amount of T&A, or gore, will help improve that.
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Gore free movie (Score:1)
Had to sell my castle because of recession... (Score:2)
It depends on the game. (Score:2)
But then in Typing of the Dead, if the gore of the zombies blowing to pieces wasn't there, I think it would lose something. In that game I never ignore the gore, its part of the game itself and belongs there.
If the gore in Wolverine starts to feel irrelevant, its probably just poorly done. Its a game pushed out to coincide with a movie release. I know it has a different storyline to
That quote (Score:2)
It depends on the game. (Score:2)
This is one of those questions that's impossible to answer in a generic context.
If you look at something like Dead Rising, it just wouldn't work well without gore. Compare to something like Viva Pinata and it'd be pretty fucking stupid with gore.
You can't blame Al Gore! (Score:4, Funny)
I think (Score:2)
Answer (Score:2)
When Does Gore Get In the Way of Gameplay?
When I'm in a total brawl on Team Fortress 2, and there is so much blood and body parts spraying all over the place that I can't even see, let alone hit the target's I'm going after. Yea, then, it's "in the way".
Tipper, the scales (Score:2)
When his wife goes all PMRC [wikipedia.org] on your industry?
Skin it and Find Out (Score:3, Interesting)
...as I became more expert, the cultural shell of the game boiled away. In a sort of staring-into-the-cascading-numbers-of-the-Matrix way, I found myself looking past the visible aspects of the game and savoring the underlying, invisible mechanics of play. ... The game became pure physics and algorithms: Vectors, speed and collision detection.
The interesting experiment would be to remove the gory skin from those underlying, invisible mechanics and replace it with some sweetness-light-and-OMG!-ponies!! skin. I'm talking about the exact same mechanics with different art.
Would we still enjoy the game as much? I'd like to find out.
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Read up on Chex Quest [wikipedia.org], a corporate attempt to do just that to 'Doom.'
Chex Quest was packaged as a prize with boxes of Chex brand cereal, back in the day. General Mills needed a wholesome family game to go with it's Wholesome Family cereal. They developed a version of doom where no harm was done to your enemies (zapping them was said to teleport them away.)
Depends on what you're trying to accomplish. (Score:3)
Violence, like anything, loses its effect when it's overused. If the blood is repetitive and gratuitous, the brain is ultimately just going to edit it out, and for entertainment purposes the player is left to deal with whatever underlying gameplay mechanics or story remains. I think gore tends to be used to try to compensate for a lack of these bedrock elements, which is unfortunate.
Horror is a genre where gore is almost criminally overused. Gore in horror is like sex in comedy--it's what you tend fall back on when you run out of real material.
Exposure to violence. (Score:3, Interesting)
I believe many, if not most, gamers are desensitized to violence. So there's already an exaggerated expectation of how violence should be depicted, mainly that there should be gushes of blood everywhere and bodies torn apart. Even, myself, who is not keen on gore finds any game with bloodless violence to be quite tame.
Your average non-gamer, however, is likely to have a very different reaction. The simple act of pointing a gun at a character and shooting them is troubling to a lot of people. I'm not suggesting that gamers are going to resort to real life violence or anything as absurd as that. But certainly there is a thrill they get out excessive violence.
I personally have no problem with gore in a game if it's an integral part of the story. The problem I have is when developers get gratuitous with it for no clear reason other than, I suppose, to sell more games. It's not all that dissimilar to developers constantly objectifying and over-sexualizing women. I like watching hot girls as much as the next guy, but when it becomes the rule, not the exception I think there's a problem. In some ways I see all this as appealing to the more immature attitudes although I'm sure some people will disagree.
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I believe many, if not most, gamers are desensitized to violence.
No, gamers are desensitized to the depiction of fake violence. Much like anyone who has watched enough American TV for a few years.
I played games for over 2 decades, from Karateka to Resistance2. Yet I recoil from the thought of actually punching anyone in violence with the purpose of hurting them, much less taking out a real gun and shoot at them.
If someone cannot separate reality from the fake stuff in a game, they will have just as much desensitization from watch American TV.
Just stop making games the
Gore only gets in the way... (Score:2)
That's because it is irrelevent... (Score:2)
When you play a game, you aren't actually causing the gore to occur... it's simply a pre-programmed reward for accomplishing a certain pre-determined task. It's the same methodology used to train dogs and teach children responsibility. You only give a reward to act as an incentive to perform a task until that task become second nature to the subject. Once that occurs, the task is simply carried out on demand for the sake of performing that task.
In a sense, you don't really ever "play" a game... the game "pl
polar opposites (Score:2)
When it comes to video games, the 2 parties are typically polar opposites of each other.
Democrats want less gore, more bush.
Republicans want more gore, less bush.
Yes and no... (Score:2)
Quake 3's truly excessive gore -- blowing your enemies into fine clouds of bloody mist -- just never gets old.
Yes, it melts away into physics and mechanics while you're playing. However, at least for me, each kill is still that much sweeter because of the gratuitous gore, and the announcer's "Excellent. Impressive."
Subconscious absorption. (Score:2)
Your subconscious is now so desensitized to gore and violence that it is filtering it out from your perception. You are now warped.
Bad Language (Score:2)
There are some games I can't play at a high volume or with most family in the room - those are the games with bad language evey minute.
Re:Bore! (Score:2)
"Ga Ga Ga Gore ... Gore .. The Gore is a Bore ... Gore .. The Gore is a Bore
Ga Ga Ga Gore
EveryGamer knows it ain't the Gore anymore!"
whua-whao-blua-blao....
About the content value of this story.
Is Seth MacFarlane a gamer?
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That's different. I think what he's saying is he'd still have bought Carmageddon if there wasn't a fount of blood when those old ladies were run over.
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I applaud Bioware for trying different things but it has been 9 years since the last AAA western rpg that I really enjoyed (Mass Effect/Fallout/Oblivion were ok, but no Planescape or BG2). I guess I should be content that they're even making any western rpgs these days.
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A person like that can do something bad to another person without even a second thought and no conscience
I think you're making an ass out of you and umption.