Games Without Killing

Lego Harry Potter! Possibly the best recent kid's video game - every "violent" act from the stories is reduced to cutesy humour and the story telling is pretty cool too. My gf is a massive Lego game fan (she's 32) and since my six year old son discovered it last week he thinks it's the most fun you can have while sitting down, particularly casting spells to encase folk in ice cubes, turn them into frogs and make them go bald. He wont be allowed to watch the last 4 (?) films for quite some time as they are pretty dark but i can read them to him, and the games do a great job of engaging a younger kid in the plot without the heavy stuff.

Games like Call of Duty: Black Ops is nothing more than in-house battle simulators. When the Columbine shooters committed their massacre, the parents sued Nintendo and a few others for Billions of dollars (they lost in court) because they thought the games brainwashed them to kill. Imagine if those shooters got their hands on video games TODAY.

Originally posted by r666evolution
Games like Call of Duty: Black Ops is nothing more than in-house battle simulators. When the Columbine shooters committed their massacre, the parents sued Nintendo and a few others for Billions of dollars (they lost in court) because they thought the games brainwashed them to kill. Imagine if those shooters got their hands on video games TODAY.

The same thing would happen; games don't make people go out and kill others

In Papers please, you play as TSA passport official in a fictional eastern Europe country, behind the iron curtain.

Non violent games are not as Unpredictable as violent fulled kill shot chaos Halo and Call of Duties. My favorite FPS is Battlefield. Arcade racers and turn based games are pretty cool too. I'm thinking of trying RTS when C&C Generals 2 hit.

Classic games like Pong or even Asteroids which is not about killing but destroying incoming asteroids (you can die though). Any sims game like sim city, sim tower, the sims etc... Any kind of construction game, racing game, and even puzzle-based games although the puzzle genre is not well defined so some do contain killing.

You can also try A Tale in the Desert which is a game where you go around collecting natural resources to discover new technologies in a 3D world. It's dated and I don't even know if it still exists, but it's kind of fun, only it doesn't have many people playing it at all in such a wide open world.

Pinball games are also not about killing things, although some tables kinda make it seem like you are. Mario is all about killing and arguably about communism and bestiality lmao. It really is hard to think about a game that isn't about killing. Even pokemon kills over pokemon. Well, they fall "unconscious" and if you want to play by that rule then most RPGs are like that. A Pheonix Down doesn't revive, but brings back someone who's unconscious.

I'm not quite sure what else there is, come to think about it most games are pretty violent. I can see why the female demographic makes up for a small percentage of real gaming. (angry bird type of games don't fit into the real game category)

Originally posted by Wyrdnews
Don't get me wrong, I enjoy some first person shooters and military games, but why is it that practically every single game contains some degree of killing in it?

So I guess what I'm asking is if anyone else would consider playing a coop game where it didn't involve death. I think it could be really very good. Could you imagine like a massive coop game where hundreds of people are taking part in a humanitarian effort or something.

I just sometimes get a bit tired of mindless violence for entertainment purposes and wish some other human traits were explored by game developers from time to time.

I have wondered about this since 1990s - can't remember if I started pondering it before or after Doom, though.

I have tried to come up with all kinds of game concepts that wouldn't require collecting (materialism and greed) or destroying / killing (couldn't be more demonic than this).

Many modern video games are really awful in this regard, even the ones aimed at young kids, like Kirby games. Ever played Kirby's Adventure? I was quite shocked. I expected a fun, easy game (I am not very good at video games, so I like the easy ones because they at least let me see more than the first level of the game), with colorful sceneries and all that.

But I didn't expect that you would have 'Monster Flame' ability in the game that appears as two RED HORNS on the character, that you would have to BURN DOWN a forest, that one of the flames would be a DRAGON, and that the endboss of that level would be a .. TREE.

Yes, the game is sending the message to kids that TREES are evil, and should be destroyed! What the F? After shooting innocent, cute beings in the face with a CANNON (why so many cannons in games anyway?), and mercilessly slaughtering others, I started feeling a little queasy. What kind of a kids' game IS this? The parents see just a nice pink creature jumping on a colorful scenery, and goes to update their blogs or talk on the phone - but what the kid is brainwashed, is quite astonishing. The player is basically conditioned to be MERCILESS towards innocent creatures, who are just minding their own business - because the player can BENEFIT from them! And the player can actually even _EAT_ them (cannibalism)!

When I had beaten up that evil tree..



.. the tree actually then had a TEAR in his eye. I felt sorry for the poor tree that I had just smashed, but the player apprently isn't supposed to, because Kirby was shining like a sun! (no masonic pun intended)

"Yay! I got the tree to cry, yippee!"

What the heck kind of a message is that? He was happy that he made the tree cry. It seems so irrelevant to an adult, but think what an impact it will have on kids. They will not learn to be compassionate, they will learn that making others cry is good and rewarded behaviour!

Of course, after that, the final nail in the game's coffin, as far as I am concerned, appeared:



The masonic pyramid, the two masonic towers (forgot their names), and duplicated so that there's three each side (33), and there's SIX (6) towers altogether!

And look, even the CAPSTONE is clearly marked (though the whole pyramid is 'carved' so that it would seem like just an innocent design coincidence).

Of course a lot more analysis could be performed, but I think that's enough about that picture.

The video games are seriously warped, and even in Doom (1993), I wondered why so many demonic symbolisms, and so much of the "hell" stuff? Couldn't we have a video game without all that crap? I was never a fan of that garbage, but now that I know more about masons and TPTB agenda, it's very clear how video games are used to make people used to violence (induced by them), to NORMALIZE so many horrible, abnormal things (black clothes, masonic symbols, metal music, horror theme, skeletons, skull&crossbones, brutal, gory murdering of people and other living things, etc.)

So what you are saying, is in my opinion, just a part of a larger problem. They NEED video games to be constantly materialistic (collecting), corporate-job-preparing (grinding) and horrible (killing, zombies, etc.) so that people will think that stuff is normal. And alarmingly, it has become just that - normal.

Anyone who questions anything about video games, will instantly summon against them the masses, hordes and flocks of horror-lusty fans of shooting humans in the head in video games, and hacking them to pieces and eating them. "What's wrong with that?", they ask.

The games are so soul-piercingly aggressive or soul-distortingly depressing and scary that it keeps you fixated on those lower emotions - you HAVE to have those emotions from time to time, gotta have the fix! So you will become less than human, eventually..

It's an insane world.

BTW, why do you have such a masonic (and Nazi Germany)-looking avatar?

I have liked some of your writings, but your avatar has always made me wonder (and I think I saw a homepage too, where you had really Nazi-style fonts).

Why do you like military games, btw? Those are basically just training for actual military - there's never going to be anything interesting about them, like a UFO in the middle of a forest, other imaginary elements. Just the boring, as mundane-as-can-be military 'reality' (such as it is), and lots of murdering and killing of your fellow men.

I wonder if it's easier to kill an actual human being after having played those games a lot? After all, at that point you are bound to know about the weapons, and how to handle them, and it's customary for you to point a rifle at something that looks like a man and squeeze your finger. Whatever reason they put out so many military-themed games, that reason can't be good. Maybe it keeps human mentality in a warlike state, sub-consciously, or something - and it makes easier to accept 'military' as something normal and good, even something to encourage!

Instead of the symptom of insanity that it actually is.

Originally posted by Wyrdnews
So I guess what I'm asking is if anyone else would consider playing a coop game where it didn't involve death. I think it could be really very good. Could you imagine like a massive coop game where hundreds of people are taking part in a humanitarian effort or something.

To answer your question - I'd like that, provided that I know the people who are playing, and I know them to be good people.

But I wouldn't mind playing such a game even alone. For me, playing video games is about "atmosphere" and "exploration", more than anything else. Gameplay comes to effect, of course, but as I have played a lot of games from a lot of eras, for decades, now - I have seen a lot of completely non-violent games as well, and enjoyed them immensely.

For example, I like playing simulators, like European Truck Simulator 2. Nothing could be more 'grinding' than that, right? Well, I don't play it in a grinding mode - I use cheats so I already have everything I could have, so I can just enjoy the driving itself! And exploring the sceneries, and the satisfaction of 'job well done' when I arrive and back up the truck to the designated point (well, it actually says "Excellent" usually). I just enjoy driving a truck, and pondering my own thoughts while wondering what it could be like to do that in real life, or accompany an actual truck driver.

In the same vein, I play some flight simulators, but not always the 'fighting' or 'mission' modes - I just like to fly around, see the sceneries, and land. I especially like landing, because it's intellectually stimulating, and like a 'precision work', but also because it involves aerodynamics and interesting natural laws like that, and "arriving" plus "freedom to go anywhere" (on the planet, though). I mean, there are many reasons why I like landing - I guess I get a feeling of success of some sort afterwards. But it wanes quickly, so a new flight is needed. Oh, and of course the 'sense of speed' (which is sorely lacking in most flight simulators, shame on the authors who think a Hornet can't fly faster than 120 km/h! Heck, even the truck can drive faster with the cheats enabled in ETS2! Oh sure, the meter says '1500 km/h', but the scenery actually flows with the speed of 100-300 km/h, depending on the simulator, plane and situation).

Sense of speed is really fun in the simulators that do it right.

But things like "Tetris", "Pang!" or "Maniac Mansion" exist also. Such games do not require killing. There are many kind of puzzle games (I think a game like 'Catamarine' or something also exists, but I forgot the actual name) where you don't have to kill or destroy, or even really collect anything.

Even I have made a small game, where your object is simply to avoid certain things, and that's all you do - avoid. Of course people of this awful modern era don't like it, because they lust for the destruction, killing and all that. I made it like that mainly because I am not very good at programming or that kind of mathematical-abstract thinking (philosophical-abstract is easier), but I also realized that I was glad that I made a complete 'pacifist-game'!

And I am wondering, whether I could make another ..

I have wondered if games where the player can actually create instead of destroying, and help others instead of killing them, and perhaps give instead of collecting, could be feasible to make or fun to play. I know I would love such a game.. In the beginning, the player could have like HUGE resources of all kinds of stuff, and then he could GIVE them to others, but he would never have to collect anything. And his success would never be measured by numbers or 'levels'.. in fact, the only measure would be the actual joy of the player.

And a pure exploration-game would be fun, but it would be a lot of work to create lots of interesting, beautiful sceneries and places .. or a game, where you would have to find out what happened a long time ago in a place where you happen to wonder to. I guess games like 'Oblivion' and the sequel, whatever it was called, sort of have a bit of an exploratory flavor to them, but it could be something so much more than that.

I dunno, just throwing out ideas - but I have been pondering about that thought a lot, what kind of game could be made that wouldn't involve destroying or killing, and which would be really wonderful and fun to play? Of course racing games already are like that, and there are many others.

But I think there's room for innovation...

Originally posted by Wyrdnews
And no, simulators don't really count as games.

Why not?

Are "Densha de Go!"-games simulators, btw? Because they are clearly "games" - you have scores, you have those gamelike sound effects, you have bonus scores and the like. Simulators, surely, wouldn't have any of those things?

In any case, I do enjoy those games a lot - they're great! It's fun to try to arrive with precision .. and it gives you a sense of constantly 'going somewhere', as in traveling and exploring, seeing new scenery.. and of course the japanese announcements are great for testing your japanese skills and fun to listen to. As a bonus, the "english" announcements are really great fun!

I think simulators do count as games, if they are built like games. Like "European Truck Simulator 2" - you deliver all kinds of cargo to all kinds of interesting places, during all kinds of interesting weather and time of day. You get score, and all that, and time goes a lot faster in the game than in real life, so it's not really a simulator, but as a pure video game, it also seems slightly serious.

So I don't know whether it is a simulator or a game that has the word "simulator" in it, all I know is that it's very enjoyable, and it's actually close to what you describe - delivering goods from one place to another. It doesn't happen in space, but the principle is the same, and I can easily imagine the same concept being transported into space. In fact, that's exactly what came to my mind when I read your description about a space game where you deliver medicine. It could be a lot of fun, if it was done like ETS2.

One wouldn't think a truck simulator (or a game called 'truck simulator') could be fun, but try it before mocking it.. with a steering wheel, it's actually way more fun than one would have thought!

Simulators should count anyway, because they often ARE exactly like that - no violence (if they are not war simulators, like Wings of Prey), just doing your stuff with freedom to explore.

How about Airport games? It's actually quite fun to play ぼくは航空管制官 (or "Boku wa Kōkū Kanseikan", literally, "I Airport Traffic Controller", but translated as "Air Traffic Controller"), but it's way too difficult for me.. I can sometimes clear the first level, but the second level ups the difficulty tenfold, and I can't cope -at-all-.

Maybe in some kind of coffee overdose with adrenalin at maximum, I could have some kind of a chance, heh.

In any case, the main point is - yes, I agree that a game does not need violence, killing, collecting or grinding to be amusing, entertaining, immersive, wonderful or a great experience. And there are plenty of games to prove me right - still, I'd like to know about more. I am sick and tired of that TPTB death cult crap in video games, I'd like to have a completely masonic-symbol-free game that doesn't have any kind of sickness about it whatsoever. No horror, no black clothes, no vampires, demons, goblins, skeletons, rusty pipes, badly-lit-factories, etc. Just beauty, exploration and fun!

The only non-violent video game I ever really enjoyed was "Hydro Thunder" (in the arcades anyway). The local D&B used to have four of those linked-together to competitive/cooperative play.

Other than that, I only play first-person-shooters. The more violent and politically-incorrect the better. I "need" to kill my fellow man in effigy.

To quote "Francis 'Psycho' Soyer", from Stripes

"[...] all I know, is that I finally get to kill somebody."

I think "Tetris" says it all.

Wyrdnews

So I guess what I'm asking is if anyone else would consider playing a coop game where it didn't involve death. I think it could be really very good. Could you imagine like a massive coop game where hundreds of people are taking part in a humanitarian effort or something.

This is probably something you won't really see in the mainstream industry. Primarily because violence sells. But that doesn't mean it's a bad idea.
There aren't really all that many co-op games that don't involve killing or excessive violence. The only ones that come to mind are Portal 2 and Minecraft.

The problem is making a compelling game that a lot of people will enjoy that still offers a challenge. And one major hurdle you will always encounter in co-op games is getting the other players to stop acting like d!cks toward one another. Like Left 4 Dead. Bringing out your inner d!ck was actually a selling point.

Now if I were to make a non-violent coop game with mass appeal, the only thing that comes to mind would be to create a survival game. Something in which multiple players find themselves as castaways who must work together to stay alive.

To make it fun, the game would have to involve building, resource collecting, crafting, exploration, and an overall sense of danger if you don't feed and water yourself.

In this situation, the players could decide not to work together. That would be fine. The game would still be playable. Just a bit harder.

A favourite of mine is the "Skate" series.
No killing whatsoever. Well you do "Kill it" but that involves no violence and all awesomeness.