Murder in Video Games: It's Gotta Mean Something, You Know, Man?

With the release of the kill-happy fourth standalone installment in the Assassin's Creed series, I thought it was a good time to bring up another debate in the video game world. This debate, however, is one that is not exactly all over the news; rather, it is an argument between fans of video games and their games' developers, between the hardcore video gamers who dissect every bit of a game's narrative and the writing team that worked countless hours crafting an interesting and, most importantly, marketable story.

When in doubt, throw some pirates or zombies into it.

The debate is rather simple at first glance: how much should killing be a factor in games? We've seen how successful the Grand Theft Auto franchise has been and it has quite a heavy emphasis on murder. However, that game has received an intense amount of backlash and criticism for its perceived "meaningless" killing. One game series that has somehow evaded a large amount of this kind of negative feedback is the Assassin's Creed games. Curiously, I would argue that Assassin's Creed has as much, if not more, wanton murder. The argument against that, however, is that the game offers you "alternatives" in which you do not need to murder hapless guards on your way to assassinating the main antagonists of the game, whom the narrative goes way out of its way to explain as horrible, heartless monsters who simply must be killed.

Yeah, that's a guy about to murder the pope. It's not so much a subtle criticism of religion as it is someone beating you over the head with a crucifix screaming at you about how institutionalized faith has become.

The thing that's problematic about this is how much more difficult the gameplay is if you actively try to avoid killing anyone you don't feel deserves it. I understand that it's probably at least a partial conscious choice of the developer; after all, it would be more difficult to infiltrate heavily guarded castles to get to an assassination target without murdering any of the various guards and such populating the castle. However, the discrepancy in difficulty is absurd. In my experience with the series, each assassination mission takes roughly four to five times the amount of time to complete when you choose the pacifist approach as opposed to the rampaging murder god one, ignoring any replays you might have to do due to the increase in difficulty. As much as the developer promotes the ability to choose how you want to play the game, it remains obvious how they really want you to play it.

You'd think after the first twenty or so guards died horribly the rest of them might re-consider their stance on attacking the strange hooded guy with swords.

So how do we reconcile this perceived imbalance in gameplay choices? I suggest we start putting an emphasis on meaningful kills. Murder as a narrative choice can have interesting and emotionally impactful consequences, even if it is a repeated concept. However, I think each kill should have some kind of meaning to it; it should impact both the player-character and the player themselves, and a game should actively try and place a player in scenarios that make them actively question the actions they are taking. Are they justified? Does this make me a bad person? The inner struggles of the character should be, in an expertly-written narrative and gameplay that is nuanced and controlled, shared with the player themselves.