One of the more frankly disturbing things I’ve read about video games recently wasn’t about sexism/misogyny but was instead about the NPCs (non-player characters) inserted into a game for a player to murder.

The piece in question was on the game Battlefield Hardline, and it contained quotes from the game’s makers regarding the thought that went into the presence and creation and – in particular – the dialogue of enemy NPCs in the game. As games have become more complex and voice acting has become more of a thing on which some focus is placed when a game is in development, there naturally arises the question of what these people are actually going to be saying. This leads to additional questions: Is the dialogue going to be more informative than anything else? Will there be any actual characterization of these people who are, after all, there largely to be killed by the player and whose lives will therefore be cut (tragically) short? Are these mustache-twirling villains, or are they just people?

And what do those decisions end up meaning for player experience?

This is actually a pretty complicated set of questions for this last reason, because of what it suggests about how the player feels about the NPCs they kill, and about the emotional weight of that killing. Think about this for a second: players in these kinds of games are frequently – essentially – mass murderers who proceed through the game by slaughtering hundreds upon hundreds if not thousands upon thousands of NPCs. Not all of these killings are even strictly speaking necessary. When a game has a significant stealth component – allowing a player to sneak by an NPC or merely render them unconscious – killing is no longer needed in order to proceed through the game.

But games often make killing fun.

When I played Dishonored, I played it through to the end more than once, not just because more than one ending was possible but because different approaches were possible and each was its own kind of fun. There was a lot of strategy and skill and awareness of environment and careful planning involved in the stealth approach – do I shoot that guard with a tranquilizer dart or chokehold him into unconsciousness? What route through this building allows me to avoid the maximum number of NPCs? How can I most effectively hide myself? How can I make use of the timing of NPC movements to my best advantage?

And then when I played it via the combat/killing-heavy approach, I got to knife dudes in the neck and summon swarms of rats to eat them alive.

That was rad.

I was killing NPCs – people, frankly, even if not fully-fledged and realized at all – in absolutely horrific ways and it was so damn fun. It was fun because it was designed to be, and I didn’t think about it or feel a single shred of remorse because the game didn’t encourage me to do so.

Part of why this is worth thinking about – beyond primitive hand-wringing won’t someone think of the children ethical concerns – is because of what killing actually is in video games. Critic Erik Kain noted that “killing people in video games is actually just solving moving puzzles”. It’s something you need to do in order to progress, which is how you play what a lot of people are still likely to think of as a “video game” (leaving aside all the games which aren’t about that at all, such as Flower, The Stanley Parable, Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs, Gone Home and Dear Esther, to name a few of my personal favorites). As such, a lot of the time it doesn’t even really feel like killing. When I play Call of Duty it doesn’t feel like violence to me in any real, visceral sense (I think a lot of this may also be that the Call of Duty series is excellently put together and really not very good).

But killing is also frequently intended and designed to be fun. It’s about creative, innovative ways of destroying humanoid bodies. I’m not a hand-wringer – I really enjoy killing people with rats, for Christ’s sake – but I don’t think that can be ignored.

Underpinning this is the commonly-held idea that games aren’t fun if they make a player pause and stop ignoring this. If they make a player consider the emotional and ethical weight of what they’re actually doing. Because if you did that, wouldn’t you feel bad? Wouldn’t you stop enjoying the game as much?

Rob Auten, writer for Battlefield Hardline, was pretty blunt about this, as a consequence of making an NPC too fully human:

Part of the cops and robbers fantasy is moving among the bad guys and being in the same room. So you have an opportunity to hear more from them. In some cases we made them too charming and people felt bad about shooting them or wanted to hang out with them instead of fighting them and that is no good.

(Personal aside: As a self-identified “gamer”, I think this is a gross idea far too commonly held. Sometimes I do just want to kill people with rats, but God forbid you emotionally engage with your thing.)

One of the games which has taken this idea directly to task – and one of my favorite games of all time and a game which I’ve written about a lot – is Spec Ops: The Line, which not only makes the people you’re killing other American soldiers – albeit soldiers who, as far as you know, have gone rogue – but allows you to listen in on conversations that approach the heartbreaking… and then gives you no choice about whether or not you will kill these people.

At one point in the game I crouched in cover and listened to two of these guys talk about how peaceful things were at that moment, and how, though things got ugly a lot of the time, that peace reminded them of what they were really fighting for.

Then I shot them in the head.

I had to. There was no stealth option there, and I needed to kill them to proceed to the next point in the game.

Reviewer Ben “Yahtzee” Crowshaw observed in a column:

[Call of Duty:] Modern Warfare got into the habit of making a shocking moment that illustrated the ruthlessness of the enemy and the resources at their disposal. It’s supposed to make you hate and fear them…The Spec Ops shocking moment [dropping white phosphorus on civilians], contrarily, is designed to make you hate yourself, and fear the things that you are capable of.

That is not “fun.”

But I also think it’s really good. And I enjoyed it, in terms of the intensity of what it made me feel.

The thing is that, at least with most AAA mainstream games, if the primary concern is this particular kind of “fun”, we’re going to continue to see exactly the convention that The Line was trying to subvert.

So I think we need to rethink the idea of “fun”.

If “fun” is enjoyment, I think we can think of a lot of other stuff in other mediums that we enjoy that doesn’t fall in line with this idea of “fun”. A lot of the stuff I like is not “fun”. I really enjoy Lars von Trier films. Those are not “fun”. I really enjoy books wherein everything terrible happens and my heart gets ripped out and eaten in front of me. Not “fun”. The Wire is not “fun”, at least not most of the time. The National is not “fun” music. Most of the fiction I write is not “fun”.

Okay, that’s me, I’m weird. But those things wouldn’t exist if there weren’t a lot of other people like me.

I want to suggest that this is a lot of why video games are generally – still – seen as juvenile by a lot of people: the attitudes toward emotion that underpin most of the big ones haven’t outgrown this idea of “fun” and begun to experiment with what fun can actually mean in terms of what we enjoy consuming.

The other thing is that big budget AAA games, while still what often get the most attention – aren’t the full picture, and a lot of stuff outside that bubble is doing exactly that. The games I mentioned above, which I really like? Flower is fun, and it also makes me cry every time I play it. Amnesia is a giant exercise in NOPE, and tremendously fun. The Stanley Parable is fun and ridiculously funny, but it’s also a bit of a mind-fuck and gently emotionally abusive at times. Gone Home is softly beautiful and sad. Dear Esther is one of those things that does the whole heart-ripping-eating business.

So this stuff is out there. More and more of it all the time. But that idea of “fun” persists, and I would like it to please stop being so unquestioningly accepted as it is there.

I still really like killing people with rats, though.

Sarah promises to not kill you with rats on Twitter – @dynamicsymmetry