‘The American Dream’ is a VR game where your hands are a pair of floating guns, and you must complete menial, everyday tasks - feed yourself, go to work, feed your children - using only your bullets, your magazines, and your gosh-darned patriotic attitude. With its Norman Rockwell-kissed aesthetic and a (not unkind) satirical take on the Second Amendment, The American Dream is a very American game.
It is, however, currently being developed in Australia, a country that enacted strict gun control laws in 1996. For many of us who grew up in antipodean countries, our obsession with guns in video games was, and continues to be, in contrast to our nonplussed environment. In New Zealand, for instance, police officers don’t even carry firearms. According to Nicholas McDonnell, whose studio Samurai Punk is behind The American Dream, this mental tug-of-war formed much of the inspiration for the game’s gentle satire. “[The American Dream] came from this conflicted relationship that me and my team have with firearms and guns in video games,” says McDonnell. “...I was starting to get really confused about the majority of what I play and what I enjoy.”
The American Dream shines a hilarious light on our digital obsession with guns, but it also poses the question: why are we still obsessed? In 2016, is the ubiquity of guns in video games holding the medium back? In light of several recent AAA titles suffering from ‘ludonarrative dissonance’ - an academic term meaning a conflict between a video game's narrative and its gameplay - due to their inclusion of guns, it’s surely a question worth asking.
Promo art for The American Dream.
Shooting deadly projectiles has been a popular video game mechanic since, literally, the invention of video games.
“Shooting deadly projectiles has been a popular video game mechanic since, literally, the invention of video games,” says video game historian Frank Cifaldi. Though the first in-game avatar to hold a gun was in the 1975 Japanese two-player arcade cabinet Western Gun, the trend gained major traction during the ‘80s thanks to the popularity of lone-soldier action flicks (“heck, Capcom even named its first game in the genre "Commando").
Carried on the shoulders of Eastern run and gunners like Ikari Warriors and Contra, dudes-with-guns experienced another boost in the ‘90s, this time from the West. id Software’s Wolfenstein popularized the first person shooter well into the rest of the decade and the new millennium. Essentially the trend born from ‘80s action movies never went away, it just kept evolving into grittier shapes.
Of course, there a couple of very simple reasons guns in video games are so popular. They’re a great test of skill, a core tenant in video games, and they feel damn good to wield. Popping a video game head gives us immediate visceral feedback that can be chained together in a constant dopamine manipulation in the brain; a zen-like flow. “Video game player tastes as of right now, much like movie-goer tastes, lean toward the exciting and visceral over the slow and methodical,” says Cifaldi.
From a development perspective, adding guns to your game has a dual benefit. Wolfenstein and Doom helped define the role of guns in video games, and those games came out of a country that defined itself through guns. “Guns are satisfying to use, and they exist in the real world,” says McDonnell. “You have easy replicable models for design, there are a lot of variants in them and the designs. If you want to make a good shooter, you already have ten designs right there, but if you want to make an action game, you have to figure out the classes, or you have to figure out different weapons. It’s more complicated.”
Saying hi to Mom in The American Dream.
More importantly? Guns sell. Guns are a familiar, beloved language to gamers, and AAA developers in particular are nervous to err away from them in what amounts to - let’s face it - big, scary, multimillion dollar risks. “With The Last of Us, we went past our comfort zone by including fewer combat encounters than we had in our previous games,” Naughty Dog’s Neil Druckmann told IGN on the topic of guns in video games back in 2014. “And with our DLC, we’re trying to go even further past our comfort zone. There are a couple of long stretches in the DLC where there’s no combat, and we’re trying to keep you engaged in other mechanics. It’s going to be an interesting test for us to see how people will react to it.”
People reacted very positively to The Last of Us: Left Behind; in fact the most common criticism leveled against it was that its bloody climactic shoot-out felt paradoxical to the very human story it had told to that point. This is one instance of the aforementioned ludonarrative dissonance, a term coined by game developer Clint Hocking when describing the tension between two different ways the game encourages the player to act in the 2007 shooter BioShock.
“To cut straight to the heart of it, Bioshock seems to suffer from a powerful dissonance between what it is about as a game, and what it is about as a story”, wrote Hocking (who also referenced the ‘Citizen Kane of video games’ in his piece, but we won’t prod that bear). “By throwing the narrative and ludic elements of the work into opposition, the game seems to openly mock the player for having believed in the fiction of the game at all.”
If a game places importance on the story, these moments of dissonance can disrupt the player’s suspension of disbelief.
Dr Malcolm Ryan, Senior Lecturer in Game Design and Development at Macquarie University, Sydney, says that dissonance is most harshly felt in games that present themselves as realistic. If a game places importance on the story, argues Ryan, these moments of dissonance can disrupt the player’s suspension of disbelief. “They can be taken out of the story and made aware of the artificiality of the game. What happens next depends on how invested the player is in the narrative.”
Many players are happy to chuckle at the conflict, mutter “video games” and blithely carry on, but those keenly invested in the narrative might find it jarring, as if the fourth wall had been accidentally broken during a play. “In particular, if the mechanics require the player to act in ways which make no narrative sense, such players may be reluctant to continue playing,” says Ryan.
Realism is a trend in the current mainstream space, felt most keenly in ‘gritty’ shooters and action games, so it’s no surprise that dissonance can be felt when guns are wielded by protagonists who are painted as realistically vulnerable or empathetic. The recent Watch Dogs 2, for example, gives players the option to mow down people by the dozen with 3D-printed assault weapons, yet its protagonist is presented as easygoing and kind-hearted.
“The way he’s portrayed in the cutscenes ranting against the misuse of people’s personal information is passionate, and he seems like a fundamentally good person,” wrote Dan Stapleton in IGN’s review of Watch Dogs 2. “And then the mission begins and he might wipe out a group of private security guards, gang members, or worse, actual San Francisco Police, before going back to being relatively happy-go-lucky in the cutscenes again, unfazed by all the murder and chaos.”
In instances like this, guns feel shoe-horned into projects where they aren’t strictly necessary. Watch Dogs 2 is a recent example of a blockbuster game where a wonderfully inventive central mechanic - hacking - has nothing to do with violence, yet violence feels included as a checked tickbox - make sure the player also has the option to kill everyone.
Even when guns make sense within the narrative, there are many instances where the central objective of ‘blast your way through’ dulls its storytelling impact. The Uncharted series has long been mocked - albeit gently - for presenting us with a charismatic, knockabout lead who is also a mass murderer, while nice guy John Marston from Red Dead Redemption seems indifferent to leaving thousands of bodies in his wake in his pursuit to take revenge on just a handful of men.
“I don't like to kill a man on his knees,” says Marston, when you’re given a rare choice to actually save an NPC, “even if he deserves it.” His honor is just a facade of course, an illusion that’s immediately broken as he rides off into the sunset among the severed limbs of his fallen enemies.
It’s here that we come to the crux of the issue. As developers try to tell stories beyond the theme of ‘survival’, they’re bucking up against an increasingly archaic central mechanic that has long since lost its ‘one-size-fits-all’ shape. This status quo is limiting the stories we can tell in our games, and as the likelihood of success in the AAA space gets smaller and smaller, it doesn’t look like it’s going to change any time soon. Recently, Watch Dogs 2, Dishonored 2 and Titanfall 2 all performed significantly lower in sales than their predecessors, which only encourages a more risk averse climate in the blockbuster space.
“AAA games can't afford to take all that many creative risks,” says Cifaldi. “If you've got to sell a game in the millions to break even, then you're going to have to play it safe and stick to genres people immediately recognize.”
Of course, this is not to say that there aren’t games where guns are the focus and do work well within the context of story. Main-stayers Call of Duty and Battlefield are more often than not wonderfully-crafted love letters to guns, while Half Life 2, Portal 2, and stalwarts in the survival horror genre like Resident Evil 4 all take shooting as a mechanic and twist it into different shapes to create something new and exciting. 2012’s Spec Ops: The Line even played with ludonarrative dissonance, presenting you with a straightforward shooter scenario before pulling the rug out from under your feet to reveal that you are, in fact, a cold-hearted killer.
For McDonnell, a playful approach to guns scratches the itch to make a shooter, but from the position of someone who has only held a gun once (“I fired it in a rifle range and then took it home and put it in a cabinet and locked it up separate from the ammunition”). Like the makers of the former games, he thinks of shooting as a mechanic to be explored, not merely inserted.
“We think about shooting. Shooting is a mechanic that exists, right, so let's do things around shooting, around that platform. People are making games that are in first person, and where you shoot at someone and you teleport into a position. I would consider that a shooter. It relies on all the same skills, the base interactions, it's just not about guns.”
It won’t always be about guns. Put side by side with film, video games are still in their infancy.
And it won’t always be about guns. Put side by side with film, video games are still in their infancy; Cifaldi believes we’re still practically in the silent movies era of the medium. “Just as we look back and laugh at the absurdity of a 19th century film audience jumping out of their seats at the sight of an approaching train, I think the people of the 22nd century will mock our astonishment at pointing a cursor at a 3D representation of a human and watching them go ragdoll.”
After all, it’s a big world, and there are many stories to tell outside of the ones that begin and end with the pull of a trigger.
Lucy O'Brien is an editor at IGN’s Sydney office. Follow her ramblings on Twitter.
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