The exact game you are describing: Metal Gear Solid. Not only does it tally body count, you can avoid combat or take mooks down non-lethally. For a couple weeks after I finish one of those games, I have real trouble killing virtual people.

@Alphast – yup, that’s exactly what I’m talking about. Oh, and Morrowind is one of my favorite games of all time. :)

@ACK – oh man, I haven’t played Pirates in ages. :)

A game just came to mind, not an FPS so kinda OT: Sid Meiers’ Pirates. Even though you do get to fight personally, you never kill the other guy, either he gives up, or you do. Of course your crew is another matter, but they’re just numbers at the bottom of the screen ;-). Decidedly family-friendly in that way. If you want your kid to grow up a pirate that is. Yaarrr

I totally agree with you here: even relatively “realistic” FPS such as Medal of Honor still are completely ridiculous on that part. That’s the reason I prefer to play games like Oblivion or Morrowind, where you can nearly go all the way to the end without killing any human. Or very few. Demons and animals are fair game, though you are not even obliged to kill them either… And forget about killing any hostile character if they haven’t attacked you first. It’s the best way to have guards stunning you and putting you in jail (with loss of characteristics and possessions.. who said jails were supposed to be vacation camps?).

@Luke:

Hey maybe that’s the new deal for the difficulty slider, not making it simply harder, but more realistic. Instead of increasing the number of enemies and their health, reduce the number, up the skills and lower the players resistance to their bullets. Sprinkle team-mates as needed.

My guess is that the problem is AI, and player frustration. It’s hard to get the AI right, and players get frustrated when they feel like the computer is “cheating”. But OTOH, the people playing on “super-hardcore-veteran” should shouldn’t whine too much.

I’m struggling to think of a game with that kind of mechanic, most shooters seem to be decidedly shooty for some weird reason ;-)

But are there actually people like that out there? I mean I do believe that someone might want to try drifting after playing a game or watching that movie. But thinking that you actually know how to do it after playing a game is just silly.

And yeah – I do like killing hordes of enemies, and it does make me feel like a badass when I wipe out a whole unit of heavily armed soldiers. But after doing that over and over again, it sinks in that I’m just too awesome. After dispatching wave after wave of enemies in a game that otherwise aims for realism you kinda realize that no one can be this good and that hurts immersion in the game world a bit.

I don’t mind unrealistic games, like killing hordes of bad guys, wave after wave of them. It’s just a game after all, and i play them in the name of fun, as a form of entertainment. You can’t read too much into it. I guess sometimes, it’s the unrealistic-ness of it all that makes it so much fun. I guess you can say TV and movies are like that, but only games can make you the protagonist of a story and not just watching him/her.

It only gets scary for me if one perceives real-life as games, like when one thinks it is quite simple to drift just because they’ve racked up high scores in NFS:Underground. You definitely need help if you think that you can be some sort of super spy or soldier, just because you’ve beaten that FPS game in super-hardcore-veteran mode.

Btw, I don’t really mind focus on killing and violence. In fact I enjoy the brutality in games, and the bloodier they are the better. I guess I’m more disturbed by the mathematical ratio – how many people can a single man kill in a lifetime. If you think about it, even in times of war, front line troops would usually have dozens of confirmed kills in each mission.

I think a good parallel is when you compare the multilayer gameplay to single player. When you play with other people, it really takes exceptional skill to score more than dozen kills without dying yourself. It kinda makes sense – just like on a real battlefield.

In a single player mode, on the other hand the goal is to cut your way through whole armies of npc’s without dying yourself. Which just seems wrong from statistical point of view.

Good point about hostages, but I guess setting realistic objectives for the player is possibly an even better solution. After all, you usually don’t send one guy by himself to rescue hostages – (unless his name is John Rambo or Chuck Norris that is). You usually send a commando squad.

Have you tried the SWAT games? You are supposed to only kill the terrorists who are a direct threat (e.g., disable the guy shooting at you, not the one who drops his gun and puts his hands up in surrender). Your score is affected by how well you handled the situation, so going in blasting everyone isn’t the best strategy.

If this disturbs you, think about any history book you ever read. Was the focus on peace or war? Little time is spent on the diplomacy that is used to end/prevent wars or on the major peace advocates of the time period. It’s all about war and the politics directly relating to war.

Getting back to the point a bit, I think that hostages are a good way to make that shift. If an enemy encampment has a dozen hostages, you can’t just go in blasting or their lives will be lost. Unfortunately, most games deal with this by giving you a knife and a silencer.

We try to paint the morals in black and white. Enemy = bad, no redeeming qualities. S/he has no family to feed, joined this enemy army of free will, and wants you dead because you represent good. How often is that the case in real life? Goombas have feelings too ;)

I hear you, you whining sissy-boy.
Seriously, though, it is an interesting dichotomy. I enjoy them probably as much as you, but now that I have 2 small children, I think about it more than I used to.
Maybe it stems from most of us wanting to feel like a hero but lacking the day-to-day opportunity, and we are conditioned to think of heroes as being military in nature. That notion has been receiving some much-needed adjustment lately, but it’s still there.
Great topic! I can’t wait to see where it goes. :)