Bodycount in FPS Games

This is something that started bothering me recently. I love FPS games, but the more I play them, the more it bothers me. Think about this: how many people did Gordon Freeman kill throughout the course of Half Life 2? How many soldiers died at Jack Carver’s hands in FarCry? If you really count all the kills you score throughout your average game, you will realize that the body count is higher than most over the top Rambo style action movies.

This seems to be the premise in almost every FPS game: you fight your way through wave after wave of highly trained troops, dispatching all of them and going through thousands of rounds of ammo. You single handedly kill hundreds, if not thousands of people before you reach the final stage and/or boss. Most games don’t really keep track of the actual in game body count, but if they did it would probably look bit like that scene from Hot Shots 2 in which Charlie Sheen is shooting his machine gun for 3 minutes straight decimating the enemy soldiers while a counter in the corner of the screen spins wildly out of control:


click here if you can’t see the movie

This is little bit less striking in games where you mostly kill zombies and/or aliens (eg. Halo). I mean, zombies usually need to be killed to avoid spreading the disease, and they are already dead. But killing scores and scores of human beings just seems wrong and unrealistic. And yes, I do realize that most of the FPS games do include things that are much realistic than that. Still, I sometimes have hard time believing that the protagonists of these games is really as altruistic and kind hearted as the script paints them to be. I mean, after you kill roughly 6 thousand men or so, can you still consider yourself normal? Even if it was in self defense – the realization that in the past few days you have single handedly killed more people than the nuke that was dropped on Hiroshima can’t be good for your sanity.

It’s not that I don’t enjoy the giddy wanton carnage that usually ensues in these games. It’s just that sometimes I find this non-stop bloodbath tiresome, and slightly disturbing. Sometimes I wish that we could bring these out of control body counts back into realm of plausibility. Perhaps game would offer you alternatives to combat – so that instead of cutting your way through ranks of enemies, you could sneak past perhaps solve some logical puzzle that would allow you to bypass or incapacitate enemies without actually slaughtering them wholesale. I know that some of the stealth based games out there do offer you that kind of experience, but that’s not what I mean.

When you see 15-20 heavily armed soldiers advancing towards your position your reaction should usually be “Oh, shit – let’s run away and find another way to get in” instead of “Yeeehaw! Bring’em on!” I think this kind of game play where you are forced to pick your battles, and avoid heavy protracted combat would be a bit more rewarding, than just mindlessly murdering hordes upon hordes of enemies. But that’s just me.

[tags]fps, first person shooter, body count, fps body count, hot shots 2, half life 2, far cry[/tags]

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10 Responses to Bodycount in FPS Games

  1. Teague UNITED STATES Internet Explorer Windows says:

    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. :)

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  2. Ian Clifton UNITED STATES Mozilla Firefox Ubuntu Linux says:

    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 ;)

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  3. Luke Maciak UNITED STATES Mozilla Firefox Windows says:

    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.

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  4. Muhammad SINGAPORE Mozilla Firefox Windows Terminalist says:

    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.

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  5. Luke Maciak UNITED STATES Mozilla Firefox Ubuntu Linux says:

    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.

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  6. ACK SWEDEN Mozilla Firefox Ubuntu Linux says:

    @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 ;-)

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  7. Alphast NETHERLANDS Mozilla Firefox Debian GNU/Linux Terminalist says:

    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?).

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  8. ACK SWEDEN Mozilla Firefox Ubuntu Linux says:

    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

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  9. Luke Maciak UNITED STATES Mozilla Firefox Windows says:

    @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. :)

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  10. Red_Dawn UNITED STATES Mozilla Firefox Windows says:

    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.

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