Slamming a man's head in a car door. Shoving him through a wood chipper. Plunging his face into a tank of hungry piranhas. THQ's controversy-baiting conversion of The Punisher is set to prod videogame violence into subtly new territory when it's released later this month. Based around the extremely dark Marvel comic book and movie, the game puts you in control of unhinged vigilante, Frank Castle, as he wastes criminal scumbags by the dozen. In key areas of each map you can also interrogate suspects via a torture mini-game, carefully manipulating your victim's stress level via the twin analogue sticks. Get them just scared enough and they'll sing like a canary, go too far and they die a gruesome death...
This feature may only be a calculated attempt to draw attention to a standard Max Payne clone, but it raises a few intriguing questions. In most instances, game violence is a transitory act – you pull the trigger a couple of times and your enemy is down. In Punisher, the interactivity of the violent act lingers, inflicting pain becomes a gameplay challenge, arguably more psychologically involving than merely aiming and firing. The element of sadism is an extension of what we saw in Manhunt last year, where the lead character is ordered to kill gang members in a variety of lurid ways, purely to satiate the bloodlust of a psychotic spectator. Literally, senseless violence.
Some will argue that these games usher in a new era of sickening gratuity but in many ways they're actually more truthful. Game violence, whatever the narrative context, is about taking pleasure in dishing out death – if it wasn't fun we wouldn't do it. Manhunt and Punisher are simply revelling in this fact, removing - or at least backgrounding - the usual plot justifications in favour of pure and sustained violent interaction. In this context, the director in Manhunt is really just a surrogate gamer, voicing the thoughts that flash through all our heads when we bludgeon a scientist to death in Half-Life, just for the hell of it.
So where is all this going? What do the violent games of the future have in store for us? If we can stomach the anarchic gore of The Punisher and Manhunt, what will be served up in their wake? Certainly, as technology develops, so do the raw materials available for spectacularly graphic bloodshed. Human characters are gradually transmuting from the iconic to the naturalistic – where once you were shooting stick men, you're now up against complex 3D models. The people we are killing are beginning to look just like… people.
I asked Paul McLaughlin Head of Art at Lionhead Studios, just how detailed human models are these days. He told me, "currently the polygon count is in the hundreds or low thousands. It really depends on the particular platform, number of characters displayed on screen at once, and on the positioning of the camera relative to the characters; closer requires more polys. However at Lionhead we are contemplating characters in the order of 10,000 – 20,000. This is a significant increase and we're primarily making that leap to allow us to explore facial expression and character empathy to a greater degree…. I think we'll see a lot more realistic looking characters this year. In two or three years you'll have to look very hard to tell the difference between a screenshot from a game and a still from a movie."
The realism won't just be skin deep. Slowly, a new age of anatomical authenticity is dawning. Endorphin a complex real-time human animation system created by NaturalMotion will produce characters that emulate movement from the inside out. As CEO Torsten Reil explains, "we have created genuine virtual humans, modelling not just their skeletal structures, but their nervous systems and muscles as well. When an endorphin character moves, the nerves are activating muscle fibres that in turn move the skeleton, making for extremely realistic movement".
So if human characters are to have real, functioning insides, the natural progression in terms of game violence, is toward graphically realistic injury. Real wounds. I asked both Paul and Torsten if we'll get to the point where human models contain authentic viscera, so that they spill bodily organs all over the place when they're shot. Both said the industry was already very close to making this happen. However, they offered a key proviso. As Reil puts it, "We have to ask ourselves, of course, how far we want to take this kind of realism. If it is just about creating gory scenes for the sake of it, people will rightly be concerned. On the other hand, realism can also be used to evoke feelings previously unknown in games, such as pity. This adds a completely new layer of depth which has so far been unique to films."
Is there going to be a tipping point for games? A moment where graphical realism makes experiences like those represented in Manhunt and Punisher unpalatable to a mass audience? Because certainly, it will be the boundaries of mainstream taste, not the technology itself, that will dictate content. If you look at cinema, despite the incredible special effects technology available to today's horror film makers, multiplex movies like Bogeyman and Wes Craven's latest, Cursed, are no more gory than their forbearers thirty years ago. Will we really want to bash innocent passers-by to death, if we can see the fear in their eyes, blood streaming from fresh wounds, guts spilling, steaming onto the sidewalk. Will that be cool?
Or will the depiction of game violence fracture into different strands to avoid that scenario? Already we're seeing a number of games that attempt to place violence within a moral framework. Fable and Deus Ex both show that there are consequences to random acts of thuggery and ask players to make moral choices. Meanwhile, in Full Spectrum Warrior – the urban battle simulator originally designed for the US army - the 'don't shoot the civilians' feature found in shooters like Virtua Cop (where it existed purely to challenge the reflexes of the player) is extended and muddied, so that your actions must sometimes be entirely structured around minimising civilian casualties, even if those civilians shout abuse, and even attack you. Games are beginning to learn that violence is more complicated than good guys and bad guys.
On the other hand, the depiction of violence may become more self-conscious and stylised. The 'bullet time' shooting sequences introduced by Max Payne are an example, but we could also see games that use particle editors and/or real-time physics to create outrageous Kill Bill-style blood spurts and limb amputations that couldn't possibly be construed as realistic. I was talking to Aaron Loeb at Planet moon about the OTT gore effects in their forthcoming PSP horror shooter, Infected. "We have a system called "Meaty Chunks," he explains. "When you blow up an Infected, it will break into its component parts of viscera, limbs, and other meaty chunks, which will then fly around and bounce off of others using a correct physical model. On top of that, the blood is dangerous to other Infected, so if they get caught in the spray of chunks, they may also explode into parts." Could this be the future - comic book hyper violence to separate us from any sense of 'reality'?
Doubtless, we'll see all of these approaches and more as game design evolves to cope with impending photorealism. Importantly, the introduction of characters who convey fear and happiness, who roll into a ball when threatened, and who look real, could bring about a quantum shift in underlying game design, changing the whole focus to emotional rather than violent interaction. No, I don't mean Quake Hugmatch, or multiplayer Capture the Love. I mean games where players must read the expressions and body language of NPCs rather than just twat them with crow bars. The Sims, but photorealistic, first-person, immersive.
"I don't believe there is more of an inclination towards gore in video games than any other media," says McLaughlin. "It's primarily that combative and competitive gameplay, which has been the traditional mainstay of video games, lends itself to this sort of presentation. As the market matures more you'll see a whole host of new genres all produced to the highest standards of realism and quality. In the area you're talking about it'll mean internal organs, broken limbs or whatever, just as it would in an E.R. game or Animal Hospital.
"Personally I have no idea if people would want to 'play' in that sort of environment but it's certainly possible to create. I'm far more excited by the potential for conveying emotion and developing empathy with CG characters. I do feel that this'll be the big shift in virtual entertainment. When you have believable virtual friends, lovers, perhaps even a family, you're not going to want to garrote them… Although…."
