Violence Does Not Occur In Videogames

This post was inspired by someone in my discussion group who remarked that Mario punching a Koopa Troopa in Super Mario World was uncharacteristically violent.

Does violence occur in videogames?

I would argue that no violence occurs in videogames.

While Merriam Webster defines violence as “behavior involving physical force intended to hurt, damage, or kill someone or something”, I think such a definition is both underinclusive and overinclusive. First, the inclusion of “physical force” in the definition of violence ignores the robust discourse on non-physical violence that cursorily includes systemic, taxonomic, economic, and linguistic violence. Second, the restrictive invocation of intentionality presupposes omniscience and omnipotence and fails to accurately capture the unintentionality of vast swathes of violence. Third, the ipso facto inclusion of merely damaging something is overly broad; merely damaging something is not violence, for violence can only occur when someone has a particular form of attachment (care, dependence, etc.) to the thing being damaged.

I instead would define violence more succinctly as “enacted harm against something about which someone cares”. This can be people, possessions, conceptions of the self, the environment, cultures, and so on.

With this operative definition of violence, what occurs in Super Mario World and Braid is not violence. Stomping on a Goomba or Monstar is not violence as an act unto itself. Stomping on a Goomba or Monstar, however, can become violence if a player or observer maintain a particular form of attachment to those creatures. In that case, the violence is occurring through videogames; violence is being perpetrated by the player, mediated by the videogame, to the player or observer. Alternatively, as was Liz Ryerson’s experience, violence from video games occurs in Braid through “it’s [sic] centering Tim’s story, and attempting to rationalize of justify his guilt without really delving much into its source”. Liz Ryerson transformed this violence she experienced from Braid into the violence that many players experience from Problem Attic, whether that violence took the form of nauseating visuals, jarring sounds, feelings of hopelessness and containment, or still other virulent stimuli.

However, in any discussion of so-called violence in videogames, the concern that videogames cause violence inevitably arises. This concern takes several oft-repeated forms: desensitization (the repetition and consequencelessness of “violence” in videogames causes desensitization to violence which results in a lower or non-existent threshold to commit violent acts), encouragement (videogames reward “violence” resulting in players believing violence is actively good), and transferability (“violence” in videogames and violence are synonymous, so videogame players just become more violent). I think these approaches to videogame-caused violence are not particularly fruitful. If instead we focus on the idea that “games themselves can also directly generate concepts”, we can ask the question, “what concepts do players build playing a game and do these concepts facilitate violence?” (Jagoda 131). With this question, we can begin to see how the Manichaeism of Super Mario World facilitates the creation of ideologies of fascistic individualism and simple binary morality that facilitate violence. Violence occurring with these ideologies formed using videogames is violence occurring with videogames.

Violence can occur through, with, and from videogames but not in videogames since Goombas can’t feel pain.