Batman Comic Writer Says Videogame Violence Not Real Enough, Questions What Gamers Really Want

Landry Walker, a writer who has worked on DC Comic’s “Batman: The Brave and the Bold” as well as “The Incredibles”, published an interesting article on the web sharing his views on videogame violence and what he thinks gamers really want versus what they say they want.

He claims to have come to this realization while watching a friend play Rocksteady’s Batman: Arkahm Asylum game. The sheer fact that Batman was actually taking damage was beyond him as he repeatedly told his friend that someone like Batman was’t supposed to get shot in the first place, but beyond that he was even more taken back by the fact that the impact of the rounds fired into the Dark Knight didn’t seem to cause any visible agony or distress to the character.

Landry cites his own personal encounter with gunfire as an example:

I’ve been shot at a couple of times. I don’t mean I was sitting at the TV waving a controller around so a little pixel person could dodge cyborg powered armor piercing poison tipped bullets. Nope. These were just bullets from a simple and boring hand gun. In each instance, the bullets missed. Lucky me. Because there were no handy first aid packs or carefully planted green herbs lying around waiting. If I had been shot, I expect it would have been amazingly unlike a video game. Assuming the bullet did not inflict irreparable harm to my body, the experience of actually being shot (let’s assume a grazing strike to the shoulder) would have likely done irreparable harm to the cleanliness of my pants. Yes. I realize the imaginary bullet hit my imaginary shoulder. You do the obvious math on how that correlates to the un-cleanliness of my pants.

He goes on to explain how he believes that gamers don’t want reality in games despite what he has heard them say on multiple occasions, and then proceeds to contradict himself in a way by saying that he would personally like to see more realism in games in the hopes that those playing walk away with a greater appreciation for the magnitude of the scenario they happened to survive:

Time and time again, I’ve heard people claim that they want to see a greater degree of realism in video games. But that’s a lie. We don’t want realism. We want fantasy. We want unlimited ammo and we want rapid respawns. We want to jump out of second story windows without a scratch. We want to dodge bullets and shake off mortal wounds without pause.

I want a game that recreates that insane rush of endorphins and adrenaline or whatever it is after hearing a simple bullet crack past your ear. That’s what games should be. So real that I just have to put down the controller for a minute because some part of my lizard brain is shaking in disbelief over the scenario I somehow managed to survive.

While I don’t think that the game Landry describes in the tail end of the quote above would be very fun at all, mainly due to my belief that reality is no where near as easy to survive as fantasy, I do agree that most gamers don’t want complete realism.

I wrote a similar article on Ripten back in 2008 titled “Fun versus Reality: How Real Do You Want It?.” Reality does not neccessarily equal fun, though I think that somewhere along the line things got mixed up and companies started making the assumption that with Next Gen power and graphics everything had to look and play as if it were real. That is not and should not be the case.

I had a professor in college once say that the look/style of something, be it a comic or a movie or anything for that matter, doesn’t matter nearly as much as the consistancy of the product. In other words, you can draw an entire comic or make a full feature movie using stick figures, and if the look  is consistant enough that your audience buys into the world you will have done a good job.

What do you think? Are the majority of gamers saying they want reality in games without knowing exactly what “real” is? Or do you believe that the increased power of consoles has sent developers and publishers down a path that’s more focused on flexing their technological muscle?

Source: Elder-Geek