Violence in Interactive Storytelling

Tl;dr: What if you had to do paperwork before you could attempt to use violence to solve your problems? Can we nudge the future towards a better world?

Humans are storytellers. It is literally etched into every part of who we are. We tell stories to ourselves about who we are. We share and invent stories with others to carry history or pertinent lessons. Our stories entertain, educate, and inspire us.

Humans can also be very violent. Any brief skim through news (never mind history) is enough justification for that claim.

Before we can discuss violence in the context of storytelling, however, we need to be concrete with what I mean by violence. The dictionary may define violence as “the use of physical force to harm or destroy”. This definition is both obvious and limiting, ignoring other ways beyond physical force that violence manifests itself.

Moral questions on violence reach beyond mere physical force: Is it violence to defend oneself from harm? Is it violence to revoke freedom? Is it violence to silence someone? What about in sports - is it violent to tackle in football, or punch in boxing? Although we can say, “It depends”, that begs the question: On what does it depend?

My definition of violence is more encompassing and abstract, however I believe it also brings more clarity to the subject:

Violence is to reduce someone from being a person to being an object.

Although not a precise enough definition for a PhD, as a working definition this is far more useful. This shifts the burden from external actions to internal states of being. A violent mindset precedes violent acts.1

Violence is a Mindset

This means that, before violent acts break out, we can take the time to learn and prepare our mindsets so that we might avoid violence altogether. Going back to competitive sports, a violent mindset would reduce an opponent to an object: something to be defeated. A non-violent mindset is rooted in empathy, rendering opponents as people to be respected with dignity.

I’ve seen American football games where a tackle turns into a potentially life-changing injury, with an opposing player removed from the field on a stretcher. At one game, the crowd cheered with glee: we destroyed our opponent, making our own victory all the easier to obtain! In another scenario, the crowd fell silent, a sudden vigil to a person who, despite wearing a different jersey than ours, was just another player in the game.

Such was the case for Franz Stigler and Charlie Brown, opposing pilots in World War II. Charlie Brown was piloting an American bomber that had sustained heavy damage. His crew, wounded, could be seen through holes in the fuselage. Stigler, an ace German pilot, saw the low-flying bomber struggling to keep up with its returning formation. Stigler had planned to shoot down the bomber, as he was one victory away from earning his Knight’s Cross (never mind that to not attack could have been treasonous, risking his own life). He recalled his own training from Gustav Rödel, who said “If I ever see or hear of you shooting at a man in a parachute, I will shoot you myself.” Stigler later commented, “To me, it was just like they were in a parachute. I saw them, and I couldn’t shoot them down.”2

Would it have been violent for Stigler to shoot down Brown’s bomber? What if Brown’s crew took aim and fired at Stigler?

Non-violence, as practiced by Gandhi or Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is rooted in these same principles: instead of rendering others as enemies or objects, we see them as potential friends and at least as humans with dignity. Non-violence lays a mental trap for an aggressor, wherein their own violence forces them to convict themselves with their own conscience.

“Every nation and every man instantly surround themselves with a material apparatus which exactly corresponds to . . .their state of thought. Observe how every truth and every error, each a thought of some man’s mind, clothes itself with societies, houses, cities, language, ceremonies, newspapers. Observe the ideas of the present day . . . see how timber, brick, lime, and stone have fl own into convenient shape, obedient to the master idea reigning in the minds of many persons. . . . It follows, of course, that the least enlargement of ideas . . . would cause the most striking changes of external things.”

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, “War,” lecture delivered in Boston, March, 1838. Reprinted in Emerson’s Complete Works, vol. XI, (Boston: Houghton, Miffl in & Co., 1887), 177.

Violence in Interactive Storytelling

So, you may be wondering, what does all of this have to do with Bridge Simulators and interactive storytelling?

Human storytelling all too often leans into violence as a means of creating conflict, resolving conflict, or even introducing slapstick comedy. The earliest video games, movies, and stories almost universally involve some kind of violence-against-violence, even when comic or trivial. Donkey Kong chucking barrels at Mario, Mario jumping on or shooting fireballs at Koopa turtles, first person shooters, duck hunt, the list goes on and on.

It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine bridge simulators, TTRPGs, LARPs, and other forms of interactive storytelling without guns, arrows, swords, phasers, torpedos, and the like. What is one to do in a D&D campaign without tools of violence?

I’m not sure I have an answer to D&D, but I would like to propose that bridge simulators have a unique set of constraints that can lend themselves to exploring non-violence in what is, generally, a very unforgiving environment: the inky void of space.

Space is really big, and time is really long

One of the tensions of telling stories in Space is that Space is actually really boring on human-scales. There’s not much out there, it’s generally dark and cold with little variation, and it takes forever to get anywhere. The advantage to all of this is that it allows for a lot of time to explore the inner space of characters and stories, rather than the outer space of conflict.

Of course, that’s not as much fun as going into some conflict, guns blazing, where you ask questions later, or getting chased by some antagonistic alien through a Nebula. Hence the tension between taking all the time in the world (because you’re not on a world anymore) and having to tell a story within a few hours of play. A wild-west-style shootout between good guys and bad guys has its own appeal, where the stakes are immediate and the victories are obvious. I don’t think anyone has made a popular drama about Thoreau’s Walden, sitting around thinking for hours in between chopping wood.

What if we slow down turns of combat from sub-second to minutes or more?

Hence, storytelling in space is not quite as reactively tactical as the close-quarters combat of rolling dice to figure out if you hit a kobold in a dungeion. Rather, strategic planning and resource management are critical. When it could take minutes for your torpedo to actually hit your target, you have some time to decide whether that’s the right move or not. Likewise, your opponent is going to see it coming far enough ahead to try to do something about it.

In that time frame, what if you had to do paperwork to justify the use of force? In the real world, law enforcement has to file paperwork to justify the use of force after the fact, accounting for every spent bullet casing. What if you had the time to reason through the consequences of your actions, your justification for using force, and weighing the fact that you only carry so much energy and ammunition? This becomes a critical exercise in moral decision making, strategy, and planning. It’s a simple nudge away from reactive shoot-first-ask-questions-later gameplay to proactive planning and intentionality.

Energy weapons in space like phasers or particle beams are a little trickier, since they travel at the speed of light - and an opponent can’t see them coming until they’re already there. That said, the amount of energy you have to concentrate in order to cause harm at such vast distances is non-trivial, leading such weapons to be more useful at closer range, or when attempting to deflect kinetic weapons like torpedos.

We owe the future the right kind of nudge

I’ve heard it said that the way to change culture is to make more culture. The culture I’m from is, sadly, a very violent one. Can we change this culture by making new storytelling that is less violent and still fun? If we can take the time to slow down, learn and think through moral decision making, and nudge ourselves to adopt a non-violent mindset in our storytelling and gameplay, can we change how we engage with ourselves and others in the real world?

When I was younger, I heard it said that “all software is a political act.” I didn’t understand this: I just wanted to build cool stuff, and hopefully make a living doing it. As I’ve written more software, and seen the industry move through cycles of boom and bust, I’ve come to understand this better.

The code we write is a means to an end. That end is putting something into the world that is a bundle of our preferences, possibilities, and design choices. This will always be so, whether we’re writing code or fashioning some other kind of machine.

Each of these bundles of preferences nudges people - our customers or users or players or neighbors - towards certain defaults. Do our social feeds prioritize more ~”engagement”~ addiction? Do we optimize games with skinner boxes and predatory psychology? Do we use dark patterns? Does a game open our minds to new ideas? Could interactive storytelling teach us empathy and compassion?3

Can we make it fun?

Closing this chain of thoughts out, we have the cautionary reality of what amounts to evolutionary pressure. If people can choose between two different games - one a fun and exciting adventure with typical violence, the other one boasting about how much moral paperwork you get to do when faced with violence - it’s pretty easy to assume that the exciting and fun one will win the day. If both games cost $20, then this turns into a zero-sum race to whoever will win a purchase, and that will likely starve our novel paperwork game out into the cold.

Prevailing culture: 1, Non-violent culture: 0.

Can we make the alternative culture more fun? How can we make such games more interesting?

I think we can, but we have to “gamify” a different experience. Instead of tactical reactions on who can shoot first or fastest, can we “find the fun” in the process of discovery? If there are different branches of story to explore and experience, can we make it possible to see the consequences of our choices? Or how the future might change drastically based on decisions we make today?

I leave this question open: When it comes to designs that nudge us towards a better world, how can we make it fun?

We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery, we need humanity; more than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost.

~ Charlie Chaplin