Remember E3? Remember how this year it seemed to be especially rife with exploding helicopters, heads being blown off, and elephant monsters' skulls being ripped open to expose their brains? Extreme violence in video game trailers and demos shown at big shows like E3 is obviously a result of the need to make your game stand out above others in a limited amount of time, but it does seem to be escalating to entirely new levels.
Perhaps surprisingly, someone who has come forward to call a spade a spade is the director of one of the games that fell foul of this at this year's E3: Splinter Cell: Blacklist. In an interview with GamesIndustry International, Patrick Redding suggested that the way to more successfully incorporate violence into a game is to take “a more systemic approach”, to veer away from the kinds of showy cinematic sequences that make such good trailer fodder and to make violence more of a choice:
If I'm playing the game and these events are being shown to me, and I feel as though it's like a cinematic moment in the middle of the game, then my discomfort with it comes from the feeling that I can't avoid it, or that it's part of the story that has to happen.
Of course, while a game like Splinter Cell: Blacklist is bound to rely on a certain level of violence, not all games should. On a bigger scale, Redding suggests we simply need more variety in the industry:
I think we all agree that for the last several years, games have been dominated by the adolescent male power fantasy-type experiences, across all genres and across all platforms, and I think most of us would like there to be more different kinds of games out there.
He might be speaking the obvious, but it's nice to have someone on the development side of things admit to it, even if Blacklist's E3 trailer contained its own fair share of neck stabbing, cars exploding, and lots and lots of bullets.