Contact Traces: On the Creative Technology of Videogame Gore

Gore in art is not necessarily gory; it rhymes with amor—it is either the substance of the tonal structure or material for the construction of figures of speech.

—Viktor Shklovsky, “Sterne’s Tristram Shandy: Stylistic Commentary,” 1921

Introduction

There is more to videogame¹ violence than violence. Such an outlook has gained traction in game studies and games journalism, as critical analyses of violence in video games seek alternatives to the perennial scapegoating of violent media for mass shootings.² Rather than engage politicians and the National Rifle Association in bad-faith debates, critics and scholars have pursued more productive understandings of how violence in video games works and can be interpreted. For example, people who make violent games have a much different relation to the violence they depict than do players. Joshua Rivera reports that one animator who produced anatomically accurate ultraviolent computer-generated–imagery cinematics for Mortal Kombat XI, often referencing photographs and videos of real injuries, was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. What lasts a few seconds in game might take days or weeks of sustained labor to create. Relating an interview with Alex Hutchinson, a game director who worked on violent games such as Assassin’s Creed III and Far Cry 4, Rivera writes that “the sensory feedback you get from interacting with the game—the thrill of winning, and fear of losing—does a lot of work to make graphic violence abstract in nature. Observers can’t quite understand that in the same way and might therefore be more repelled by the bloody images they’re seeing on screen.”³ On one hand, players enact a perspective that at least partially renders “graphic violence abstract in nature.” This is because the game does not operate as a simulation of the player’s reality but instead deploys graphical violence as one element within a structural process that engages player understanding. Were a player’s aesthetic appreciation of the game to remain exclusively at the level of realistic simulation, most people would likely be unable to play it. On the other hand, the violence shown by a game such as Mortal Kombat XI appears more detailed than its predecessors three decades ago—though perhaps not more realistic. After all, it was the darker, bloodier presentation achieved by “recording real actors performing all the moves” that set Mortal Kombat apart from its competitors in the arcades.⁴ How, then, might the critic account for such abstraction of violence— from the perspective of the player and the inner workings of the game—in the course of its computational enaction?

One response to how video games abstract from real-life violence lauds games that represent violence more realistically in a fuller sense of the word than visual, graphical realism. Games critic Ed Smith argues that video games are not violent enough because many of them represent bodily harm on its own without the attendant consequences and feelings that make violence meaningful.⁵ How violence is represented, he argues, should change from mere ludic obstacle to being narratively impactful, emotionally meaningful, and thereby uncomfortable.⁶ Realistic violence, however, need not portray loss. For instance, journalist Yussef Cole explains how Mafia 3 channels the appropriation of gun rights by the Black Panthers to defend against white supremacist power, itself historically supported by guns.⁷ Mafia 3 expands Smith’s call for depictions of meaningful violence by providing a politically subversive variant on the video game’s conventional power fantasy.

Amanda Phillips’s recent scholarship complicates the distinctions between player experience and outside observer as well as between abstract game mechanics and realistic representation.⁸ Taking up the headshot in video games, the issue for her is not whether players will themselves attempt to shoot people in the head in real life but rather that the prominence of headshots as a virtuosic ludic act informs a much wider cultural reception of gun violence and death. Headshots in video games instantiate what Phillips calls “mechropolitics,” which applies Achille Mbembe’s idea of necropolitics—the control of populations by dolling out death and controlling the...