Content warning: detailed descriptions of violence.
In part 1, we tackled how we pick the targets of our first-person shooters. How do we reconcile the disparity between subject choice and subject matter? Why even play these games at all?
Well, duh, dumbass, they’re fun. Welcome to part 2.
No messing around, let’s keep it to the point this time: I play these games because they are fun. Sure, fun can’t sustain a healthy mind on its own, but immense art and depth have sprung up around the violence in these games. It’s so easy to brush under the rug. “It’s fun” is no real justification, though it may be the only justification that matters.
Doom is great and all, but it’s a bit old. In 1996, id Software released the follow-up that would set the tone for the genre. Quake is monumental in a lot of ways. It is both a serious artistic feat and an impressive technical one, sporting an actual 3D-rendered environment. It’s hard to overstate how big of a deal this is. Doom is run on simulated 3D, or basically a bunch of 2D images arranged very cleverly. Quake enemies, however, have backs, fronts and sides! It even added jumping to the genre! Really, though, it introduced the protagonist of our story: Bunnyhopping. Bunnyhopping is the name given to a quirk of the Quake physics engine. While consistently jumping, the player can move the mouse and alternate strafing directions to speed up faster than intended. The game only calculates friction while the player is on the ground, so by staying in the air you can keep accelerating to incredible speeds. This is movement tech, a constant, low-risk action more difficult than just walking around, but in exchange, it’s faster and more stylish.
In part 1 of this series, I talked about David Szymanski’s 2018 game DUSK. I fear I did it a disservice there. On paper, it’s basically a Quake fangame. It takes the broad strokes of the world and rewalks those paths with slight changes to taste. It appears, at first glance, to be inspired by Quake to a fault. In play, however, it’s a completely different story. The game builds on Quake in ways you can’t recognize in video. The speed of movement, the weapon selection and the stylishness are so refined they come close to clashing with the game’s redneck aesthetic. The levels are built around movement and combat in gradient, with brief squabbles at the beginning of each level escalating to dramatic fights. It builds tension in short cycles, with each level less than 10 minutes on a replay. Again, beyond the referential aesthetic, there’s an incredible degree of care taken to DUSK’s construction. Nowhere is this clearer than the movement. The game provides massive arenas for bunnyhopping around, a sense of verticality that Quake never tapped into. It’s so exciting to merge quick reactions and familiarity with these areas into a single path. It’s designed around bunnyhopping, rocket jumping and doing whatever you can to move as fast as possible. The speed gives a feeling of mastery and the difficulty becomes its own draw, where our skills can be measured against higher and higher bars. In turn, that difficulty becomes its own special kind of fun.
Sorath’s 2016 game Devil Daggers also answers the titular question in its own way. It’s one single nondescript arena: It has no story, no worldbuilding, a fire button, a jump button and some arrow keys. Despite this, I’ve played hours and hours of it. It’s not randomly generated — it’s one clear procession of enemies. The most talented players in the world can only survive for 10 minutes. You just kill endless demons on a circular platform in a black void. That’s not really what it’s about, though. It’s about drawing lines around this arena with your body and pushing how much you can hold in your head at once, all while keeping track of ten groups of enemies, weaving in between their lines as you predict them and moving exactly as fast as you need to. Bunnyhopping in Devil Daggers is high risk. Moving fast means having less of an idea of where you are, which stacks with the game’s intense difficulty. I’ve watched non-FPS players try the game and bounce off after five minutes of play. When a genre starts getting this kind of specialization, or when it’s niche to begin with, it really does lose people quickly. In exchange, the developers are able to tailor more engaging experiences to fewer players.
The power in this niche is bestowed directly to a game like Cruelty Squad. The game requires maximum focus, situational awareness and planning. Reaching those heights requires tapping into a flow state. Not everyone can reach that, though. Difficulty is taken for granted — we wouldn’t be here if we didn’t know how to do this dance. Because of this, niche games can push the limits further and further. There are challenges in the later stages of Dusk and Cruelty Squad incomprehensible to AAA games. You can’t sell a game this difficult to people with jobs — the community is composed of either people passionate enough to make time for it, or people with a lot of time to invest. The developers can keep placing higher and higher bars, and each time, because we’ve built this collective curve across all the games we’ve played in the genre, we can tackle each one at a higher and higher level. It feels obvious to say, but it’s satisfying. It’s fun, and that makes the jagged edges of the game’s presentation fade to feel completely natural.
The end of this road is competition, either with yourself or other players. A developer can only make a game so difficult, but a player can chase more precise execution forever. Angel Matrix’s 2022 game Neon White is perhaps the best example. Each level provides a carefully crafted gauntlet. They’re all rather easy on their own, but the game times your run-throughs of each level. If you land precise shots on the floating cel shaded demons and keep your momentum through the beautiful high-contrast locales, you can shave a few extra seconds off. It’s addicting. After so much fun, it’s trivial to put the violence out of your mind. When playing for the first time, I spent 45 minutes trying to beat a single level in less than 14 seconds. Of course, this is all aided by Machine Girl’s soundtrack, giving a perfect upbeat backing to every section. Everything bleeds away into a completely internal experience. We know exactly what we have to do, it’s just a matter of keeping composure towards a near-infinite vanishing point of precision. It operates below conscious thought, building muscle memory for each flick of the camera and dash jump combination. The goal? Always know more or less where you’re trying to go, and stay in the air.
That’s what it’s always been about, though. Just like in Quake, stay in the air. The games are always urging you to push it a little farther. Every time you bunnyhop, you’re making a choice of speed over control. At first, it’s tough — you’ll hit walls and feel stupid. Eventually, though, you’ll learn to pick your opportunities, and the game’s art will start to reveal itself in a series of split-second questions. The “fun” I’ve been liberally referring to throughout these first two pieces is exactly that: making decisions. When you have to choose between jumping over and sliding under an enemy attack, you are making a choice. Though it may not be as flashy or centralized as a narrative choice, there’s a lot more potential to use this. A smart game designer will build around giving the player as many feasible points of choice as possible. So why do we need the violence if it’s all just choices? If the form can be boiled down this far, why are we still following the old muscle memory of splatterhouse violence?
SPRAWL is the second of three games that inspired me to write these pieces. It puts everything we’ve talked about to use: It’s rich with movement tech, its own style of bunnyhopping, special weapon interactions, risk incentivization, limited meaningful options and a ton of situations to try it all out. It’s also quiet. Rather than opting for the flashiness of the genre’s top bills, it stays grounded in the dance-like rhythm of the movement. There is no big plot twist — just checking levels off. It’s faintly melancholic and provides an excellent backdrop for satisfying personal progression like Neon White. The only thing holding it back is the combat. The sullen concrete and challenging but consistent movement makes me wish I didn’t have to keep killing enemies.
In some ways, this is resonant. The protagonist doesn’t really want anything, but she also doesn’t seem to want to continue doing the killing she’s done so much of. In a genre like this, the only way to finish things off is with a little more violence. It’s kind of beautiful the way the themes align here. There is so much fun in this genre that could be surgically extracted from violence. Games like Neon White already do this to some extent — it abstracts the subjects of the violence and turns the focus to the dance. We could take it further, to games like Mirror’s Edge that feature nearly no combat at all. Wouldn’t things still ring hollow, though, built on a legacy of that violence as a silent background element?
This is all just icing. Interesting interrogations of the form are secondary to the form itself. There is an art here — if one far less respected — compacted into the single word “fun.” I want to let these games speak. They deserve a shot at it. That’s why you play them: There’s an entire unexplored dimension of interactivity in art, and these breakneck visceral games are the ones that are pushing it the hardest. The interplay of moment-to-moment reactions and long-term planning in games like Dusk and Neon White, the cold frantic flow state of games like Cruelty Squad and Devil Daggers — it’s a sort of interactive beauty I can only describe as truth. The sense of interactivity is true to these games and their ideas, and that’s something I’m so rarely forced to consider. It’s a beautiful gem trapped in this genre’s history and aesthetic.
Can the truth be separated from the violence? Tune in next time, when I talk about shooting people in the head. Fun!
Summer Senior Arts Editor Holly Tsch can be reached at htsch@umich.edu.