In Search of Pacifism
What is violence? Videogames have been occupied with this question ever since Spacewar! (1962). It is a rather simple game in terms of intertwining systems compared to modern ones and to the subject at hand. Exploring how violence is depicted is a long and complicated journey, which we’ll try to make as short as possible, while avoiding myopic dead ends the subject has been rife with. To do so, we shall go from the simple towards the complex, from game systems to what they depict, which distinction will become arbitrary as what we’re looking at is transformed by the analysis.
The aforementioned violent scenario of Spacewar! is a good starting point because of its simplicity. In it, two spaceships face down each other in outer space, with the capacity for movement and ejecting rockets at a cost by using fuel. Ejected rockets fly until they run out of fuel, just as spaceships do. Once they do, both should start floating and cease to be a rocket and a ship to become moving objects. Upon colliding with another object, these objects destroy each other by movement and by being objects. We can say then, that movement and objects are destructive to equal measure, be it a spaceship or rocket, either floating or flying. How can we tell them apart, and what makes a rocket an object of mass destruction?
The answer is obvious to anyone familiar with spaceships and rockets, whose difference lies outside of fuel consumption and collision with objects. In Spacewar!, however, rockets disappear after running out of fuel. Their disappearance stops them from floating, which renders them unable to cause destruction. This decrease in destructive power coincides with the decrease of the rocket’s fuel. The spaceship, by contrast, becomes less responsive once it runs out of fuel, because it becomes unable to thrust itself. This makes the ship’s large floating body more destructive than a weapon of mass destruction.
Yet, this isn’t how we tell one destructive agent from another, but rather by intent. A ship is perceived to be violent if it ejects rockets at a target. We infer intent based on prior knowledge that tells us that rockets are designed as weapons of destruction. Such a ship can be seen as destructive even if it floats or thrusts itself towards a direction. Its weapons make it threatening. Can it ever be seen as neutral, or peaceful, even?
Multitudinous violence
Deus Ex (2000) imagines a future where violence is so common that people barely bat an eye to it. In the first game, a deadly pandemic ravages the world. States and corporations mobilize armed forces of man and machine in response. People carry weapons and modify their bodies in relation to violence. Deus Ex: Human Revolution (2011) depicts the preceding years of conflict about the legalization and commodification of body modifications. State and corporate powers are the focus of each games. Players are asked to delve into these conflicting powers as exceptional individuals. In Deus Ex, it is through a character called JC Denton, a genetically modified operative for a government anti-terrorist coalition; in Human Revolution, it is through Adam Jensen, a private security specialist, enhanced with experimental body augmentations. Violence arises from these parallels between state and corporations, and from individual and collective forms of power. Both games pose questions in this framework, where violence is situated in different ways and forms to make us question what violence even is.
Untangling this web of violence is the task at hand, that’s neither short nor easy, as it lays multitudes upon multitudes to frame something as violence. Upon looking at these multitudes constituting violence, we’d quickly find that unraveling them in their entirety is not possible. Whereas relating them to systemic frameworks, moral or otherwise, would turn the investigation to a reflection that reveals the framework one looks through as well as what is looked at. This is why such investigations can appear systematizing and moralizing. They transform by being transforming and are transforming by transformation. By making such moves of the framework transparent, one may face its incompleteness with greater clarity and, perhaps find the framework’s traces as interesting as what they leave behind by transformation. Since these transformations have no beginning or end points in particular by being continuously transforming, we should look at the commonalities between Deus Ex and Human Revolution. One such parallel is how they frame character actions as choices in inflicting violence.
Violent choices
In the first mission briefing of Deus Ex, players receive an electric baton and are offered to choose between a sniper rifle, a rocket launcher and a tranquilizing mini-crossbow. Human Revolution offers similar options, except weapons for killing are labeled as “lethal,” whereas for subduing as “non-lethal.” Instead of relying on prior knowledge about weapons and their destructive power, Human Revolution imbues weapons with values. The dialog-wheel informs us that weapons are evaluated according to their capacity of ending a human life. Evaluated by who? Jensen’s boss, the CEO of an augmentation company relays this information, or rather, offers ways to carry out his order. And the game’s formal system, another form of authority, lays out these values in explicit terms.
Does this imply that we are perceived according to these value systems, as either peaceful or violent? The protagonist’s boss and the developers may want us to think this, if we make such an inference from their authority. But this speculation only conceives an all-encompassing authority that makes us yield to its force. This won’t do, as weapons do more than murder or non-murder. Looking at how we perceive people carrying weapons is a good start to think about how we might be looked at, but it would lead us to stare down at our own values over and over again. To avoid this tautology, we shall look at how these games introduce and frame weapons.
Denton’s first mission briefing describes what some of the weapons do and stresses that his duty as a peace-keeping agent is to minimize casualties. This briefing places a utilitarian outlook next to a moral one. Human Revolution does something similar by letting us choose between long- and short-range weapons that are either lethal or not. The dialog-wheel shows these options one after another, conveying a weapon’s range and its capacity for murder in the same way. We may say that these displays of information don’t differentiate between a weapon’s use and morality, because to its utility, one information is the same as another. Conveyance displays them as the same. But if we consider that a weapon’s use is murder, where each and every part contributes to this utility, then conveyance should only express information about killing. These two statements about a weapon’s utility cannot be true at once, because if the use of conveying information is to render something true, then this conveyance has to reveal each aspect of a weapon during expression, whereas if a weapon’s utility is murder, then it should only allow for such uses. Omissions and additions then can only occur outside of their utility.
We’ve looked at what is used, thus far, that’s incomplete without its user. Let’s return to our earlier example about Jensen’s boss to expand on this notion of utility. We may infer that he relays this information in a cold and calculating manner, because he’s the representative of an augmentation company that sees weapons according to their utility. Unlike the state agency in Deus Ex, this corporation in Human Revolution seems to rely on a utilitarian lens instead of a moral one, to hide the human cost of weapons, we may infer. By ascribing the same intent to each entity, we may delineate the utility of conveying information to concealment that aims at the same thing. This concealment is a use that stands next to uses of conveying information relating to state and corporate interests, weapon uses, and so on. It can be anything based on this conjecture in relation to intent, that may lead us to wild speculations. To avoid this, we shall continue our exploration without the erroneous assumption about the separability of user from what is used, part from its whole, and that any of these follow one another in a clearly discernible order.
With this in mind, we shall conceive utility as an activity that generates use value to someone or something from someone or something. The generation of this value is what we shall focus on, for now, rather than the location of entities with agency. It is to conceptualize movement between movements and entities as opposed to notions and entities in a movement, like with agency. Because the latter can only give definite answers in a context it deems complete, but which can only be such by not accounting for movements and entities it cannot account for, therefore relying on an incomplete context for its answer. Such answers thus can only reveal the context they locate themselves in, which respond to something else than what it says it responds to.
To make this argument less abstract, consider our earlier observation about a moral lens that the state agency in Deus Ex seems to rely on. In concealing the cost of human life, the moral framework generates use value that state agencies and the player character acts upon. It influences and is influential to entities with agency, which influences are influence-generating. This continuous influence generation is influenced by use value generated by other influences. Pinning down a specific entity with agency in relation to these generational influences is contextual, that is to say, it’s ever useful if it provides use to our analysis pertaining violence and pacifism as its other. Weapons are the center of this by generating use for killing that which generates uses in relation to murder.
Utilitarian violence
Backpacks in Deus Ex, Human Revolution and in videogames, in general, seem to be at the center of this by providing space to weapons and ammunition. They provide use value for these items, and generate use value to their user, which use value generates use value for backpacks. It isn’t possible to deduce what comes first in this circular argument, because use value is generated by entities and is generating entities. This generating generation excludes application of agency to entities, as it is driven by use value that generates and generating. Hence we shall start from one point of entry, such as the space in the player character’s backpack that provides use value by holding weapons and ammunition. Since space in these backpacks is finite, it limits the number of weapons and ammunition they can hold. Backpacks make weapons and ammunition comparable to one another according to the space they take up in this finite backpack. One may make inferences based on this size property, such as a weapon’s size in proportion to objects outside of one’s backpack. People may be used as such a metric system in proportion to weapon properties, like their size. Consider that a rocket launcher has an enormous stopping power, from which one draws a correlational relationship with its size. Based on this inference, one may deduce a weapon’s power from its size in proportion to its holder. We could say that this utilitarian outlook reduces people to objects, or that they become undifferentiated from weapons in this proportionate look that views each and every object in relation to a weapon’s lethality.
Violence can be measured according to such utilitarian metrics. But does this evaluation help us determine whether we’re perceived as peaceful or neutral, we might ask. Conversations offer us explicit feedback to reflect on our lethal or non-lethal actions, when characters comment on them, and when they describe violence around them. The latter can be especially thought-provoking, if violence is channeled through values that deviate from utilitarianism. Both games have colorful characters from corporate drones and overlords, gung-ho mercenaries, revolutionaries to working class citizens. Each one of them are situated differently in relation to corporate and state violence. Not all of them are able to voice these in public though. Jensen and Denton can engage with whoever they want and attempt to strike conversations as many times as they want. Time freezes once they start a conversation and they may take all the time in the world to respond, unlike other characters, bound by the rules of time.
There’s a stark contrast between how these conversations are presented. In Deus Ex, conversation starters are listed en masse once we engage with a character, like how we would approach a stranger or friend in a conversation as topics bounce around in our head. In Human Revolution, the dialog-wheel offers a limited number of options, hiding others behind labels such as “details” and “about.” These options typically touch on more personal subjects and meandering tangents people tend to engage in once they lose themselves in a conversation. Options outside of these progress conversations towards Jensen’s mission. Once we learn that options under “details” and “about” don’t end conversations, we can jump from one topic to another, without knowing where it would lead us. Except the same options remain visible and we can return to them as many times as we want to the same effect. We peel back layer after layer by picking and choosing subjects we’re interested in, only to end up in the same place that looks like places we’ve been before. Conversations lose their casual slapdashery and labyrinthian whimsy to something we methodically delve into and investigate. The so-called “Emotional Intelligence Enhancer” augmentation encapsulates this dehumanization of conversations. This allows Jensen to infer information about the person he talks with and activate so-called “pheromones” to influence them. It quantifies personality traits to get what he wants, in effect, turning conversations into interrogations.
This isn’t unique to Human Revolution, since videogame characters are often incapable of resisting players. Some of them nervously pace around while others stand motionless, as if surrendering themselves to be strapped in by player characters. Once they’re engaged, they become locked in in conversations. But each one of them is prepared for the interrogation, ready to mimic emotions and repeat responses verbatim until they’re left alone. How can we reflect then on our actions through conversations, if they posit characters in subservient relation to the player character? What questions can arise about violence, if conversations and weapons quantify and follow quantifications? This quantifying notion can be substituted with values, metrics or anything else with a common denominator, such as morality or utility. Quantifications merely make utilitarian motifs more transparent. Is it because these games present them through utilitarian lenses that can only show violence as a matter of quantification and utility?
The violent self
Perhaps we’re witnessing transforming transformations when we look at Deus Ex and Human Revolution characters in combat encounters and conversations through a particular lens. In such scenarios, characters are either defeated or evaded in combat, whereas conversation options need to be exhausted for progression. From this point of view of progression, evasion, destruction and exhaustion are rendered the same. The lens we look through equalizes characters to one thing, and we might as well call them obstacles, since they need to be overcome for progression. This progression makes us progress which then in turn makes it as such, that is, progression. Then what makes us progress is progression, and we might say that we’re in progression with what makes us do something or that we’re obliged to carry this out because of a need for progression. This is what a lens does. By transforming transformations, it makes transformations transforming. When looking at something, this means that a lens transforms looking that’s transforming, which transformations are transforming what is looked at. That something one looks at, then, reflects back the lens looking uses. This means that the thing one looks at is also transforming to the lens and looking. We just can’t tell the ways these notions interplay with one another, since we’re looking at some things through some lens in some ways.
With this in mind, let’s have a look at combat encounters from the point of view of items. We might say that players engage with characters as items lay around in boxes and on dead bodies, and as ammunition are conserved and kept in check in relation to the size of one’s inventory. Calculations take place that measure items spent by using ammunition in comparison with items picked up after and during combat. It is to gain as much as what was spent, which gains are constrained by the backpack space one has. This calculation is therefore a matter of equalization, mediated by backpack space.
Violent and non-violent means can be located in this by considering how one approaches combat encounters: either by engagement or avoidance that corresponds with items one has and hasn’t got and with gains and losses. Conversations can be located in this as well when we consider that characters offer keys and information in exchange for items and currency. This translates to gains and losses in backpack space and item value as one considers their options in conversations. Whether one option is considered a gain or a loss, is dependent on the affected parts of the system, which are rendered irrelevant once combat and conversation encounters are progressed, that is, progression takes place to an equal measure.
No choice can be made outside this value system. Items and currency may be lost by opting for an ethical stance, but they are lost and gained regardless. Backpack space can only be filled up or emptied according to its utility. A series of additions and subtractions take place from this point of view to that of equality. This lens excludes altruistic or amoral choices, as these ethical associations can only be ascribed to them outside what the backpack’s utility allows for.
Yet, players will make choices based on values outside this system, since, well, they aren’t backpacks. But since the backpack’s utility is only capable of equalizing operations, then associations with these additions and subtractions can only give back zero. That is, a good deed will ultimately be mitigated by a bad one according to this system that equalizes, such as in what we described as progression and generation of use value.
Experience points may appear as a means to mitigate this system, since it follows the logic of addition. Denton and Jensen gain experience points based on their actions. It is a matter of gaining more or less relative to choices, as characters gain experience as long as they engage with the game world. Player character skills and augmentations can be upgraded with experience points. This sets up a correlational relationship between gains of experience points and the improvement of one’s capabilities. But we can’t tell what we gain experience from exactly. Take the case of conversations, where dialog options yield experience once they unveil information about the game world. It isn’t addition that yields this, as not every information is considered experience-worthy. Calling this narrative progression is misleading as well, since a narrative cannot gain or acquire positive connotation; it merely is, that reaffirms iself by unveiling parts that haven’t been unveiled. Experience points may come from the gain or a loss of an item, from spending or acquiring currency, from killing or saving someone from being killed, and so on. It is the engagement in exchange that leads to self-improvement, which makes every sentence in a conversation carry potential value to this self that improves.
The unlocking or improvement of skills and augmentation, in this sense, sets up a transactional relationship with experience points as well. It is the engagement in exchange, then, that improves swimming capabilities, makes one’s footsteps silent and enhances abilities of murder. The names of these skills and augmentations draw on connotations prior to their in-game engagement, and reinforce some of them by framing their use to ends of survival. We may draw a parallel between this loose category of survival as self-preservation through which this self makes progression. This is quite misleading, since this self isn’t progressing, nor improving, but perseveres. It is done for itself, where this self is transformed and transforming to give back a result that’s equal with this self. Food and weapons serve this transforming transformation to an end of perseverance that gives back the affected self as the same after being transformed. Ascribing this to the narrative as a device that conveys this is misleading, again, as it cannot be transforming that transforms, since the self as narrative makes no transformations nor is it transforming, but it simply is.
Transaction as violence
Series of transformations transform by being transforming through a series of additions and subtractions to that of equality. Utility is but one operation that carries this out, whether through food, weapons, backpack space or the cost of skills and augmentations. Their use value makes them measurable and transparent in this system of utility that transforms them by series of exchanges that ascribe them exchange value in proportion to parts of the system, such as currency, experience and lethality. In Spacewar!, it is fuel which is used for every part of the system. It is the universal value in a system about violence which transforms it to a series of exchanges according to its logic. In Deus Ex and Human Revolution, conversations, characters, weapons and combat encounters are submerged in a series of exchanges and currencies through which violence rears its head as part of this system that nullifies anything and everything through equalizing transactions.
What does it mean to eject a bullet in this system? We weigh the cost of bullets, the space they free up in our backpack and the value we get from stripping bodies we shot dead, and from experience points we receive for a life coming to end. Experience points show up in our display, whether a foe bled out or came to a quick death in Human Revolution. This distancing effect is also present when we strip dead bodies for loot. A pop-up window presents a sterile abstraction of what a deceased person left behind, and displays items considered useful, such as weapons and ammunition. We can loot them without having to bloody our hands as items appear in our backpack after a single click on a corpse in Deus Ex. Human Revolution gives us the option to choose which items we’d like to take, while some of its contemporaries freeze time and space while looting dead bodies.
What does it mean to speak through this systemic cone of utility? Speech has little to no utilitarian cost as opposed to combat encounters, but makes progression that’s progressing. From a safe distance, we eject words and sentences. They connect according to items we have, augmentations we use for manipulation and per our skills in speechcraft. During conversations, we pick and choose between options and make a series of calculations in a system that renders everything equal. In Human Revolution, one mission involves getting into a police station. Jensen can lean on an ex-colleague working at the receptionist table to let him into one of the restricted areas. This will cost his job. In what ways is coercion different from physical violence? What does the game make us think by framing these subject matters as choices to pick from? Only through the unifying lens of transaction can these be treated on the same level.
Violence for itself
Progression arises from progressing that progresses as progression. It starts from itself, goes towards itself, and ends up as itself, without starting or ending. Progression, then, is just is, a movement that perpetuates itself. Let’s locate how weapons function in this system. Consider that weapons which subdue targets operate on a short range as opposed to lethal weapons effective from any distance. Through the lens of cost-benefit calculation, subduing targets is a riskier proposition than murder. This makes subduing a less utilitarian solution to violence, whereas sparing a life is a more moral one, if we rely on the inference we made earlier. But this observation relies on the same cost-benefit calculation that looks at weapons, but instead of evaluating them based on their capacity to kill or subdue, it locates their result as moral as opposed to utilitarian. The notion of risk connects these cost-benefit evaluations to potential progression. Weapons, then, start progression, carry it out, and lead to an end without one, as weapons will be needed to progress, without a starting point, as the narrative construction of weapons rely on information prior to their construction. Through this exchange between construction and notions prior to it, weapons come into formation, those which progress progression. They are for themselves, as progression is, in this movement that’s progressing progression.
Choices between weapons, then, serve progression as progression. It’s no wonder that common terms in videogame culture, such as looting, is so far removed from death, and that depictions of people are referred to as non-player characters. Because from the exchange between weapons as tools of utility and morality, non-player characters are transformed to objects of utility and morality, as one and another in opposition to each other. Death is the product and production of this transaction of one and another one that equalizes them as zero, in itself, as death. It makes progression by progression to create progression, that is, by itself, for itself, towards itself. These equalizing exchanges render anything and everything as itself, as empty movement bereft of meaning: as movement itself. Progression, utility and death are such movements, carried out by weapons to undifferentiated ends in experience points, carriers of items in the universal of non-player characters, whose only difference lies in relation to the player character.
Through this negation of player-like characteristic, depictions of people appear without the ability to spend, calculate and use means to utilitarian ends, without which characters appear bereft of what the utilitarian lens frames as use, that is, human. This makes what uses to be used, and what is used to use towards undifferentiated means that culminates as the ultimate undifferentiator in death. It is to progress through a series of progression-like references that renders progression without reference and progression, as it is to engage in violence in a series of lethal and non-lethal means that renders them neither violent or non-violent, nor lethal or non-lethal. Death that differentiates life from itself as its other, frames one in opposition to another one, such as in combat encounters, where oppositions move through a series of value systems by exchange. Death gives back zero, while these exchanges ascribe a series of values to this result, rendering zero that differentiates undifference and undifferentiates difference to non-difference. Death thus becomes meaningless, that in becoming as such, creates non-meaning through a series of exchanges to undifferentiating zero. Making choices in this framework is to choose as being chosen and being chosen as choosing. These relate to one another only as a sum of transactions that equalize. In this framework, pacifism stands as one to the other one of violence, without rejection or opposition, but by negation in a series of equalizing exchanges to non-violence, that’s neither violent nor not violent. It just is, transforming transformations, which transformations are transforming to give back the result of undifferentiating zero, indifferent towards anything and everything. It is to signify nothing by everything through a series of equalizing exchanges that only affirm equality in the self, as a self-improving and self-preserving self stripped from its selfhood: a death and non-death by violence and non-violence.
