The single greatest all-american action hero, John McClane, has killed a total of 73 people
across all five Die Hard movies over the course of 25 years.
The Epic greek war hero Odysseus, a fictional character known for his abilities as a warrior
killed around 200 people in 15 years of war and travel in one of the bloodiest displays
in greek legend.
The deadliest sniper alive right now is a British Marine whose identity is a closely
guarded secret, because the government is afraid that he’ll become a target of extremist
terrorists. He has 173 confirmed kills.
My character in Fallout 4 has killed over 900 people in the 30 days since leaving Vault
111.
What. The. Fuck?
Most of those were Raiders. And the defenseless
scientists of the Institute. If you include Super Mutants and synths, my total confirmed
sentient lives ended totals well over 2,000. If you include all of my Fallout 4 characters,
that number jumps to 5,000.
But it’s just Raiders, super mutants, synths, and the occasional evil scientist. No big
deal, right?
But, you know, it’s not. Just. It’s also Geth. Mercenaries. All the henchmen that I
punched in the head with my olympian fists and left on the floor of Arkham Asylum, their
brains swelling without any medical attention. It’s the Orcs of Mordor. The Falmer and
Bandits of Skyrim. It’s Stormtroopers, Dark Jedi, Soldiers, Pedophiles, and like, every
single pixel in Hotline Miami. And it’s all a blur!
I think I may be a sociopath.
Wait, no, that can’t be right. ‘cause then CBS would be right. And there’d--I
mean, you’d all be sociopaths, too. I mean, maybe some of you are. It’s the Internet,
after all. But certainly not all of you.
But isn’t it kind of weird that just about every game with a combat mechanic has just
waves and waves of forgettable shithead bulletfodder in them? Weird, maybe, yes, but not new. Not
by a long shot.
Remember earlier, when I mentioned the Odyssey, and the around 200 men Odysseus killed? Yeah,
like, half of them were just nameless dudes who were trying to bang his wife. I mean,
say what you want about mowing down dozens of raiders in 10 minutes, at least they had
the audacity to shoot at you first.
This trope, the one of completely disposable henchmen, is as old as storytelling.
“Tale as old as tii--”
NO AUSTIN. NO COPYRIGHT STRIKES TODAY.
In his essay Disembodied Violence in Fantasy Traditions, Mark Filopowich talks about the
war portrayed in the Illiad, the prelude to the Odyssey, which details the war of Troy,
and how heros like “I Need Better Shoes” Achilles fight through insignificant hordes
of warriors on their way to destiny. This violence, the one against mooks, is disembodied,
because it’s committed against what are, narratively-speaking, non-humans. They’re
just, like, human-shaped blob things against which the mighty hero gets to dull his Epic
Sword of Mook Slaying +1 against. It’s not real violence because it doesn’t actually
happen to a real person.
I mean, think about Raiders in Fallout. Or the mooks in the Arkham series. How much characterization
is really going on? Maybe an overheard conversation about how fun it was stomping on baby skulls
for laughs or pocket change? Drug use? Addiction? The only characterization most of these hordes
of Nobodies get serves to emphasize how bad they are, and how lacking of deserved brainskull
batspankings they are.
The only time violence is really violence in these settings is when two narratively-significant
characters meet. Like when-- --you meet Kellogg in Fallout 4 and confront
him about why he stole your baby. Kellogg is a dangerous, coldblooded, calculating,
fucking nigh-immortal brickmachine--this isn’t Achilles ploughing through dozens of copy-pasted
skinbags, this is Achilles’s faceoff with Hector, Prince of Troy, resident badass.
It is in these pivotal moments where the violence becomes real. The meeting of equals. Kellogg,
hardened veteran agent of the Institute, and the Sole Survivor, who’s spent every last
moment outside the vault turning everything that stands in her way into toothpaste, fighting
with grit and determination for this moment. These are no mooks. These are legends.
This structure is so ubiquitous that it spans into genres that aren’t Epic stories.
So it’s old. It’s tried and true. So that’s that. No point in examining it further. If
it worked for Homer, it can work for us. Let’s call this episode here.
Well...maybe. But maybe not. I mean, just because something has always been a certain
way doesn’t actually mean it’s “okay.”
Let’s look at it a bit closer.
Those non-people I mentioned earlier, the ones Achilles turns into German Pancake Batter
on the battlefield, they’re REAL people. Peasants, actually. You know. Poor people.
Poor people who dropped everything they were doing (not by choice by the way) and trudged
off to Troy to fight for their King’s boner. Or, erm, his honor.
And at the end of the day, Bandits and Raiders are just poor shitholes who are trying to
survive under the worst circumstances. Who else is desperate enough to shoot someone
over pocket change? Henchmen in Gotham are mostly poor people. Or mentally ill people.
Who live in Gotham. A city of goddamn freaks. I mean, you try living as a truly desperate
person in a town with the Joker, Penguin, and Two-Face. Yeah, you’d probably be a
weirdo too.
I had the most amazing experience the other day. I was playing Broforce, a game that at
first glance is all about expendability of enemies, when about halfway through the game
I ran into a scene telling the story about one insignificant terrorist character, from
birth, to his first love, to training and his proudest professional moments, all before
showing him explode into just a blob of wet carbon.
Shows like Venture Brothers also play with humanizing henchmen.
See the pattern? Treating henchmen as people is so unusual for our brains that it’s a
joke.
But where’s the problem here? Maybe there isn’t one. I mean, yeah, Raiders and other
shitholes may be people who were once babies, but so was Hitler, Stalin, Osama Bin Laden,
and J Edgar Hoover. Has he been dead long enough for that joke to not be controversial?
Probably not. Oh well!
I mean, if we start forgiving assholes for being assholes just because at one point they
pooped their pants by mistake instead of immediately after we bury bits of hot lead in their brainmelons,
then we might as well just give up.
Some games like Shadow of Mordor offer us a new take on the enemy, a kind of hybrid
of Hector and the run-of-the-mill henchman. You know orcs. They’re orcs. They’re sheathes
for Aragorn’s sword, Legolas’s bow, “And my Axe”
“SHUT UP GIMLI.”
Shadow of Mordor introduced the Nemesis mechanic, that generates orc warchiefs that serve as
a foil for your main character throughout the game. They have a name, they grow and
change after every interaction they have with you. It’s awesome.
Unfortunately, this presents a new problem. If these warchiefs can be special, Hectorian
challenges to you, what about the other orcs? What are orcs, anyway? They’re a hell of
a lot more human than super mutants, that’s for sure. And before you nerds get all frothy,
I know orcs were created by elves that were tortured and misshapen by Melkor, so don’t
even get started.
Austin Walker explores this game in “Real Human Beings: The New NPC,” where he says
“the evilness” of the orcs serves one purpose: to justify the horrific behavior
of Talion, who spends his time in the story using ghost powers to enslave and manipulate
the “savage” orcs. Savage orcs that, hey, by the way, sing songs and write poetry and
create art--signifiers of culture--How do you make reprehensible actions seem justified?
Well, make the victim way, way worse. Why do you think it’s so easy to mow down Nazis?
Or raiders? Or Bandits?
These storytelling tropes exist to further highlight how what you’re killing or punching
is different from you, an “other” that has it coming. I know, capital “O other”
has some connotations, but it really fits here. The more different and non-person something
seems to you, the easier it is to divorce yourself from empathy when interacting with
them. In the case of Zelda and Octorok’s, it’s aesthetic design. It’s a squidthing,
not a person. In Fallout and Shadow of Mordor, it’s because they’re ineffably “evil.”
In Mass Effect it’s because they’re indoctrinated cyborg hybrids.
As the colossal battles between opposing ideals shown to us in Achilles and Hector, Batman
and The Joker, Link and Ganondorf, and Mario and Bowser, violence between two people can
exist to serve a narrative without mindless evaporation of humanity.
I know. I know. I’m overthinking video games. I should rename this show “overthinking.”
But this isn’t a small deal. Really! In fact, this narrative structure totally exists
in real life. The Slave Trade in the Americas was incredibly dependent on white people dehumanizing
their black slaves. One, in order to help justify the terrible, terrible conditions
these people were kept in, and in an attempt to get black people to accept their fate as
subhuman, therefore making slavery easier to maintain.
Modern warfare relies on this as well. The reason these storytelling elements are there
to begin with is because they existed in real life already. How many stories about the World
Wars, the American Civil war, and, hell, the Iraq war have you read? The casualties just...feel
like a number, don’t they? Nameless, historyless nonhumans, moving across the battlefield while
the epic Winston Churchills and Adolf Hitlers played chess with one another. And propaganda
totally worked to do this, too. Don’t think of the enemy as people--that just gets in
the way.
Research done by SLA Marshall after World War II revealed that only 25% of American
infantrymen fired their weapons at enemy combatants. Because it turns out that it’s goddamn hard
to kill a person when you know that they’re a person. It turns out that being able to
dehumanize the enemy is a huge edge in combat.
These questions and issues presented to us in Video Games, whether intentional or not,
are incredibly important, and deserve our full attention. Just like Achilles in the
Iliad, we as players are thrust into a story that’s bigger than us--albeit a story presented
to us by game designers, not Kings. And while we’re at the whims and desires of those
who created the story, we still have our agency, both within and without the game. And unlike
the real world with real war and real consequences, we’re free to go along with the story the
way it’s meant to be told, or we can try to push back against fate. We’re free to
experiment, examine, and explore, and find our own way. We still may end up meeting our
end the way it was meant to be, but hey, if there’s one thing Greek Myths and Game Design
have in common, it’s fate. Thank’s for watching.
And what do you think? Should we be taking a closer look at NPCs and canonfodder are
portrayed in games? Am I overthinking it? Probably. I mean, this isn’t going to stop
me from just, you know, murdering my way through Fallout 4.
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