DISPATCHES JUNE

I love playing games. As an almost 40-yearold with a family, though, I spend more time reading about games and writing lists of the games I want to play than actually playing them.

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Fight test

As I look down my list, I have noticed one thing: a growing trend where the games I want to play do not involve as much violence and killing as they used to. Whether I am getting squeamish in my old age or whether it is being a father, I have come to the realisation that violence doesn’t have to be integral to every game’s design.

Whether you’re an Italian plumber stomping on a turtle so you can use its shell as a missile or a green-tunic-wearing boy slicing nasty pea-shooting shrubs in your local forest, you’re never far away from violence in videogames. OK, those are bad examples, but I bet anyone who looks back at some of the games they have played recently will see it. Sure, maybe it had a great story to tell. But what happened in between the storytelling? It is very likely that it would have seen you shooting, kicking, punching, stabbing, eating, smashing or even setting fire to those that got in your way. It is a prerequisite to so many of the stories that have been told in games – ever since some nasty aliens needed to be taken care of in Space Invaders.

I was trying recently to pinpoint the moment I decided that this endless cycle of violence in games was not for me. It seemed to me that things had kicked up a notch as, generation by generation, the violence got that bit more realistic and hard to stomach. Sure, I’d slayed my share of camouflaged heavies with a pickaxe in Tomb Raider, mowed down swathes of cargo-panted goons in Uncharted, shot countless Nazis in various Wolfensteins, Medal Of Honors and CODs, but I think I found the tipping point when I played The Last Of Us Part II.