A Sociopathic Comedy of Errors, Player Cruelty in Open World Games and Developer Savviness

Sandbox games are an established convention of gaming, one that has been around since the days of early computer games, and have only grown more intricate and complex, though they have waxed and waned on the level of interactivity the player might have in them.

The first true, or at the very least a precursor, sandbox game I probably played was likely Ultima 6: The False Prophet, when I was still just a kid, learning how to use the computer. At the time, I was more dazzled at the colorful graphics and size of the world, never really appreciating the level of interactivity the game world had the time.

Games, especially those in the roleplaying genre, of yesteryear had allowed players some limited interaction with the world around them beyond killing monsters. In my memory; however, the freedoms they offered were not much more than hunting monsters, looting chests, possibly stealing / borrowing shop inventory, and limited dialogue trees triggered by keywords.

This is a very distilled and simplified example, but the ability to kill or destroy and move around everything from the NPCs to the smallest ‘detail’ object, such as a knife, fork, or candle seemed might have seemed to be a pretty big deal at the time. To more latter-day players who have experienced Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout 3, Grand Theft Auto, inFamous, along with other games where the possibilities seem endless, this is fairly mundane.

This leads me to the crux of the argument, while not every sandbox world game might allow the player to pick up and fiddle with the minutia, as many modern sandbox RPGs do, they all have a single element in common. Almost every character in the world (except those with special flags preventing their deaths or being integral to the plot.) can be killed. Often in, and especially as time marches on, incredibly sadistic to the point of hilarious fashion. Here, your mileage and ‘brutality tolerance’ may vary.

I probably had the idea floating in my head before, but I came to it when I was playing Dwarf Fortress after months of a friend pestering me to give it a try. After I got past the somewhat oblique and archaic system of building a fortress or playing an adventurer, I found myself almost overwhelmed with possibilities, if only because I did not have graphics doing the work of my imagination for me.

Yes, I had the ability to explore a procedurally generated fantasy (albeit limited, as the game is in working alpha, but mods do add depth that is otherwise absent from the vanilla game), and slay random monsters harassing the country side or build a magnificent dwarf castle, I found myself drawn to the things my friend raved about in game.

It was the possibility to go out and cause creative mayhem upon the world the game generated, or creating a fantastic fortress, only to turn it into a Rube-Goldberg device that would invariably inflict some horrific and humiliating death upon the unfortunate recipient.

Things involving lava, spikes, pits filled with monsters, blood sacrifice, etc. have all been explored by myself and other players in this game, judging by the varied number of posts and online chats devoted purely to figuring out ways to up the creativity involved in the death of in-game characters. And this is by no means the first game to do this.

There are countless opportunities for player inspired cruelty in many other genres, but the sandbox/open world subgenre seems to let the player run carte blanche with the huge number of options that it not only gives the player in terms of exploration and activities, but the ability to cause destruction to the world at large.

Often, the world features themselves are static, changing only if certain conditions are met (a certain quest in Fallout 3 rings to mind), but allows you to otherwise run amok and concoct, often hilariously over-the-top, brutal ways to cause general mayhem.

Many of these games have comical sadism built into them, but I often wonder, especially after watching several YouTube videos of various games while thinking on this subject, how much of it was intentionally done by the developers and how much was created and discovered by players.

While certain behaviors are without a doubt planned into the framework of the game itself (Open world Tim Schafer games, GTA, Dungeon Keeper series), there gets to be a certain level where the levels of sadism, creativity, and comedic effect gets elevated by the enterprising player abusing the various engines powering the game. Of course, I may be using the word sadism unfairly, as no one is really getting hurt. Or actually suffers.

At the end of the transaction, all that has really changed is a few bits of active code have changed and flags have been flipped, causing a change, either temporary or permanent, in the game state. And the damage can easily be undone by loading an earlier save.

There were limitations in many earlier games where you had a limited number of save states, but oftentimes in my experience these games had far harsher punishments for player cruelty. Powerful guards, inability to finish the game (Morrowind was the first experience I recall having where the game -actively- informed you that you ‘broke’ the game if you killed the wrong NPC -- albeit, it was later uncovered that this could be worked around.), often kept the player in check.

Though inklings of the more modern open-world game where immoral/amoral decisions were just as valid as the good ones, did both sides begin to have positive and negative ramifications.

More often than not, senseless violence has more negative consequences than positive, but even the game world has various ways of dealing with the ramifications of your actions if you are caught. Fable, Red Dead Redemption/GTA, and others have cool-down counters for crimes and violence committed against innocents.

Usually it involves leaving the area for a bit, but when you come back, aside from other in-game punishments, such as bounties or certain options being closed off temporarily, things quickly return to the status quo and life goes on. In a sense, it helps alleviate the consequences of a rampage, but it also serves to break the immersion by removing a sense of permanency.

There have been swings in the other direction that I find break the immersion, by making some NPCs or otherwise killable objects immortal. Of course, yes, there are mods to get around this, but if I wanted to go on a tear and kill everything in the game world because I was bored or needed to blow off some steam, I, and am sure many players, feel that we should have the option to do so.

Though the games are often good at telling you whether or not something is flagged as ‘immortal’, it would be highly disappointing to create some elaborate trap or ridiculous scenario only to have the recipient shrug it off or be rendered unconscious. Worse yet is when that immortal character turns around and does a one hit kill, but this frequently leads to laughter from both shock and absurdity. In turn, for their efforts in cruelty and simulated sadism, the player is rewarded with a suitable and ironic death.

Shivering Isles had a particularly good example of this. The player could gleefully butcher the majority of the Daedric Prince, Sheogorath’s court and kingdom, but the moment the player so much as swung at the demonic sovereign, they found themselves falling from an unfathomable height onto an altar covered in the bodies of others who had somehow displeased the aforementioned character in the past.

I saw this as a sort of “HAHA! We know your game, player!” from the developers. Other developers have caught on to the tendency of player’s to go postal in open worlds as well by having characters within the world do many of the things the player might think of doing, or directly lampshading the behavior by making humorous commentary about things that have possibly occurred. I remember the first time I heard “OH MY GOD! NOT AGAIN!” in GTA4 and laughed.

At the end of the day, there seems to be an increasing give and take between the developers and players in the sand box (and other genres for that matter) genre, where escalating levels of creative violence are being implemented.

Originally, other than in games such as the original Grand Theft Auto and Carmaggedon, the developers likely did not anticipate or expect the levels of resourceful inventiveness that players would engage in to cause often comedic, cartoon-level violence upon the inhabitants of the world crafted by the designers.

As games gradually became more complex and incorporated more detail into the way their worlds worked, players eventually began to push these very things to their limits and find baffling and unthought of ways to push those barriers, usually by inflicting some horrendous punishment upon a character in the game.

Player’s reasons for doing this are manifold -- either boredom, some innate urge to get out there without consequence, the ability to do it because they can, a desire to engage in something surreal or absurd, or simply morbid curiosity on how far they can push the myriad subroutines that power their favorite game.

Now, comes the fun part / pay off of this lengthy and rambling post: Let’s all share a prized moment in gaming sadism or incident we saw with our friends / dormmates / what have you or your thoughts on the tools given to the player for these endeavors and how the developers are responding and enabling it, if they are at all. I’ll go first.

After a particularly frustrating day at college, I needed to blow off some steam, and popped in GTA: San Andreas. I had already beaten the game, so I summoned in the harrier (Hydra) and took off, immediately blowing up everything I could see up and down the freeways of the in-game Los Angeles.

This only had its thrill for a few minutes, so I decided to bail out of the plane. This was blind luck, as it careened into a truck and proceeded to explode, causing the truck to fly off into the air and beginning a cascade of exploding cars, probably causing a jam up that would make the 405 on a regular day look like a sunday drive.

The proceeding moments involved large amounts of gunfire and increasingly improvised attempts to escape from the in-game police. Needless to say, CJ did not escape that day, but I did feel a hell of a lot better afterwards because the sheer absurdity of the 15-20 minutes it took to do that caused me to laugh a fair amount and relieved a large amount of the stress I had accumulated that day.

For me, it was the cathartic absurdity that was sure to ensue that probably caused me to engage in ‘comedic sociopathy‘ that afternoon. Other times it has been boredom, and other times, like many players, I wanted to see how badly I could just abuse the game.