I'm Tired of "Cycles of Violence" Stories
Dip explores the idea of Cycles of Violence using AAA games and traces the potential for more robust conceptions of violence.
Cliches run shit. They’re memes, in the Kojiman sense, passed around until they’re both brambly to brandish and unquestionably true. That is, until something beckons you out of the brush.
There has been ongoing and often videographed violence, both fast and slow, committed against Global Majority peoples (in the Sahel, the Caribbean, Sudan, Congo, Palestine, Tigray and other parts of the Horn, Reservations, Black/Native/immigrant communities in the US, and countless other places and contexts). The power of cliches has been brought into stark relief.
In particular, the “cycles of violence” cliche runs in rivulets through conversations around the more visceral events. It’s a stopgap, preventing deeper analysis; events are made digestible at the low, low cost of comprehension. This makes it difficult to build true understanding, but looking at prominent cultural touchstones like games can help explain how these ideas are (re)produced, alongside the ways folks might move beyond them.
Photo by Fons Heijnsbroek on Unsplash
I started thinking about “cycles of violence” critically with The Last of Us Part II. There, the player tears through the world in an inversion of the first game. Your mission is to “make right” the killing of Joel, Ellie’s (the main character-player) adoptive father. Much is lost along the way, and Ellie, while holding onto her humanity through mercy, finds herself alone and maimed for the trouble.
Generational trauma is revealed as a powerful carrier for this cliche; Ellie emulates Joel, inheriting his practice of using violence as a tool for fulfillment. Where Joel was (re-)learning to protect (with the hope of building), Ellie learns to destroy. She picks up the torch by being the protagonist. She also takes on Joel’s way of relating to the world down the barrel of a gun.
One thing you’ll notice with this story is a lack of concern for justice. Ellie’s warpath may try to show the “futility of violence,” but social repercussions are lacking beyond the (inter)personal. The systemic rot causing these conflicts is left unattended, making for a shallow critique of violence-as-such.
This rot is on full display with Far Cry 2. As a modern retelling of Heart of Darkness with guns, you go into an essentialized African country as a foreign mercenary. Your goal is simple: stop a weapons dealer at the center of the country’s breakdown of law and order.
Like its inspiration, being in Africa corrupts the player, with their character contracting a case of malaria early on (from the air, highlighting the land’s inherent “violence”) and slowly becoming more physically violent as the story progresses. Here, that growing violence is similarly treated as having a cyclic and pointless nature, with the only way out being death: of the character, the antagonist, and the country itself. Once again, there isn’t a meaningful examination of the systems that led to this.
Political dynamics get simplified down to the (genuine) flaws and idiosyncrasies of individuals, foreclosing interest in sociopolitical systems beyond one-off statements about uneven development or corrupt Westerners.
These games sidestep the social realities of a world indebted to ongoing (neo)colonialism, imperialism, and (the afterlives of) slavery; the conflicts therein are made to seem petty, pointless. They instill a feeling of superiority, where the “model player” can look at these game worlds and say “at least ‘we’re’ not like that.”
These historical “debts” mold cultural production, helping to define the bounds of acceptable thought and behavior. TLOU II, FC2, and many other stories perpetuate cliches that feed into culturally imperialist practices. Fantasies are made, where the messiness of violence is decontextualized and dropped into “amusing” simulations; simple answers to complex questions rule. What’s lost is a deeper understanding of the causes.
For instance, it might seem that, with Ellie sparing Abby (the woman who killed Joel), the cycle has ended. However, by creating ludonarrative vortexes of agency/protagonism around the POV characters of Ellie/Abby, their personal journeys take the place of critical engagement with the systems they’re embedded in. The power plays throughout are backgrounded to the detriment of a meaningful, collective ability to understand the violence in which they find themselves, thus naturalizing it.
Far Cry 2 has an even more specious answer to the “violence question.” For the UCEA (Unnamed Country “Emblematic” of Africa), salvation comes from death. Again, this is an end to a personal cycle, without doing the hard work of uprooting why violence was happening in the first place. Ultimately, this doesn’t provide any insight about what causes (what’s understood as) “cycles” of violence.
Moralizing violence in this way, where it is simultaneously critiqued and exalted as inherent to (certain) human conditions (especially the “barbarity” that accompanies apocalypse or collapse (or Africanness)) is problematic. This kind of rhetoric leads to seeing violence as a personal and moral choice to ultimately disregard, regardless of the context, unless you want to lose everything (usually limited to property, social relationships, standing) or yourself (humanity, individuality).
This logic ends up leaving the realm of obviously objectionable situations to include things as materially and ethically varied as personal spats, rebellions, and imperial wars/other such murdering sprees. Flattening them all into one category only serves to exalt the worst interpretations, playing into the hands of the powerful.
This dynamic deserves attention, even (and maybe especially) in blockbuster games. Framing what is called violence in its social context allows us to see, for example, the tacit calls for people to be “perfect victims” in both games discussed. This perspective comes to light through an equal damnation of all who choose to fight. There is an aura of anxiety around “being just as bad” as “the Other” through “perpetuating cycles.” This thinking is a cage that prevents the characters in these games (and us) from ending those very “cycles.”
Games can help us avoid these pitfalls if they take seriously the power they hold to shape culture, using it to build empathy for those who are dominated and resist. They may even help burn the brambles of cliche away.
