Signifying Violence, Part Four: THE GOBLET OF FIER

In the last three posts in this series I looked at the degree to which violence is signified in games, the degree to which play experience is mediated, and how these two factors may affect the experience of the game. Specifically, I've discussed:



- Violence in terms of "interactivity": How mediation affects what you can do in a game.
- Violence in terms of signification: How acts in games are signified or not signified as violent.
- The intersection of mediation and violence in video games: Complete with lame-o chart work!

Most recently I plotted a handful of games in terms of both play mediation and signification of violence. In some cases, a single change could affect a game's standing along both axes. I mentioned then that a game would likely not be a fixed pint, but could vary in its position according to the changing values of a game. Here are two examples of games that do just that.


Once again, my chart is freakishly small. Click on it to see it be freakishly medium-sized.

1. No More Heroes: US versus Japan and EU releases

It's uncommon to encounter a video game about violence... stranger still to come across one about violence in videogames. It follows a otaku-turned-assassin, who goes from idolizing wrestling and anime to living in a world of this sort of stylized violence. Like any good satire, No More Heroes isn't afraid to get its hands dirty. When the main character, Travis, kill an enemy, it spews both an impossible fountain of blood and a handful of coins.

The vicious gouts of blood are taken directly from anime drawn from seinen manga, who have been stylizing this types of hypergore for decades. The coins, of course, are pure video-game stock and trade... a coin of the realm, as it were. To have both erupt from a target is a surreal effect. As a game devoted to systematically killing through a swath of foes, it is decidedly two ways about its homicides. There is a high level of violence signification, on par with other games explicitly about violence. But in coaching the violence inside the signifiers of retro-gaming, it functions as a clear statement: "Forget what you have seen. This is what a violent video game looks like."

The irony is that since its thematic statement is predicated upon the excessive use of the exact same violent images that other games boast so carelessly, No More Heroes has, itself, been the target of censure. In the Japanese and European releases, the violent surges of blood were removed altogether. As well, corpses disappear quickly after being killed, rather than remaining on the ground.

A youtube poster, xserothx, has done an excellent job providing comparisons of the death scenes from both the US and censored versions.