Digital Decapitations A Primal Release, Creator Says

There tend to be two camps in the discussion about violent video games. There are those on the inside who make and play violent games and bat an eye at the gore as infrequently as they ever talk about why they make and enjoy this kind of thing. And then there are those on the outside, often critical of violent games, sometimes in positions of policy-making, sometimes calling for bans or legal protections.

Jones is in the inside camp, of course. He’s a child of horror movies. His folks have seen clips of the games he makes. “It’s not their cup of tea,” he chuckled. They weren’t into the horror movies either. “They love me and they know I’m a good guy.”

He can explain exactly how decapitations got into this new Aliens Vs. Predator. He recalls early meetings at Rebellion as he and his team batting around ideas for their first-person shooter. “We’d sit around and talk about what we could do in the game. One or the other designers would say quietly and sheepishly, ‘I want to rip people’s heads out, and their spines. Can we do that?’

“We said, ‘Let’s prototype it.'” They did. And they played it.

“What we found is that it never got old,” Jones recalled. “You didn’t get desensitized to it. And when we’d play it you’d see all kinds of reactions, like malevolent glee or shock.”

Decapitations fit the R-rated lore of the Aliens Vs. Predator series. The movies upon which Rebellion’s new and previous Aliens Vs. Predator games are based are violent. They are fantasy, of course, a science fiction view of the universe that puts Predator above Homo Sapien in the food chain and adds Alien to the list of man-killers that also includes Great White Sharks. Because of that, the game couldn’t be tame, Jones said. Rebellion wanted to make a game that felt “authentic” to the films. Its characters, controlled by the player or not, had to be vicious: “If we chose to pretend they didn’t do really nasty things to people, these creatures you’d be frightened of in real life… it would have felt dishonest.”

Video games, Jones told me, are good vehicles for delivering a “primal” emotion. They provide a release and a catharsis. He believes society yearns for this. “Why do people go shooting clay pigeons?” he pondered. Or a more ghoulish example: “During the execution of Saddam Hussein, somebody took out their cell phone and was filming it. And millions of people went to look at it on line.” These are the actions, Jones believes, of people living in a thankfully gentler world. “The world we live in, the western world, is a far safer world than we ever had before ,” he said. “Yet people seek some sort of primal experience.” Aliens Vs. Predator and other violent games might be part of that.

Jones, like the other makers of violent video games who I’ve met, was as amiable as he was thoughtful. Get a person who knows their violent games talking, and fascinating discussions can ensure about how the killings and the guilt of Kratos in God of War registered with a player versus those in a Modern Warfare 2. How decapitating a space marine in Aliens Vs. Predator will feel the first, 10th or 100th time, however, is something we can’t talk about freely yet, not until the game is out and more of us have had the chance to do it. The violence isn’t for everyone, of course, though some can live with it. Jones’ parents, for example. “They love me and they know I’m a good guy,” he told me.

Tim Jones is a peaceful man. He will continue to play — and if there’s good cause to — make games that are violent. There’s no contradiction there, not to him. The virtual, fantasy violence has its purposes. “It’s just that,” he begins, “I don’t think it’s unhealthy.”