Murder Simulators

I always get a little giggle when thinking about the mass media’s latching onto Jack Thompson’s “murder simulator” description of Grand Theft Auto. The irony is thick enough to sculpt. Grand Theft Auto couldn’t be further from a murder simulator. You’d be equally justified in calling The Sims or Chess a murder simulator. The Grand Canyon sized distinction I’m shooting for here is a legal definition. Murder absolutely requires the premeditated dispatching of a fellow human being. In Grand Theft Auto, The Sims, or Chess, the player certainly kills a lot of dollish constructs; however, simulated killing and simulated murder are very different things.

Despite Jack Thompson’s continuing buffoonery, there is a real murder simulator on the market right now and it’s not the game you think it is. In fact, it was originally released with a T for teen rating, highlighting how completely out of touch the ESRB is (they might possibly want to try actually playing a game before rating it for example). The game I’m referring to is Bethesda’s Oblivion. There are several reasons I feel that Oblivion falls into Jack Thompson’s errantly created category and several more reasons that this is not a bad thing, but an enormous step forward for games as an artistic medium.

Personally, I’ve killed uncountable numbers of dollish constructs in my twenty-nine years, but it took Oblivion to stay my knife wielding hand with the tone of moral conundrum, clear as a ringing bell. The eureka moment happened for me while progressing through the Dark Brotherhood guild, which required me to take on the role of the unquestioning assassin, blindly following the commanded deaths passed on to me by my mysterious Sithis worshiping superiors.

I was encouraged to kill softly and quietly at first, dispatching individuals in their sleep after breaking into their private houses or picking their locked hotel doors, but curiosity got the better of me; I couldn’t help but speak with my intended victims first, meeting up with them at the local bar and picking up back-story from Bethesda’s carefully scripted dialog trees. The first few assassinations I performed seemed to be some fantastically sleazy individuals, including one that admitted to a rape as I killed him. I found it mildly interesting that Bethesda had chosen to focus on the story of each individual instead of a combat or sneaking element, but at first I didn’t think that the quests were that much different from the Thieves Guild quests. Boy was I wrong.

(light spoilers ahead) My eureka moment happened while searching for a particular drug-addled individual I was supposed to dispatch quietly for a bonus reward. I tracked him to a certain hotel, rented my own room, and waited quietly for him to fall asleep. Just after midnight, I took full advantage of my journeyman sneak level and crept silently into the hallway and cracked opened his lock with the pop of an alteration spell I’d designed especially for this purpose. Then, my heart stopped, for as I crept into his room I noticed he wasn’t alone in his bed, but was sleeping beside a lover. I stood frozen as if I’d been hit by a master level paralyze spell and watched the two sleeping forms tossing and twitching as real dreaming humans might. Then, I quietly resheathed my Dark Brotherhood blade and returned to my own room to sleep out the remainder of the night.

The most fascinating thing I’ve found about Oblivion’s sandbox style of play so far is the way the game actively encourages me to branch off my chosen quest path and not simply play the game as if it were linear. The way they do this is by inserting down time between certain quests in the same story line, encouraging me to experience the game in the most fluid way possible. This interested me, because it provided fertile ground for real moral choice. Instead of being forced to go forward and commit the murder by the construction of the game itself, I knew that I had many other alternate story paths I could be taking.

That being said, I did walk back into my target’s room the next morning, hoping to catch him unawares and alone. Instead I was greeted by his lover, who spoke with me candidly about her situation and her mixed emotions for her drug addicted mate. With a little help from a personality-bending spell, I was also able to extract the specific time and location my target might be getting high. Later, while looking for a nice dark corner to stash myself in the abandoned house my target used, I stumbled over another murder. Seemingly, my prey had already messily dispatched the owner of the house to create himself an addict’s paradise. My moral conundrum was solved and I completed my contract.

The Dark Brotherhood quest line works by presenting me with situations that seem simple and then layering on complexity of character, instead complexity of gameplay. All of the assassinations I’ve carried out so far have been one hit kills, no challenge at all from a gameplay perspective, but morally, the challenge continues to ramp up. As I progress along the story line, each murder has seemed less justifiable. My current target, a mother and her children has no justification whatsoever, but it is too late for me, as the Dark Brotherhood has me hook, line and sinker.

As game critics, we are constantly ranting at game designers to provide the player with some real emotional content besides the usual suspects of fear, adrenaline, or concentration. We need look no further. Oblivion is a game for real grown-ups; the murder simulator brings something unique to the realm of drama. We’ve all seen character driven movies about murder; however, Oblivion offers the chance to enter the mind of the murderer ourselves.