Playful Virtual Violence

This Element looks at practices of emotional experiences with regard to a phenomenon that I call ‘playful virtual violence’. Aside from a few notable exceptions, virtual violence and video game violence are rarely discussed explicitly in the literature. Andreas Reference Jahn-Sudmann, Schröder, Heller, Krewani and SchröderJahn-Sudmann and Arne Schröder (2010) offer a useful starting point with their concept of ‘ludic violence’, which they argue has a ‘similarity relationship’ to physical violence (p. 133). While this partly gets at what I mean by playful virtual violence, my concept requires additional unpacking. It makes sense to start from the end and work backwards. ‘Violence’ can mean very different things. It can be physical, psychic, structural, symbolic, cultural, political, direct, personal, individual, or collective. I use ‘violence’ explicitly in the sense of physical violence, which Merriam-Webster defines as ‘the use of physical force so as to injure, abuse, damage, or destroy’. Using ‘violence’ strictly in this sense has a number of advantages. First, physical violence, as Randall Reference 62CollinsCollins (2008) notes, ‘has a clear core referent, which we can study using micro-situational observations’ (p. 24). This means that, in contrast to other forms of violence, such as symbolic or structural violence, physical violence is easily recognisable and empirically observable, though the intent to harm is not always apparent. Second, its observability enables analytical and ethnographic understanding without resorting to normative judgements. This is especially critical when approaching a topic as controversial as video game violence.

Of course, physical violence in video games is different from actual physical violence, for the violence it depicts is virtual. In his influential ethnographic study Second Life, Tom Boellstorff (2018) argued that the ‘virtual’ should not be thought of in opposition to the ‘real’ but rather in relation to the ‘actual’:

The philosopher Philip Reference Brey and GrimshawBrey (2014) goes one further and distinguishes between ‘digital objects’ and ‘virtual objects’. Digital objects are the bits and bytes calculated by the computer. Though digital objects lack identifiable mass and an explicit location in physical space, Brey maintains that they are nevertheless persistent, uniform, and stable structures with specifiable relations to the hardware, and hence can claim the status of objects. By contrast, virtual objects are generated on top of digital objects, as it were. They are ‘digital objects that appear to us as physical objects and that we interact with in a manner similar to physical objects’ (Reference Brey and GrimshawBrey 2014, 44). Crucially, virtual objects appear not identical but similar to physical objects. For a digital object to become a virtual object, a human agent must recognise the virtual object’s similarity to an actual object and then do something with it. In his seminal work Umgang mit Technik (‘Interacting with technology’), the cultural anthropologist Stefan Reference BeckBeck (1997) argues that only when human agents use a technology to some end does it become a socioculturally relevant Tat-Sache, a play on words emphasising the interdependency of fact (Tatsache), action (Tat), and thing (Sache) (p. 353). From an ethnographic perspective, what technology is matters less than how it is put into practice. Rather than regarding the virtual as a self-contained ontological state, it makes more sense to think of the virtual as a set of practices that enact similarities between virtual entities (e.g., objects, spaces, bodies, sounds, movements) and their physical counterparts.

The final term to unpack is ‘playful’. Like violence, play admits a multitude of meanings, and a variety of very different concepts exist in video-game scholarship. My understanding of play is bound up with its relationship to seriousness and draws on the work of Gregory Reference Bateson, Salen and ZimmermanBateson (2006), who examined the relationship in his 1954 lecture ‘A Theory of Play and Fantasy’. For Bateson, play belongs to a theory of communication involving different levels of abstraction when signalling messages. He famously came up with the idea while observing monkeys at the San Francisco Zoo. In the primate house, he noticed two monkeys engaged in play fighting, going through the motions of a real physical altercation but without using serious force. In their playful wrangling, Bateson believed he saw a form of metacommunication with a specific message: ‘This is play’, which is to say, ‘These actions, in which we now engage, do not denote what would be denoted by those actions which these actions denote’. ‘The playful nip denotes the bite’, Bateson explains, ‘but it does not denote what would be denoted by the bite’ (p. 317). The metacommunicative message ‘this is play’ is a paradoxical message, for play signifies a handling of particular meanings distinct from non-play yet necessarily constituted by it. Though play is not serious, it is only possible in reference to the serious. Bateson elucidates the relationship by way of an analogy. Just as maps are systems of reference to a territory, games are a network of references to non-playful meanings (p. 317). For Bateson, the relationship between map and territory, or between playful reference to a non-playful signal and the non-playful signal itself, are neither clearly the same nor clearly distinct. Rather, ‘in play, they are both equated and discriminated’ (Reference Bateson, Salen and ZimmermanBateson 2006, 321). Britta Neitzel succinctly summarises Bateson’s argument: ‘A playful action denotes, and at the same time it does not denote, the “real” action to which it refers’ (Reference Neitzel, Günzel, Liebe and MerschNeitzel 2008, 281).

The relationship between play and non-play gives rise to the distinctive function of play as a process of emotional experience. The experience of pleasure fits well into the model, though Bateson touches on the subject only in passing. Understanding pleasure as a playful activity means focusing on how those at play enact enjoyable emotional experiences through playful reference to non-playful actions. Playful violence is reference by means of verbal and non-verbal signals to actual physical violence within a process framed through metacommunication as play. In this sense, Bateson’s fighting monkeys are engaging in playful violence, as are children playing cops and robbers. In video games, the practice is inflected by digital technology to become playful virtual violence. Through the similarity between actual physical violence and its digital representations, gamers generate a rich tapestry of emotional experiences. The task of this Element is to explore those experiences in all their variety.

‘Bam!’

Wow effects arise not only from the passive observation of destruction but also from active participation in it. Indeed, a specific vocabulary has emerged in video game culture to express just this kind of experience with playful virtual violence: ‘Boom!’, ‘Pam!’, ‘Bang!’, ‘Pow!’, ‘Zap!’ and, most of all, ‘Bam!’ These expressions are emotional practices that articulate the joy of experiencing one’s effectiveness in killing an opponent, a ‘bam effect’. In an episode for the game Skyrim, a Let’s Player known as Piet happens on a pack of bandits and charges into battle (recommended example).Footnote ⁸ His knight, brandishing an intimidating broadsword, fells the first bandit in a single blow. ‘Bam!’ Piet cries, and proceeds to make short order of the others. The Let’s Player Sarazar displays similar enthusiasm while playing the first-person shooter Battlefield 3 (recommended example).Footnote ⁹ Sarazar, playing a marine sergeant, takes control of a heavy machine gun mounted on a Humvee and unleashes a barrage of bullets on enemy operatives. As the large calibre ammo rains down on them, Sazarar exclaims, ‘Baaaaam! Bam bam bam bam!’

Some 25 per cent of the Let’s Play fight sequences for Skyrim that I examined contained at least one ‘Bam!’ or a variation thereof; in Battlefield 3 and 4, it was 40 per cent; and in the action adventure games Tomb Raider and Assassin’s Creed 4, the total reached 60 per cent. Such counts indicate the high frequency with which players take pleasure in the ‘bam effect’. Not coincidentally, ‘Bam!’ and its synonyms are onomatopoetic inventions imitating the sound of a blow – be it a fist, a sword, a bullet, or a missile. The exclamations always accompany these moments of impact, emphasising both their force and the pleasure of the player as he or she experiences the rush of vanquishing an opponent.

In digital societies, technology allows people to extend their bodies in pursuit of intense emotional experiences. The philosopher Don Ihde, whose works explore how human lives are entangled with technology, developed a model that is helpful for understanding the phenomenon. His books Technics and Praxis (Reference Ihde1979) and Technology of the Lifeworld (Reference Ihde1990) draw on ideas from Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty to argue that technology is more than an artefact or tool; it is a medium shaping how human beings perceive and act in an environment. Ihde draws on a passage in Being and Time (first published in German in 1927) in which Heidegger observes that when beholding a hammer in action the physical object fades into the background and one’s attention turns to its activity – the nail it strikes and the wood into which it drives the nail (Reference HeideggerHeidegger 2001, 98). Heidegger calls this the hammer’s ‘readiness-to-hand’ (p. 98), the state of a technology that has gone from being an artefact to being an intrinsic part of human action and perception. Ihde finds a similar idea in Reference Merleau-PontyMerleau-Ponty’s (2002, 165–6) reading of a blind man whose cane is at once sensory organ and embodied extension. Ihde calls this kind of relationship between humans and technology ‘embodiment relations, because in this use context I take the technologies into my experiencing in a particular way by way of perceiving through such technologies and through the reflexive transformation of my perceptual and body sense’ (Reference IhdeIhde 1990, 72; see also Reference Ihde1979, 6–11).

The philosopher Philipp Reference Brey and MitchamBrey (2000) notes that Ihde concentrates on the technologies of perception and does not address other technologies – cars and hammers, say. For Brey, however, technologies are extensions not only of human perception but also of motor skills (Reference Brey and Mitcham2000, 8), shaping how we navigate in and interact with the environment. In embodiment relations, technology is a medium of perception that changes the relationship of human activity to its surroundings. By extending human beings’ perceptual and motor skills, technology creates new possibilities for emotional experience. Playing video games is a prime example of a popular pleasure that derives from embodiment relations with technology. Indeed, the relations they form are particularly complex, especially in the case of 3D action games. Here, technology is not simply a means to enhance perception and action within the physical environment; it simulates a virtual body through which players link their perception and action to a virtual environment.

Among gamers, the common term for virtual body is avatar – a Sanskrit word meaning ‘manifestation of a divinity’ (Reference Juul, Klevjer, Jensen, Rothenbuhler, Pooley and CraigJuul & Klevjer, 2016). My understanding of avatars as virtual bodies follows the concept of virtuality I describe in Section 1. The avatar body is virtual not only because it is computer-mediated but also because it crucially depends on its similarity to physical bodies. Virtual bodies can only become meaningful and effective through players treating them as representations of actual bodies and using them accordingly – moving, running, jumping, crouching, exploring, killing. The function of virtual bodies in video games, in other words, emerges from the gaming experience itself. The avatar’s body is constituted by the act of playing a video game and the medium through which players experience it. In the words of the video game theorist Rune Reference KlevjerKlevjer (2006, 10): ‘The avatar is the embodied manifestation of the player’s engagement with the “gameworld”; it is the player incarnated’. Crucially, the avatar does not mediate between the human body and the actual physical environment – as is the case with eyeglasses, say. Rather, it relates the human body to a virtual environment. The embodiment relation between player and avatar ensures that the movements on the screen can be perceived and performed as actions of virtual bodies.

It is only in light of the embodiment relation between player and avatar that the significance of the ‘bam effect’ becomes apparent. Unlike the ‘wow effect’, which can occur while watching a movie as well as when playing a video game, the ‘bam effect’ signals the pleasure of a deeply embodied emotional experience.

Domination

The pleasure in the ‘bam effect’ has a social dimension as well. In a Let’s Play video of the 2013 Tomb Raider, Sarazar, in the persona of Lara Croft, faces a masked enemy bearing a large bulletproof shield (recommended example).Footnote ¹⁰ After a series of evasive manoeuvres, Sarazar stabs him with an arrow. ‘That’s all you got, asshole?’ he asks. As the opponent mounts a new attack, Sarazar continues to bait him. ‘Come on, let’s dance!’ ‘I can do the waltz!’ Sarazar adroitly dodges a machete swipe and counters with a blow to the leg. The enemy falls to his knees and Sarazar goes in for the kill. The perspective moves to a close-up shot: Lara places a shotgun under the enemy’s chin and pulls the trigger. As the blood splatters, Sarazar lets out a ‘Bam!’ and laughs. ‘Now that’s an execution kill’, he adds, his voice dropping deeper.

Though only 35 seconds long, the clip contains several forms of emotional experience. First is the pleasure in Sarazar’s ‘Bam!’ as he pummels his opponent. Second is the fearlessness he demonstrates by hurling insults (‘That’s all you got, asshole?’; ‘Come on, let’s dance!’). Third is the superiority signalled by his mocking laughter. As with many other Let’s Players, Sarazar engages in performative forms of communication that treat computer-controlled enemies as social agents. The German sociologists Heinrich Reference PopitzPopitz (1992) and Wolfgang Reference SofskySofsky (2005) have argued that violence demonstrates superiority and, by extension, power. In video games, players make playful allusions to the social implications of violence as they enact feelings of social superiority by dominating others through their virtual bodies.

The pleasure in dominating others is particularly pronounced in online multiplayer games, where players implicitly understand that there is a human being behind every enemy avatar. Gronkh, the best-known Let’s Player in Germany, describes the difference to single player games during a session of GTA Online: ‘It’s pretty awesome, playing against other players, I gotta say. That gives you a totally different kick’.Footnote ¹¹ The significance of the difference is something that many of the gamers I interviewed stressed. Petator, a 32-year-old male player, observed:

The pleasure taken in frustrating others intensifies when opponents lose points or valuable items. In the multiplayer zombie survival game DayZ, the death of an avatar is permanent, and the player must start again at the beginning. This creates opportunity for a cruel form of domination. Sixteen-year-old Joey described how he likes to find a hidden spot and from there pick off players with his rifle. ‘You aim at them and you know that they will die soon. Only they don’t know it. That is so cool, this feeling, because you know that they have spent four days [collecting equipment]. And now they’re going to die’. It was clear that Joey enjoys contemplating the anger and frustration of the opponent ahead of time. Bernd, a 22-year-old gamer, told me what it feels like to kill an opponent and take his possessions:

Though I couldn’t see him, I detected a sly smile on Bernd’s face. It should become clear, the domination of an opponent is a powerful factor in the pleasure of virtual violence. Yet for the people I interviewed, the act of domination is not altogether serious. It contains an element of playfulness and is part of the thrill of feeling superior to others.

When video game culture first formed, most players were male, and that remains true today, at least for mainstream action games; in other game genres, the picture has changed significantly.Footnote ¹² The experiences of domination I came across in my research mostly involved male players, which raises the question whether pleasure in video game violence is connected to specific ideas of masculinity. For ethnographers, it is less productive to ask why so many male players find video game violence fun than to explore whether ideas of masculinity amplify the pleasure from video game violence.

Although the field of game studies has no shortage of literature on gender theory, few studies have addressed the relationship between masculinity and taking pleasure in video game violence. (For a notable exception, see Reference JanszJansz, 2005.) Of course, many males in player groups engage in posturing displays and occasionally drop homophobic jokes and misogynistic comments (Reference NardiNardi 2010, 152–7). Judging by the emotional practices of the players, however, concrete links between video game violence and specific notions of masculinity are rare. An exception can be found in emotional practices that express pleasure in video game violence through male-connoted sexual acts. Words like ‘fuck’ or ‘bang’ are regularly used by male players as synonyms for video game violence. It can occur in the annunciation of violence, as when the Let’s Player Hardi, waiting to ambush an enemy in the stealth action game Hitman: Absolution, says, ‘Oh, I’m going to fuck you right in the ass, boy’.Footnote ¹³ Other times it serves to emphasise violence after the fact, such as when a player of Counter-Strike comments on a kill with the words: ‘I fucked you, you noob’. The frequency of sexual comments like these varies strongly. The Let’s Player Sarazar, and many of those I played with during my research, do not use them, whereas other players use them regularly. Less common than the inclusion of terms such as ‘fuck’, but just as significant, if not more so, is the use of the English word ‘rape’. It is rarely heard in German-language Let’s Play videos, but occurs routinely in the text and voice chat channels for shooters and other multiplayer games. During a heated discussion after a gruelling fight in DayZ, the user Petator’s opines, ‘You can actually only punish people with one thing: you simply have to rape them’.

To better understand what players mean when they use these sexualised terms, we need to listen to the players themselves. Here is Petator, who did not mince words:

Asked about the meaning of ‘rape’, he replied:

A ‘rage quit’ – another instance of English used by German players – is when a player abruptly leaves a game out of anger. The term is paradigmatic for the other side of domination in multiplayer games: the experience of one’s own inferiority. It is what makes defeat a ‘rape’ in the first place. For it is only because players become angry and frustrated after losing that they can be humiliated. Petator was quite frank about that:

The use of highly sexualised language by Petator and many of the others I interviewed underscores the experience of domination in video game violence. The question that needs to be asked is whether the targeted use of sexualised language expresses a further dimension of pleasure that emerges from the confluence of video game violence, domination, and masculinity.

In answering that question, I take the view of Candace West and Don H. Zimmerman that masculinity, and sexuality in general, are products of social, cultural, and emotional processes. ‘A person’s gender’, they write, ‘is not simply an aspect of what one is, but, more fundamentally, it is something that one does, and does recurrently, in interaction with others’ (Reference West and Zimmerman1987, 140). Specific ways of feeling play a crucial role in what West and Zimmerman call ‘doing gender’. Expressions of emotion can be a form of doing gender and vice versa. Stephanie A. Reference Shields, Garner, Di Leone, Hadley, Stets and TurnerShields et al. (2006) write, ‘Shared beliefs about emotion assist in defining and maintaining beliefs about gender and gender-as-difference. … Beliefs about emotion reveal the distinctive ‘how’ of being a gendered person: Doing emotion … signals one’s genuineness as female or male, feminine or masculine’ (p. 67). The particular ways of doing emotion that count as feminine or masculine depend on social, cultural, and historical factors (Reference Borutta, Verheyen, Borutta and VerheyenBorutta & Verheyen, 2010). Context is crucial: think of male fans at football matches who cry openly when their club loses but who would be ashamed to do so in public anywhere else. Emotional practices with male gender connotations exist for a wide variety of individuals and sociocultural situations.

The use of terms such as ‘fuck’ and ‘rape’ to articulate experiences of domination mobilises a particularly clichéd form of male emotion: the enjoyment taken in the aggressive sexual penetration of other individuals. Such sexually charged emotives can serve as articulations of a certain type of masculinity within a social group. This does not mean that all players take this masculinity or its male-connoted feelings seriously. Nor does it mean that the pleasure they experience is based on a physical affirmation of certain male stereotypes. To be certain, emotional practices provide real validation for some players. More typically, however, players interact playfully with this stereotypical, sexualised idea of masculinity in pursuit of enjoyable emotional experiences.

Affected Bodies

So far, I have focused on the emotional experiences associated with perpetrating video game violence. But equally important for understanding pleasure in video game violence is how it is experienced by its ‘victims’, which all action gamers are at some point or another. The experience of violence perpetrated on one’s virtual body can induce feelings of stress, menace, fear, and sometimes even physical pain. Yet these feelings are also part of the gaming experience and, for many, part of what makes it enjoyable.

The cover of the very first issue of TeleMatch (recommended example) offers an allegory for a playful response to threats in video games.Footnote ¹⁴ It depicts Pac-Man as a round yellow head with hands and feet – a highly abstracted representation of the human body – as he runs from several ghosts, who will take a life if they touch him. His face epitomises pleasure in the face of peril: he shoots a hurried glance at his pursuers but seems to be having fun, his face a big toothy grin. The unique mixture of stress and fun is echoed in the earliest reviews of action games. In the issue of TeleMatch with the Pac-Man cover, a journalist describes the ‘superfast attack game’ Nautilus:

The idea that threat is nerve-wracking yet thrilling is also frequently expressed in the communicative practices of Let’s Play videos. Moments of peril are accompanied by cursing (‘Shit!’, ‘Fuck!’, ‘What the fuck!’), word repetitions (‘Dude, dude, dude!’, ‘Man, man, man!’), exclamations (‘Fuck me!’ and ‘Oh, boy!’), and interjections (‘Owwwwww!’, ‘Woah!’, ‘Oh!’, ‘Ay ay ay!’, and ‘Ahhhhh!’). The expressions are the same that people outside the gaming world use when experiencing a threatening situation or when empathising with the threatening situations of others. In action games, they are particularly prevalent. A total of 65 per cent of the single-player Let’s Play fight sequences I examined and 85 per cent of the cases when players’ avatars are subjected to violence and can’t fight back contained one or more of these expressions. These facets of experience make up a considerable portion of the pleasure in video game violence.

Being the victim of virtual violence often elicits responses in the player’s physical body. ‘Everybody who has experienced an exciting video game’, a reviewer of a space shooter writes in 1984, ‘knows that feeling when you feel the action so close to your skin that it takes your breath away and your pulse quickens’.Footnote ¹⁶ Other reviewers speak of games whose ‘realistic animation … makes players wince at each incoming shot’Footnote ¹⁷ or whose ‘nerve-racking action’ makes ‘the blood boil’.Footnote ¹⁸ Pearls of sweat, cramped fingers, racing hearts, and ‘adrenaline kicks’ all feature as central elements in journalists’ descriptions of video game experience. The same thing is true for Let’s Play videos: Gronkh has to ‘sweat piss’Footnote ¹⁹ during an action scene; for Sarazar, a battle is ‘still in the bones’Footnote ²⁰; Brammen gets ‘hard nipples’ after an explosionFootnote ²¹; and Hardi, writing about a scary sound in Dead Space 3, states, ‘No joke, just now everything inside me tightened up. Just like this [he makes a face for the facecam]: mmmmyeah! God, what a sound, man’.Footnote ²²

This does not mean that being on the receiving end of virtual violence is stronger or deeper than being on the giving end. Moreover, some of the experiences described by video game journalists and players (such as breaking out in a sweat) correspond to actual bodily processes, while others (describing a moment as ‘toe-curling’, say) function as metaphors for an intense physical response. In both cases, however, the virtual violence players receive is experienced at a somatic level. Of course, players’ bodies are never subjected to actual physical violence. And they always have the option of removing themselves from a threating situation, either by distancing themselves mentally (‘It’s just a game’) or by quitting. The players who decide to stick around willingly submit their physical bodies to the excitations of seeing their avatars under constant threat.

Nowhere is that more true than in horror games. A particularly good example is Slender: The Eight Pages. The game begins in the first-person perspective in the middle of a dark forest. The player has no weapons, only a flashlight, and its batteries last only for a short while. As the player moves through the woods, menacing sound effects play in the background. The goal is to collect eight handwritten notes warning of a tall, pale faceless entity known as Slender Man. All the while, said Slender Man lurks in the darkness and can appear at any time. If he comes into contact with a player, or if a player looks at him too long, the game is over.

Slender has become very popular on Let’s Play channels in large part due to the use of the facecam perspective, allowing viewers to see the real-time physical responses of players as they cope with fear and stress and laugh at their own reactions. The first three Let’s Play videos for Slender on the Gamestar YouTube channel have received between 500,000 and 1.5 million views each. Let’s Players Martin and Daniel have little prior knowledge of the gameplay as they start.Footnote ²³ In the top left corner, the facecam shows their faces under sparse lighting. They find the first page and an eerie pulsating sound can be heard. Both cry, ‘Uahhh!’ and Martin – who is only there to watch – reflexively pulls his face back from the screen. ‘I hate this kind of music’. Shortly after, the Slender Man teleports suddenly into view accompanied by a loud bass tone, and the two of them scream, ‘Woaaaah!’ ‘There he is! There he is!’ Daniel yells, as he commands his character to run away. Martin see-saws back and forth in front of the screen. Smiles follow their screams.

The two play the game over several episodes. In one scene, they arrive at a dark tunnel (recommended example).Footnote ²⁴ ‘Don’t go in there! Don’t go in there!’ a panicked Martin yells. Yet go in they must, because one of the eight pages is glued to a wall inside. Daniel quickly grabs the page and a dreadful din rings out. ‘Uaaahhhh!’ both yell, and Daniel flees further into the tunnel. Martin is frightened. ‘You can’t go through this tunnel!’ He tells Daniel that he should at least go faster. They manage to exit the tunnel on the side and come across creepy ruins. Martin gathers all his courage. ‘We have to go in there’, he says gravely. Slowly, they peek around the first corner and see a dimly lit room. Suddenly, they hear a dissonant static sound. Daniel turns the avatar around: right in front of him is Slender Man. Both scream. The screen flickers. Gameover. ‘Dude!’ Daniel is stunned. ‘How did he do that?’ Both are quiet for a second. At this point, the facecam in the YouTube video switches to full-screen mode. Both burst out laughing. Daniel sighs. ‘Woah, man!’ The tension disappears from their faces and changes to relief. They decide that Martin should now play a round.

As the clip shows, the pleasure in being at the receiving end of video game violence arises from a conscious decision to expose oneself to a perceived risk. It is difficult to say why the body is so strongly affected by games like these. Perhaps it is part biological, such as fear of the dark, and part cultural, such as emotional routines learned from playing similar games and watching horror films. For my work, however, it is not so much why players feel this way as how they handle their physical reactions. For though the violence of video games carries no actual risk, the players physically respond as if it were real. And by putting their virtual bodies at risk, they experience their physical bodies in a new and exciting way.

Respawn

The embodiment relation that makes the risk of video game violence feel real raises another question: what happens when players’ characters are injured or killed? In Slender, death is abstract; in others, especially those involving combat, it is appreciably more concrete. Of course, players never feel like they are actually dying, regardless of the form in which death comes. But of all the ways a player can lose a game, virtual death is not another neutral experience among others (Reference Klastrup, Corneliussen and RettbergKlastrup 2008).

Early action games of the 1970s and 80s featured abstract avatars that died after a single hit. One reason was that the manufacturers of coin-operated arcade machines wanted to maximise the amount of money they could extract from players (Reference TocciTocci 2008, 192). But as video game consoles spread in the 1980s, avatars came to have many lives, giving players the possibility of replaying challenging segments multiple times before restarting. Games in the 1990s went a step further by allowing players to save their progress after dying and start there later. The re-appearance of a video game character after having been killed is known as ‘respawning’. For the player Limaneel, it is a key factor in the experience of virtual death:

By comparing virtual death to a knockout, Limaneel seems to say not only that virtual death is temporary but also that it is somehow akin to a physical process. Some recent first-person action games such as Skyrim or Counter-Strike: Global Offensive have put the corporeality of virtual death into stark relief by abruptly switching to a third-person perspective during death. The external view of the body allows players to behold the full impact of the fatal blow. A number of third-person action games, where players already see the deaths of their character from an external viewpoint, up the ante by showing the fatality in slow motion and explicit detail. Virtual death may be only temporary, but many games depict it in the most violent way possible. The player Wooshy offered an interpretation of these violent representations of death:

Players respond to this ‘cut’ in very different ways. Some face it with detachment, as if bored; others shout ‘LOL!’ in surprise. Most display annoyance, disappointment, frustration, or anger. Common locutions include ‘Noooooo’, ‘Shit!’, ‘Go fuck yourself!’, and ‘Kiss my ass!’ Sometimes their words are accompanied by a physical outburst such as striking a desk or throwing the mouse. Many seek an explanation for their character’s death. Some blame external circumstances: the controller failed, the avatar did not do what it was supposed to do, team members fell short, the game generated too many enemies. Others blame themselves. Most are already thinking about starting again as they watch their character die. They gather fresh courage, ponder aloud how they could do better, or announce that they will prevail next time.

I asked Pandrael, an experienced gamer, about how he responds when his character on the multiplayer online game The Elder Scrolls Online dies. ‘For me’, he said, ‘it just means taking a short break. It doesn’t get to me emotionally’. The no-less-experienced gamer Miralla admitted a very different reaction: ‘It’s the worst [laughs]. It’s always awful when it happens, especially because I usually break something’. If her character dies a single time, she can cope. But after failing multiple times against a final boss, say, she may have to put the game down for several weeks, such is her frustration. In extreme instances, rage quits are common.

The level of frustration that the game produces stands in direct proportion to the excitement felt when defeating a final boss or making it to the next level. This is plainly visible in players of the Dark Souls games, which are known for their unforgiving difficulty. Florian Heider, in a review of the game for Gamestar titled ‘Dying can look this beautiful!’, writes: ‘Four destroyed gamepads, two shattered monitors, and a chewed up keyboard cable. Giant rats in the editorial department? No, Dark Souls has finally been released for the PC! We show why some games are worth the suffering’.Footnote ²⁵ Most encounters with enemies end in death and the loss of the bonus items the player has collected, and the boss fights at the end of each level are daunting. But the difficulty makes playing the game a special experience. ‘Losing again after a ten-minute fight with a dragon may be devastating’, Heider writes, ‘but it is nothing compared to the euphoria that sets in when … we finally send the scaly brute to the eternal hunting grounds – hallelujah!’Footnote ²⁶ ‘I will remember the emotions that Dark Souls woke in me for years to come’, he concludes. The intensity of the threat to the virtual body is critical; it shapes the intensity of the experience of exercising virtual violence. A victory has value when something is at stake, and what is at stake here is an emotional experience whose condition is the possibility of being frustrated. Negative emotional experiences are the price players pay for the chance of having exceptionally positive experiences. They risk frustration in the short term for singular intensity down the line.

Esports

A key reason for the popularity of online multiplayer games is that the competition with other players is more demanding than the fight against the computer and thus promises a stronger sense of achievement. A human player, according to Limaneel, ‘acts and reacts, puts you under pressure, removes the pressure, tries to escape. The conflict is much more complex’. Sixteen-year-old Miralla said, ‘In order to kill players, you need skill!’ The need for ‘skill’ – German-speaking players typically use the English term – represents a challenge that elevates the experience of comparing one’s performance with opponents.

It is no surprise, then, that a significant share of video game players participate in what is known as electronic sports, or esports. Players form teams (often referred to as ‘clans’), follow rigorous training plans, organise trial matches, and enter competitions. Constant training and professionalisation has led devoted esports players to develop extraordinary abilities. ‘In the same way traditional sports shape embodied action, elite video game play also inscribes itself on the body of players, refining over time the most nuanced yet complex circuit of action’, writes T. L. Reference TaylorTaylor (2012, 39), in the most ambitious ethnographic study on esports to date. Esport clans frequently participate in national or international leagues that are organised like those of conventional sports teams. Often, the players live hundreds of kilometres away from one another and meet online, where they train, plan strategies, and run competitions.

But the highlights for professional gamers are large offline tournaments known as LAN parties. The two events I attended took place over several days in large halls on the outskirts of German cities and contained hundreds of players, most of whom were men. Players wore professionally designed jerseys emblazoned with the logos of their sponsors. Like sports teams, the clans formed a ‘line-up’, pursued carefully planned strategies, and warmed up before important matches (less about warming up muscles than entering into an embodiment relation with the avatar). The games in the main tournaments consisted of League of Legends, Battlefield 4, and Counter-Strike, though countless others were running on the side. The competitions for the notorious multiplayer first-person shooter Counter-Strike followed predetermined rules with five players on each side. Teams played either as terrorists or counter-terrorists, swapping sides after several rounds. The terrorists had to place and explode a bomb, and the counter-terrorists had to prevent them. Another option was to kill the opposing team to win a round. The designations ‘counterterrorist’ and ‘terrorist’ were largely meaningless. Nothing indicated that players considered the actual political backdrop for the game. They accepted the counterterrorism plot as just one of many in competitive gaming.

An integral part of the Counter-Strike competitions at the LAN parties I attended was the performance of emotional practices in the physical space of the halls: periodic exclamations of ‘Yeah!’, ‘Woohoo!’, and ‘Yes!’; players pumping their fists or clapping their hands; teammates’ praising each other with words of encouragement – ‘Good!’, ‘Nice, man!’, ‘Clean!’, and ‘Strong round!’ – or with appreciative pats on the back. At the same time, the pressure of the competition and the ever-present spectre of defeat took their toll, leading to disappointment and frustration. It was common to see players shout ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck!’, ‘Shit!’, or ‘Noooo!’, pull their hair, pound on the table, or become hostile to team members.

What role does playful virtual violence have in competitive gaming experiences? In Quest for Excitement: Sport and Leisure in the Civilizing Process (1986), Norbert Elias argues that allusions to physical violence are a central part of conventional sports competitions. Elias writes that ‘the setting of sport, like that of many other leisure-pursuits, is designed to move, to stir the emotions, to evoke tensions in the form of a controlled, a well-tempered excitement’ (Reference Elias and DunningElias & Dunning 1986, 48). Though Elias’s ideas about the ‘civilising process’ do not exactly map on to emotional practice theory (Reference ScheerScheer 2011, 65), the quoted observation ties in to my arguments so far. Elias believes that the ability of sports to mobilise emotions derives from its being an imitation of an actual physical fight. ‘Some forms of sport whose design most closely resembles that of a real battle between hostile groups have a particularly strong propensity for stirring up emotions, for evoking excitement’ (Reference Elias, Elias and Dunning1986, 49). The resemblance to real battles enables emotionally intense comparison:

From an ethnographic perspective, the value judgment that sports activities have an ‘exhilarating and purifying effect’ is problematic. But the observation that physical confrontation allows a ‘confirmation of one’s own worth’ is nevertheless useful. It is what makes confrontation a competitive process in which the victorious experience ‘self-love’ and pride.

Esport players take it as given that their experiences are similar to those of participants in physical sports. Counter-Strike competitions adopt the conventions of traditional sports and embed them in the game play. As Reference Ritter and SchönbergerKlaus Schönberger and Christian Ritter (2017) argue, contemporary media practices often emerge through an interplay of persistence and recombination. This is also true of esports, where emotional practices themselves are not so much novel as recombined from persisting practices in traditional sports cultures and tailored to video game play. In traditional sports such as football, competitive comparison during physical confrontations with opponents facilitates enjoyable emotional experiences. In video gaming, playful virtual violence is intertwined with similar routines and practices that are not only accepted in our society but even considered desirable.

Team Players

This is Petra Schmitz, in the introduction to her review of the 2005 MMORPG Guild Wars, describing the thrill of her team’s hard-won victory. The same kind of pleasure can be found among players of The Elder Scrolls Online (TESO), an MMORPG I observed as a participant. Theoretically, one can master the adventures on the continent of Tamriel in isolation, but many players prefer to join forces as they face computer-controlled monsters, whether in PvE (player versus environment) or in PvP (player versus player) mode. Like many who are looking for teammates, I met Tommy, MauMau, Aruto, and Julia on the game’s chat channel. We first played together in a PvE dungeon, where four to twelve players fight through a cavern full of computer-controlled monsters. Via voice chat, I learned that they knew each other in real life (Tommy and MauMau were brothers) and had played World of Warcraft (WoW) for quite some time. But, like me, they were beginners to TESO, so we all had to struggle.

We cleared the first dungeon straight away only because our avatars happened to complement each other very well. Teams playing MMORPGs commonly choose avatars with different strengths. The ‘holy trinity’ of basic roles in the MMORPG world consists of the ‘damage dealer’, ‘tank’, and ‘healer’, and this is the arrangement we decided on. The interaction of avatars with differing roles and abilities enables particular emotional experiences. Cooperation in battle – ‘togetherness’, as one player put it – generates its own emotional quality, because, as Schmitz writes, ‘Working with many others on a large task is … a good feeling’.Footnote ³² My TESO team experienced this feeling even though we were just a small group. We played regularly together over the next few weeks, exploring Tamriel, mastering various dungeons, gifting one another valuable loot, laughing about our mistakes, and watching our avatars grow stronger. The point of our efforts was ‘to survive the challenge as a team, in the group’, Aruto told me in a subsequent interview. We stuck together and enjoyed the fruits of our alliance. Other players in MMORPGs or in games such as DayZ have similar experiences. The player Pumba, talking about DayZ, commented, ‘Just as in any other online game in which you play together with others, the feeling is great: you’ve accomplished something together, it worked, you set a goal, and everything worked wonderfully’.

After we had reached higher avatar levels, we decided to play in PvP mode, where up to several hundred players from three different factions fight at once, all trying to kill opponents, take their castles, and capture their flags over a vast territory with multiple arenas, some involving major battles, others minor skirmishes. One day, as Tommy, MauMau, and I were hanging out with our avatars near one of our smaller outposts, an overwhelming enemy force of ten players attacked us. At first we hid. Then we decided to spring into battle, accepting the likelihood that we’d get ‘wiped out’ in the process. I loaded my ‘ulti’, an ultimate skill that creates a magical shield around a team for several seconds. Under its protection, we charged the enemy forces head-on. Tommy, whose avatar served as our tank, bore the brunt of the damage, and held the enemies in place with magical claws; I cast magic spells that dealt damage to everyone around us; and MauMau, an archer, invoked a curse that disarmed their magic. We continued to fight until, much to our surprise, we had killed all ten combatants without suffering a single casualty. ‘Hey, did that really just happen?’ we wondered over the voice chat. We broke out in cheers. ‘Epic! Epic! Epic!’ MauMau yelled, using a common English-language superlative among MMORPG players to describe exceptional experiences and memorable events. When I later asked them to name a particularly unforgettable moment, it was this episode that Tommy recalled:

We all laughed, but it was true: the battle was extraordinary, and to this day stands out among all my TESO experiences.

In the search of experiences like ours, TESO players venture into ever-more-difficult levels and against ever-larger groups. In so-called endgames, players in PvE mode must come together in groups as large as twelve to defeat the strongest bosses. (In WoW, as many as forty players may be needed.) These groups are mostly composed of members from larger ‘guilds’, which can consist of many dozens of players. The PvE guild events are called ‘raids’ because of the loot (weapons, armor, objects) that players can collect. Pirou, both a ‘guild leader’ and a ‘raid leader’, commands raids multiple times a week. The team must be perfectly synchronised to stand a chance of winning: the damage dealers must unleash major DPS (damage per second), the tanks have to ‘hold aggro’ (draw attacks), and the healers have to employ their ‘ultis’ at the proper time. Everyone must remember their ‘buff food’ (usable objects that raise attribute points), and the ‘skill rotation’ (the arrangement of avatar abilities in the fight) needs to be just right. I participated in a raid that repeatedly tried to master a twelve-player dungeon – without success. When asked about the appeal of regular raids, the player Limaneel replied: ‘Sometimes we spent weeks trying to defeat the same boss before we succeeded. It was a sense of achievement that’s almost impossible to describe. You might feel something similar if you, I don’t know, if you win a football tournament or something’.

The comparisons with other sports cultures I noted earlier account for the positive emotions that players feel when they master a challenge. At the same time, the players emphasised the importance of cooperation in amplifying the sense of achievement. Lela, a guild leader, explained why:

The group is not only a vehicle for pleasure; the experience of collective fighting has its own unique quality. The members of the group know the positive feeling of sharing their hard-won success with each other. In order to understand the dynamic, it is helpful to regard player groups as what Barbara Rosenwein calls ‘emotional communities’, that is, ‘groups in which people adhere to the same norms of emotional expression and value – or devalue – the same or related emotions’ (Reference Rosenwein2006, 2). Rosenwein emphasises that emotional communities exist on multiple levels and can overlap, merge, or compete with one another: ‘Imagine … a large circle within which are smaller circles, none entirely concentric but rather distributed unevenly within the given space’ (Reference Rosenwein2006, 24). The idea that player groups constitute informal, ever-changing, yet persistent emotional communities is compatible with emotional practice theory. The question is the extent to which emotional practices within player groups mobilise and regulate emotions, forge emotional norms, and enact emotional experiences between players.

The first striking feature of emotional communities in the gaming world is the braggadocio regarding personal achievements. The voice chat channels of online games are full of examples. Here are some typical statements made by Counter-Strike players: ‘Boom, man, did you see how I finished him?’ ‘Yeah, ha ha, did you see that? The mouse twitched, and right in the head!’ ‘I totally ruled with the auto-sniper man – bam, bam! You should have seen it’. ‘I’m such an animal, man!’ ‘That was a brilliant headshot, right? I thought it was pretty awesome!’ ‘Man, right now I’ve got the best moves with the AWP [sniper rifle]! The whole time, 180 degrees and headshot!’ While the examples in Counter-Strike describe single actions, TESO players tend to brag about entire battles. MauMau, after destroying countless enemies in PvP mode while defending a castle, remarked, ‘Wow! I killed a lot of people before the castle fell! I bet I killed a hundred!’ Players’ unabashed expressions of joy after successfully killing opponents reveals the specific emotional conventions of gaming culture. The emotional communities of player groups serve as projection screens of emotional experiences that not only tolerate pleasure in playful virtual violence but – crucially – convey it as something desirable. Within the groups, bragging is an emotional practice that communicates one’s own achievements, shares them with others, solicits recognition from other players, and works to mobilise enjoyable emotional experiences. So while bragging about experiences of mastery and domination may seem focused on individuals, it nevertheless contains an important social dimension as a form of communication and a means of facilitating group emotions.

The second emotional practice common among gamer groups is mutual praise. Shouts of ‘Good!’, ‘Nice!’, ‘Clean!’, and ‘You animal!’ echo across the voice channels; in chats, the message ‘gj’ (good job) is everywhere. Recognition is not reserved exclusively for the best players. Even beginners, like me, receive praise. Of course, it was not my gaming skills that earned me words of encouragement such as ‘You animal!’ or ‘High skill PhD’ but my participation in an emotional community where praise was an established routine. Players implicitly understand that they can intensify their pleasure when they communicate their group’s success and frame their gaming experiences as enjoyable through boasting and praise. ‘I enjoy it too when playing’, the player Pandora told me. ‘That’s why I dole out so much praise’. When I asked if she is proud of her boyfriend, Lee, an accomplished Counter-Strike player, she replied, ‘At the beginning [when the two first started playing together], I was always so super proud, because he just totally mowed down the opponents’.

In online multiplayer games, the experience of playful virtual violence – whether as the perpetrator or the victim – generates a sense of belonging based on practices of mutual affection, aid, protection, boasting, praise, recognition, and separating ‘us’ from ‘them’. Playful virtual violence is, to a large extent, a cooperative pleasure in which gamers share and communicate emotional experiences together.

Professionals and Amateurs

When Marco and Tarox were appointed PvP leaders one evening in an important guild meeting with about forty participants, they immediately announced that things would be getting tougher now. ‘What we want to do is to train you’, they explained, making it clear that they would soon be abandoning the conversational tone in the guild’s voice channel. Among other things, they wanted to teach us how to fulfil our particular tasks effectively, how to move as a group, how to push forward in a battle, how to avoid enemy attacks if necessary, and so on. ‘We’re going to teach you these things until you puke’, they added. There would be ‘a lot of work’ ahead, but through hard training we could accomplish greatness, they assured us.

I was surprised by their seriousness. To date, I had only ever played TESO PvP with a small group of players and had participated in big battles only as a bystander. Now that I had joined a large guild, I was to become part of a dozen-player PvP combat unit. All-decisive in PvP mode, the unit was one of many specialised, well-coordinated groups that train several times a week in preparation for capturing strategic points or castles of opposing factions. The discipline demanded by the PvP leaders and their understanding of our training as ‘work’ was supposed to enable our guild to be successful in PvP mode.

In other MMORPGs, the new leaders had coordinated game groups of several hundred players over several years. Here in TESO, they found themselves coaching a bunch of amateurs. One of the most important lessons, they told us in the meeting, is that in battle we act not in our own interest, but in the interest of the group. To set a good example, one leader promised to respond to the ‘acute lack of healers’ in our guild by raising ‘one more healer for the good of the group’. He promised to invest several hundred hours of playtime to level-up a second avatar specialising in healing just to support the guild. ‘You need to take off your blinders and start thinking for the group’, they said. ‘The more group skills we have, the longer the group will survive’. The same went for the points we would gain and the castles we would take. Effective team play also meant resisting to become what German players call killgeil, the urge to go for a kill whenever you have a chance. We were supposed to kill an opponent only if it benefitted the team. ‘We’re really going to nip your ego in the bud. This is about togetherness’, they added. ‘We’re going to build a feeling of togetherness…. We want to achieve this feeling of togetherness so that we can inspire people through PvP’.

I felt that the leaders’ stated intention to create a feeling of togetherness stood in stark contrast to how they behaved. In one of the first training sessions, Tarox snapped at some players who logged in on a wrong game server, saying that they could visit other servers in their ‘spare time’. With military-like discipline, they taught us new commands. At ‘3 … 2 … 1 … Go!’ everyone had to sprint off at the same time. Those who weren’t fast enough were singled out – ‘Too late! Too late! Too late!’ Anyone who went too far ahead of the group was immediately warned. From now on, our voice channel was to be ruled by disciplined communication. Anyone who said anything not related to a fight or fooled around was immediately told to shut up. All we heard on the voice channel were orders from the leaders and strategic remarks from individual members. In a test run of our new strategy, we accidentally ran into an opponent’s magic spell, which is marked by a red warning circle on the ground. Tarox was incensed: ‘Look at the fucking ground! … If there’s a red circle with a flag in it, get out of there!’

Despite the tone, none of the participants complained. All of them seemed eager to meet the new standards set by the new leaders. Only gradually did I understand that most players saw the harsh tone and the military-style discipline as part of an overall positive process of professionalisation. They wanted to be part of the perfectly functioning unit that the new leadership was attempting to fashion out of a bunch of uncoordinated amateurs. Over many evenings, we met again and again to take part in the strenuous training.

All the training enabled us to extract more pleasure from playful virtual violence, as we celebrated ever greater successes and defeated entire opposing armies. The player Pandrael told me in his interview: ‘Yes, it’s just fun when you see that what you practice or what you learn, that you slowly learn to implement it, and of course you’re happy that you didn’t do it for nothing, but also have a visible result’. The professionalisation of the group intensified the pleasure of fighting together. At the same time, it allowed us to grow into an emotional community who took playful fighting in PvP seriously. This created new possibilities for emotional experience. The professionalisation made game-related skills and knowledge particularly meaningful, lending learning a specific emotional potential. As players improved, they began to consult websites with information on the game’s possibilities, on the advantages and disadvantages of particular weapons, on the countless ways to support their team and gain an advantage over opponents. Even more important was the practical knowledge gained through personal experience. Take Julia, for instance. A very good healer, she told me that her skills are based on ‘Learning by doing. … If I can’t get something done, I look on the Internet: What do the others do? And then I try to optimise it for myself: What fits together and how can I do it better and how can I help the group better?’ Tarox so valued the importance of practical knowledge that he lets his students make mistakes. ‘Even if it’s a bit mean’, he explained, ‘I like to let them run into a trap once in a while, during the exercises and stuff’.

The practices of teaching and learning in which we engaged are in principle the same as in other sports and gaming cultures, and they fulfil similar emotional functions. The acquisition of knowledge constitutes a continuous exchange of pride and recognition. When I asked Marco and Tarox whether they are proud of their students when their teaching efforts are successful, they answered affirmatively: ‘You are extremely proud when you see: All right, you finally have someone who really accepts what you tell him, and through that really gets better and better from evening to evening, or from hour to hour’. Tarox added, ‘This is exactly what pushes the feeling of togetherness in a group. When people go: “Hey, what they’re telling me works”’. The guild leader Lela also described this process in detail: ‘The more you do with each other and the more you share success and failure with each other and talk about them, the more you have the feeling of understanding and knowing the others better, even though it is a virtual world’.

As these examples show, the pleasure of fighting together and the pleasure of belonging to an emotional community are intertwined and complementary. The exercise and experience of playful virtual violence are the anchor points of the process, which can include talking about successes, expressing mutual affection, helping and protecting, boasting and praising, and communicating pride and recognition. In all these cases, playful virtual violence is the means to a highly cooperative pleasure through which players can share their emotional experiences with others.

Making Enemies

In multiplayer games, players often experience the stories as secondary to the action. One reason for this is that the constant communication between players distracts them from the narrative. The tension between just and unjust violence nevertheless remains crucial in at least some multiplayer games. Nowhere is this more evident than in the zombie survival game DayZ, where each avatar is only accorded a single life. When players start a new avatar, they spend hours, often days gathering the supplies necessary for survival and for defending themselves against computer-controlled zombies. When they die, they have to begin anew. Encounters with other players are often fraught, because it is impossible to know beforehand whether they will be friendly or whether they will kill your avatar and take your virtual possessions, undoing many hours of work. In a group interview, the player Kerby described his frustration: ‘It’s so annoying … when you let someone live, or you meet someone, get along well at first, and yet he is one who, as soon as you turn around, shoots you … in the back like a coward’. His buddy Milo added:

On some game servers running a persistent virtual environment in which dozens of players can participate simultaneously, the same players are repeatedly present over several weeks (often every day) and can be identified by their names. Since the same players regularly attack each other, stab each other in the back, cheat, rob, or willingly destroy each other’s vehicles, long-term hostilities develop. For example, the player Fenre told me about his ‘deep hate’ for the player Maxo. One time, Maxo, for no reason, blew up the vehicle in which Fenre had stored his possessions, destroying many hours of work. ‘I was really pissed off then’, Fenre said in our interview. ‘What I wanted to do then … I wanted to get the plane and fly it right into the middle of their camp while all the people [Maxo’s group of players] were there’.

Not all players talk about ‘hate’, but most have an aversion to certain opposing players. Borke, for example, also despised Maxo and several of his team members because they always attacked first, even the weaker teams, and always took everyone’s possessions. Worse, they were ‘campers’, cowardly players who lie in wait for others and shoot them in the back:

The example demonstrates how the interpretation of physical violence as a drastic form of injustice can emotionally charge social interactions in multiplayer games, rendering individuals or entire groups declared enemies. My participant observation in DayZ shows that players’ justifications for their own hostile acts are almost always based on tendentious assumptions. Most players participate in practices of robbing, assaulting, and killing other players but are good at finding reasons why their behaviours are right and those of others are wrong.

This process of constructing enmity has an emotional quality of its own: enmity as such is a powerful emotional experience, and it is precisely the intensity of ‘hating’ the enemy that many players seek. Having said that, all players agreed in their interviews that their hatred of opponents did not extend beyond the game. Players, like Wooshy, who ended up in an opponent’s voice chat realised that ‘they’re just normal people’. Lela explained:

The ability to distinguish between opponents in the game and players outside the game keeps the enmity playful. Players focus their hostility on the former, which allows them to enjoy the dramatic intensity of the strong hatred they feel. As Pirou puts it, ‘These are just the frictions between players … which they seek to amplify somewhat … to make the game more fun…. It’s not meant maliciously’.

Making enemies goes hand in hand with the emotional experiences of togetherness and cooperation discussed in Section 4. In many multiplayer games, allied players not only rush to help each other, but also take revenge when their teammates’ avatars are harmed. In TESO, when a player avenges a friend by killing the opponent who defeated him, both player and friend are automatically informed by a message on the screen. Such in-game functions facilitate bragging about and showing gratitude for retribution. In DayZ, revenge is equally important, though it does not feature automatic notifications as in TESO. Clans in DayZ spend much time communicating via voice and text chats about the outrage they feel when an ally experiences injustice, which helps consolidate their emotional community.

When a clan is ‘at war’ with another group, everyone is expected to participate. For example, one of my DayZ clans – in a version of the game allowing players to build permanent settlements and establish a long-time presence – waged war against the RTR clan for several weeks. The enemy clan was clearly superior to us. They had killed our group and stolen our possessions more than once, and we came to see them as the bad guys – acting unfairly, always shooting first, attacking innocent players. To us, they were manifestly evil, while we were fair and just. Of course, there was no real evidence that our opponents were evil; they were simply superior to us. We nevertheless talked ourselves into a rage because we implicitly knew that our anger could multiply our pleasure if we managed to defeat the clan. Once, a teammate joined RTR’s voice channel and told us they had been quite friendly. The rest of us deliberately ignored the remark and spoke instead of our hatred. The rare instances when one of us managed to kill an RTR were accompanied by jubilant celebration.

As a mediocre player, I was denied this pleasure until one day I unexpectedly came upon a large group of heavily armed RTR players who were looting an old castle. Since I was playing with a fresh avatar and had little to lose, I tried to infiltrate the group. (It is possible to do this without being noticed because so many avatars in DayZ look exactly the same.) When the group got in their cars to drive off, I jumped into the driver’s seat of a vehicle, and though an RTR avatar was already on the passenger side, I was able to follow them without raising any suspicions. As I narrated my actions live on my group’s voice channel, my clanmates listened with a mix of disbelief and amusement. None of us had managed to pull off anything like this before. I was eventually able to shoot the passenger with a gun from the trunk. In the ensuing chaos, I destroyed one car and killed two more from the clan. Loud laughter broke out as I told my team what happened. I was proud to have dealt significant damage to such a formidable opponent, and the feat earned me praise and recognition from my teammates, who were still talking about it days after the fight and even more than a year later in a reunion with some of the players.

As my example shows, vengeance through playful virtual violence can strengthen emotional solidarity among gaming group members, providing opportunities for displaying pride and showing recognition, for having experiences and sharing memories. The importance of a common enemy for group cohesion became especially clear once our war with RTR came to an abrupt end. Ten days after my encounter, we ambushed the RTR convoy with hand grenades, took out most of them in the crossfire, and finished off the fleeing players from a captured helicopter. Our voice channel erupted with cheers and exuberant laughter because we knew that we had hit them hard and that they would need much time to recover. ‘Yes, men’, Manu cheerfully observed. ‘We gave them a proper penetration today. They were scared to death. I’ve never seen them shooting haphazardly into the sky like that’. We came back online the next day, eager to continue the fight, but no RTR players were on our server. We waited the whole evening, to no avail. We had hit our enemies so hard that they had decided either to change servers or stop playing altogether. We wandered through the woods listless, suddenly with nothing to do. One by one, we all went offline. It wasn’t fun anymore. We returned again another day, but the other players and smaller groups on the server were no match for us. Worse still, they hadn’t done us any wrong so attacking them wouldn’t have been an act of pleasurable revenge. Eventually, our player group disbanded. It seems that our shared hatred of an enemy was what had held us together all along.

Feeling Rules and Their Transgression

The emotional experiences I have described in this Section so far are consistent with prevailing ‘feeling rules’, the cultural conventions that determine what we should feel or should not feel in a given situation. For the sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild, feeling rules are

Feeling rules are what permit players to experience pleasure without shame when they inflict retaliatory violence on their enemies. But the pleasure that feeling rules regulate can also be activated when players violate the rules through deviant or aberrant practices. The first games in which players could assume the role of the bad guy appeared in the 1980s. Two playtesters of the 1987 adventure Knight Orc describe the experience in Happy Computer Spielesonderheft: ‘Wow, that’s an idea that’s truly unusual: that you can assume the role of a mean, ugly, and foul-smelling orc instead of, as usual, acting as the brave champion, is top class’.Footnote ³⁸ In 1994, some Star Wars fans, having played countless games on ‘the light side of the Force’, were happy that TIE Fighter gave them the chance to switch teams:

The particular appeal of the game, practically identical to earlier Star Wars instalments, is that it allows players to do what they are otherwise forbidden from doing. The transgression arises not simply in performing an act regarded as unjust but also in enjoying its transgressiveness. The pleasure of emotional transgression constitutes its own type of experience.

The principle of transgression figures prominently in the action game Grand Theft Auto. In the first game of the series, released in 1997, players steer their avatars through a large city from a bird’s-eye view as they commit crimes and climb the gangster career ladder. In a review of the game, Steffen Schamberger writes that GTA ‘breaks all the laws’ and makes ‘the players into car thieves, kidnappers, and killers … That it’s murderously good fun’, he adds, ‘may annoy old fogy moralisers’.Footnote ⁴⁰ It is not only the life of crime that fascinates players, but also the opportunity to threaten or kill civilians and police officers. Schamberger cites the press release for the first game without a hint of moralising: ‘Feel your blood pump the first time you hijack a school bus!’ The review provides two screenshots in which the player’s character guns down police officers and then stands idly by as the ambulance approaches. The caption reads: ‘Typical mafia: first cause a bloodbath by killing the police … and then calmly watch as firefighters and paramedics do the clean-up work’.

Over the following years, GTA became one of the most successful game series of all time. Once it introduced third-person and first-person perspectives in later instalments, it became a perfect example of an open-world game, in which players are free to explore the game environment, complete side missions and engage in everyday activities: work out, shop for clothes, visit a strip club, or go to the movies. But the exercise of playful virtual violence – against other gangsters, police offers, or bystanders – is by far the most common activity. In GTA V, the bystanders are the inhabitants of the virtual city of Los Santos, who simply lead their lives as they hang out on street corners, take walks, or go to work. The game by no means requires players to inflict violence on innocent bystanders, but it permits it – and many players are all too eager to overstep the boundaries of conventional feeling rules.

The most common example in GTA V is the hit-and-run. Much of the game is spent in cars (most of them stolen) while completing missions. Players often drive at breakneck speeds because they are under time pressure or are too impatient to obey traffic laws and end up killing many innocent people – pedestrians, bicyclists, motorcyclists, other drivers. For the Let’s Player Gronkh, killing pedestrians on GTA V is a favourite pastime. In one episode, Gronkh feigns innocence whenever he runs over a pedestrian, declaring ‘Oopsie!’ or ‘Sorry!’ after each hit. Sarazar, who sits next to him, provides ironic commentary. Later in the episode, Gronkh runs over a motorcyclist (recommended example)Footnote ⁴¹ and both share a laugh. Sarazar, striking an outraged tone, declares, ‘That’s not politically correct … That’s quite politically incorrect, what you’re doing here, sir’. Gronkh tells him that he’s merely performing a government crash test as he steers his car over another motorcyclist.

The laughter of Gronkh and Sarazar is not the haughty ridicule of players who dominate an opponent. Its purpose as an emotional practice is to communicate their pleasure in committing unjust violence – and to render their behaviour transgressive in the first place. Gronkh’s mock innocence mimics the very feeling rules he violates. The joke lies in acting as if the death was accidental even though it was clearly intentional; in feigning guilt despite obvious enjoyment. Sarazar’s reprimands serve a similar function. He apes the admonitory tone of someone shocked by Gronkh’s actions before both players signal that they are in on the joke with boisterous laughter.

Such disparity – the difference between what people say and what people do – is often a source of humour. Many situations appear funny because they bring together elements that do not fit together. The notion of incongruity, the sociologist Giselinde Kuipers explains,

The ‘transgression of social norms, or the breaking of social patterns’ describes the behaviour of Gronkh and Sarazar. They break expected rules (intentionally running over bystanders) and display aberrant feelings (taking pleasure in killing innocents). Mary Douglas, the anthropologist whom Kuipers cites above, writes: ‘A joke is a play upon form. It brings into relation disparate elements in such a way that one accepted pattern is challenged by the appearance of another which in some way was hidden in the first’ (Reference DouglasDouglas 1999, 150). Video game violence has a particular ability to generate humorous situations because it provides opportunities for just that kind of joking. Physical violence is subject to strict feeling rules that players can transgress and then distort by holding up a fun-house mirror to social norms. This is what Gronkh and Sarazar do when they ironically parrot the very feeling rules that they violate. By foregrounding the incongruity of the emotional experience, they create a joke that they and their audiences are meant to enjoy.

The GTA series is also known for the ability of players to go on rampages whenever they please. The more innocents they kill and cars they blow up, the more police officers or SWAT teams appear on the scene. This usually leads to a string of car chases and shoot-outs that ends with the death of the protagonist. In GTA V, this is of little consequence: the character always reawakens in front of a hospital short of some virtual money but with a clean police record.

To get a better sense of a GTA rampage, consider a Let’s Play episode from Gronkh (recommended example).Footnote ⁴² Gronkh’s avatar, Franklin, peacefully watches a crowd assembled in front of a large theatre modelled after a famous building in Los Angeles. Gronkh whistles innocently. ‘Nice to see so many people out and about’, he says, stifling a laugh as he selects a hand grenade from his weapons inventory. Still whistling, he prepares to lob the grenade into the crowd but accidentally drops it before he can do so. The people panic and scatter. Franklin pulls out a machine gun and shoots a group of people fleeing down the street. Screams can be heard; several fall to the ground dead. ‘I’m not a good role model, kids!’ Gronkh exclaims sarcastically. ‘Don’t do this at home! But the age limit is 18+, so you aren’t watching this anyway’. As Franklin shoots a few people about to round the next block, police sirens can be heard. Franklin gets into his car and drives off. Gronkh lets out a satisfied sigh and says, ‘I just wanted to … it simply had to be done’. When he notices a large contingent of police in pursuit, he expresses disbelief: ‘But I didn’t do anything! I’m innocent. I’m a victim of the media! I play violent video games. It’s not my fault!’ Gronkh somehow manages to escape without a dramatic shoot-out. The wanted level returns to zero, and he continues to play as if nothing happened.

Gronkh’s emotional practices during the rampage are similar to those during his hit-and-runs. He laughs mischievously, feigns innocence, and alludes to the taboos he is in the process of breaking, including the long and heated debate about the link between school mass shootings and violent video games. His transgression is performative: not only does he kill many innocent people; he openly enjoys it while having a laugh or two.

Many of the 230,000 viewers who watched the episode seem to have enjoyed it as much as Gronkh did and offered words of encouragement:

The last comment is especially telling. In GTA V, going on rampage or running over pedestrians is not just possible; it’s what one does. Even when the game’s narrative or the specific missions do not require indiscriminate killing, the game culture of GTA encourages it. Viewers expect transgressive behaviour from GTA Let’s Players because the practice of unjust violence is an integral part of the pleasure of playful virtual violence.

Of course, not all players of GTA or other action games feel the same way. A major challenge in ethnographic studies of transgression is that feeling rules are not static. They can change depending on individual experiences, opinions, and sociocultural contexts. For instance, the rampage described here was conducted by a German player killing innocent civilians with a black avatar at a well-known American landmark. For players with a different sociocultural background, the fact that the rampage was conducted with GTA’s only black protagonist may have specific implications for how they experience the scene and whether they find the transgression humorous. Here lies a clear limit of my work, whose exclusive focus on a small number of German players does not account for differences in the emotional experience of playful virtual violence. What it can do is explore some of the basic principles of emotional experience and the transgression of feeling rules.

Feeling Bad

The passage is from a special report in PC Games describing the notorious ‘no Russian’ level from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (2009), a first-person shooter in which terrorists intent on concealing their Russian nationality wreak havoc at a fictional airport in Moscow. Players of the German version must watch the massacre without participating – if they do, the mission fails – while the original US version allows them to participate in the killing. According to the publisher, Activision, the point of the massacre is to raise the game’s dramatic stakes: ‘The airport scene shows the viciousness and cold-bloodedness of a renegade Russian villain and his unit. The enemy actions show the urgency of the player’s mission to stop him’.Footnote ⁵³ For many of the playtesters, however, the ‘No Russian’ level breaks a crucial taboo. Daniel Matschikewsky, writing for Gamestar in 2009, comments on the scene: ‘I’m shaken by the self-indulgence with which Modern Warfare 2 shows the airport massacre. … Despite how much fun I had with the rest of this enthralling, immersive game, the cheap sensationalism shocked me, and for me it devalues the whole game’.Footnote ⁵⁴

Matchikewsky’s words express with full force the ambivalence that until then journalists writing about action games no longer talked about. They suggest that the brutal episode in Modern Warfare 2 may not be pleasurable for everyone on account of the particular kind of virtual violence it depicts. In the past ten years, a fair number of studies have examined the ethical questions that emerge from playing video games, with some focusing specifically on the ‘No Russian’ level (Reference Mukherjee and InderstMukherjee 2011; Reference SchottSchott 2016, 197–214; Reference Sicart, Sageng, Fossheim and Mandt LarsenSicart 2012). But their inquiries into the ambivalence players feel have only been peripheral. Let’s Play videos provide many examples for fleshing out players’ unpleasurable emotional experiences. Based on my study of Let’s Play videos, I have identified three kinds.

The first is shock at the detail and explicitness of audio-visual representations of physical violence. For example, Gronkh’s avatar in the horror action game Outlast is taken prisoner, and the player is forced to watch from a first-person perspective as a mad scientist cuts off each of the protagonist’s ring fingers.Footnote ⁵⁵ The avatar screams, whimpers, cries, and vomits on the floor. Gronkh, visible in the facecam, stares aghast at the screen, looks up at the camera, and then, after a long pause, lets out a laugh. The laugh is a response to the incongruity of the situation, yet he does not enjoy the experience. ‘Man, what kind of game is this? What have I done to myself here? Man … you can’t be serious. Who programs stuff like this?’

The second kind of unpleasurable experience is the empathy players feel for computer-controlled characters subjected to virtual violence. While playing Battlefield 4, the Let’s Player Brammen searches a sinking freighter in a squad of elite soldiers and discovers several brothers-at-arms trapped in rising water under metal grates (recommended example).Footnote ⁵⁶ The commander, seeing the grates are welded in place, presses the others to continue their mission, on whose success the lives of many others depend. ‘Man, that’s really crazy, if you just simply … ’, Brammen says, before he is interrupted by the voice of one of the trapped soldiers: ‘Please don’t let us die down here!’ As he reluctantly moves his avatar into the next room, one calls out in desperation: ‘No, please! Tell my mom! Tell my mom! I can’t die like this! Not in this hole!’ Brammen is shaken. ‘Man, no joke’, he says, as the last gurgles of the drowning soldiers can be heard in the background. ‘That … is sick. That is really sick’.

The third kind of unpleasurable emotion occurs when players inflict unjust virtual violence on others and either find no enjoyment in the break with social conventions or constantly swing between amusement and horror. The feeling is particularly frequent when playing Trevor, a psychopathic protagonist from GTA V. In one sequence, the Let’s Player Piet begins a side mission with the character, who after a verbal altercation must kill as many ‘rednecks’ as possible within a set time frame.Footnote ⁵⁷ Piet starts with the usual expressions of excitement, but as the corpses begin to pile up all around him, he enters another mode. ‘Oh, we’re sick bastards. Look how many people we’re killing. This is freakier than normal, I have to say. I’m not used to this in GTA, not to this extreme’. Eventually, Pietsmiet completes his ‘mission’ with flying colours. He seems happy until he sees all the bodies: ‘We’ve created a fucking mass grave’. His tone is briefly nonchalant. ‘Yeah, that’s how Trevor does it. That’s how the wind blows here’. Then it becomes serious again. ‘Sick … just sick’. Finally, he laughs. ‘I kinda like it. It’s freaky though’.

Like the other two unpleasurable emotional experiences I identify, the third involves a moment in which the player takes a step back and considers the violence from a certain remove. Words like ‘sick’, ‘shit’, ‘crass’, ‘abnormal’, or ‘freaky’ signal the change in perspective. They indicate that, for the particular player, the game’s representations of physical violence crossed the line. Of course, the exact location of the line differs from person to person. What one player finds shocking another may shrug off with a laugh. What is clear, however, is that feeling rules regarding physical violence continue to apply in video games, albeit in altered form. Breaking the rules can be fun, but it can also lead to horror and disgust. Developers typically try to limit unpleasurable experiences lest the game turn off potential players. For instance, while players of GTA V can indiscriminately kill bystanders, none of those bystanders are children, whose murder is the paradigm of innocent suffering and hence a potent taboo. More recently, however, game developers have pushed the limits of playful virtual violence and in some cases have intentionally sought to elicit feelings of guilt in players.

Guilt and Compassion

An example I would like to discuss at some length is Spec Ops: The Line, a third-person shooter developed in Germany. The player controls Captain Martin Walker, an elite solider who, in the company of two squadmates, makes his way through a sandstorm-ravaged Dubai teeming with renegade US military units and terrorists. Like other shooters, the game commences with pithy banter among the heroes and a few skirmishes with the bad guys before the real action begins. In his LP series of the game, Sarazar handles the first few levels just as he does those in other action games – feeling stress, revelling in domination, enthralled by wow and bam effects. As the game progresses, however, he encounters something darker. It becomes impossible to distinguish between the good guys and the bad guys, making everyone a potential target. The soldiers stumble on the first mass grave. A voice on their radio indicates that people are being tortured. Later the squad comes across an entire enemy battalion and have the choice of using conventional weapons or white phosphorus shells from a mortar.Footnote ⁵⁸ One of the soldiers reminds them that white phosphorus is a banned chemical weapon with devastating effects. Sarazar decides to use it anyway. Walker opens a laptop and activates a drone camera for guiding the shells to their targets. The first shells explode. Sarazar is thrilled. ‘Bam!’ ‘Next, please!’ ‘Wham! They’re definitely next! Bam!’ As the drone’s infrared camera pans across the battlefield, Sarazar spies a large group of people and thinks that they might be civilians held captive by the enemy. But by the time he notices, a shell has already exploded in their vicinity. Screams ring out. ‘Holy shit!’ Sarazar exclaims. ‘Um … oh, that’s how quickly friendly fire can happen, friends’. The three soldiers put away the mortar. ‘We eliminated them to the man’, comments Sarazar, his growing unease audible. Once the smoke has cleared, he beholds the full extent of the destruction. ‘Oh dear, holy shit! … I wasn’t supposed to kill the civilians. I’ve really been a bad, bad boy, contrary to my intentions’.

In the next episode, the squad advances through the devastated area they shelled (recommended example).Footnote ⁵⁹ The ground is littered with mutilated soldiers, some still alive and crying in pain. ‘Shit, man. The whole place is burning, and it’s our fault’, Sarazar remarks, and admits that he could have chosen differently. The dying scream for help. ‘Fuck’, Sarazar mutters despondently. ‘Look at that, everybody’s burning. And somehow it’s all our fault because we had to mess around with the phosphorus mortar’. At one point, he tries to inject some humour into the situation. ‘Looks like this guy was playing with grill charcoal’, he says after coming across another charred body. But he realises that the joke is in poor taste in light of the nightmarish injuries wrought by the white phosphorus. A cutscene follows in which a dying soldier explains that they were only trying to help. Then the squad discovers an enclosed area full of dead civilians, their bodies horribly disfigured. Sarazar is clearly upset. ‘Oh man … I’ve got a really guilty conscience now. Oh man’. One squadmate is sickened at the sight and starts to argue with the other about who’s to blame. Walker is silent but visibly distressed. He approaches the mangled body of a mother holding a young girl, her hand still covering the child’s eyes. Sarazar is stunned by the graphicness of the image. ‘How … sick’. The cutscene eventually ends and as the soldiers push on, Sarazar summarises his impressions:

Enemy fire interrupts him mid-sentence. Amid the fighting, Sarazar manages to finish his thought: ‘ … into the deadly reality of war!’

The white phosphorus scene in Spec Ops: The Line confronts players with something that most action games give a wide berth. What players first experience at a distance, mediated by the abstract images from the drone’s infrared camera, is forced on them later in all its horrific detail. The situation is all the more shocking because the dead include innocent civilians as well as enemy soldiers. It should be noted that, while Sarazar thinks it was his choice to use white phosphorus, the game does not allow players to proceed to the next level without it. To be certain, a player who believes that he or she is responsible for the carnage might feel particularly bad afterward. But the ‘reality of war’ the game depicts here is so horrible that the purpose can be none other than to saddle players with guilt, regardless of whether they feel directly responsible or not. Spec Ops: The Line is the rare action game in which players must reckon with their active participation in virtual violence and emotionally process a side of war that is everything but gratifying and fun. Not surprisingly, the game failed to achieve financial success, and the developer has since returned to designing conventional action games.Footnote ⁶⁰ But not all players shy away from the negative emotional experiences offered by the game; some believe that they make for a richer gaming experience. One viewer puts it in a nutshell: ‘What I think was awesome about Spec Ops is that the game manages to give you guilty conscience’.Footnote ⁶¹

Of course, the innocents who die in Spec Ops: The Line are computer-controlled digital representations. Real people do not suffer. In multiplayer games, real people are behind the avatars, but in conventional games such as Counter-Strike or Battlefield 3 and 4, death is not transgressive. Everyone you can kill wants to kill you. No one is innocent and there is no risk of collateral damage. An important exception is the zombie survival game DayZ, where players can decide if they want to work together against computer-controlled zombies or kill one another’s avatars. As noted earlier, the avatars in DayZ have only one life, so every death is a dramatic event. I can attest to this from my own experience. I know how frustrating it can be to be killed. I also know the guilt of killing other avatars out of selfishness or for no good reason at all. Because death matters in the game and because some players had good intentions, I came to feel compassion for the misfortunes of others.

A number of players I interviewed shared my feelings. As the player Onkie told me, ‘DayZ was the first time … that I felt sorry for shooting someone’. He related an encounter in the game’s fictional world. Having been killed by other players more than once, Onkie decided not to take any chances when he came across another avatar on an otherwise empty beach and fired his shotgun straightaway. As the avatar slowly bled out, it became clear that he was unarmed. Via text chat, Onkie apologised to the player, who was disappointed and frustrated. They decided that Onkie should give the avatar a quick death. The injured character slowly rose to his feet and saluted. Onkie described to me his reaction:

The guilty conscience that Onkie and others I interviewed feel arises because they killed someone who was unarmed and did not intend to hurt them. In Onkie’s case, he was also confronted with the emotional consequences of his actions while messaging with the other player. Of course, not all players would have responded the way Onkie did; some might have found it funny. But stories like his show us that feeling rules are no less strong in multiplayer games and follow the common sense intuition we have about actual physical violence: do not shoot unarmed people who mean you no harm. The possibility of experiencing the emotional consequences of one’s actions is crucial here. Onkie’s opponent is not only annoyed; he is sad. While opponents’ frustration can strengthen pleasurable feelings of superiority, their sadness can evoke compassion, opening the door to discomfort as players confront unforeseen consequences of their virtual actions. Experiences with playful virtual violence are often balancing acts at the edges of feeling rules – and can quickly tip one way or another.