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Violence causes video games.

I deleted a long-winded post about my hand-wringing about the relationship between the video game industry and United States gun culture. If you’ve known me for a long time you’ve seen me write that post on various different social media platforms over and over, my feelings have not changed, and I don’t think I know anybody who fundamentally disagrees.

Instead I’ll admit I spent an afternoon reading about the history of what eventually became the 7.62x51mm NATO and 5.56x45mm NATO ammunition standards (if you have never served in the military and are already familiar with those sequences of numbers, you are likely a brain poisoned gamer like me). I have to say, as ideologically disagreeable as it is to me, I appreciate all the work my fellow civilian game developers have poured into making military weapons feel stylish and empowering, because the design and manufacture of the very same real life arms they celebrate is just as boring, frustrating, anticlimactic, and brutally pragmatic as the bureaucracy of war itself.

Here’s a summary of what I learned, in terms an eager sixteen year old gamer at a recruiting office would understand.

  • World War II: Big bullets. High recoil. Arms manufacturers lie to the Pentagon about how good they are. Too heavy to carry lots of them. Single shots tear people to shreds. Automatic fire misses. Soldiers load individual bullets, aim carefully, and die a lot.

  • Cold War: Big bullets too clumsy from close up in jungles and cities where all the war is happening. Soldiers with rifles killed in ambushes by randos with pistols and SMGs. Smaller bullets. High recoil. Lower stopping power. Arms manufacturers lie to the Pentagon about how good they are. Single bullets kill if aimed right. Automatic fire misses a little less. Magazines are too heavy and have too few shots. Soldiers duct tape them together, still run out of ammo, and die a lot.

  • Present: Little bullets, for war in jungles and cities. Low recoil. Low stopping power. Arms manufacturers lie to the Pentagon about how good they are. Soldiers have to aim perfectly to kill anybody, so they usually just spray a lot instead to get the enemy to fuck off. Automatic fire is accurate. Magazines carry more bullets, reducing the benefit of lower weight. Soldiers are bad at killing each other but they are taught to shoot a lot to protect themselves so they slaughter a fuckton of civilians.


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In this video a man demonstrates how to reload and fire his vintage US Revolutionary War era musket. I've read from a number of (possibly apocryphal?) sources that to qualify for deployment in most European armies at the time--and for the more than three centuries that such muskets were regularly in military use--a musketeer or rifleman had to be able to fire three shots in under a minute, which he demonstrates. Some exceptionally well-trained musketeers of the period boasted they could do four or five, but this was quite rare. That is a hilariously slow fire rate by modern standards, to the point where when the game Holdfast: Nations at War accurately represented this delay in their reload animations, reviewers read it as a satire of modern FPS gunfeel design. (That's why these guns fixed bayonets, allowing them to be converted to spears at close range. "TIP: Running at the enemy screaming with your pike is faster than reloading!")

But what were the tradeoffs of this incredibly slow fire rate? Well, the entire gun could be built around firing one shot at a time, and a soldier didn't have to carry a lot of them. And originally the whole point of this weapon was to counter armored cavalry, so everything about it was optimized to punch through plate armor.

So consequently, muskets packed a fucking wallop.


The musket this fellow uses in the video fires .69 caliber balls (nice), but ammunition for muskets went up to .75 cal. That is a huge bullet--compare the modern .50 cal round used in heavy machine guns and sniper rifles designed to destroy automobile engines. Now, the numbers I've found are iffy and mostly napkin math from non-experts, and there is huge variability in the lethality of firearm rounds in real life warfare, so don't quote me on this. But the general consensus seems to be that while the 5.56 round is lethal to an unarmored victim at four times the range, the musket ball delivers almost twice the force at a hundred yards. In the US Civil War--the final years of the musket in American military history, before it was fully replaced by the rifle--this would explain why stray musket shots fired from 400 yards or more away wouldn't even pierce clothing, but people shot at close to point blank range...well, Ambrose Bierce had a lot to say about how all those watercolor paintings don't do justice to how messy it actually was. Even modern medicine couldn't put back together someone disassembled by a musket close up.

If you follow this historical trajectory all the way through the 7.62mm and 5.56mm rounds, it seems like "smaller bullets, but more of them close up, and deadly from farther away" has been a thing in US infantry weapons since even before the US's founding. And that is so very, extremely not video games.

My advice: If you want big oomph power fantasy in a video game where the boss is a big dragon or a ten foot zombie colossus or a giant enemy crab or whatever, don't make the player character a tacticool modern operator with a SIG SG 552 tricked out with a laser sight and an extended mag and an ACOG scope. That feels shitty and doesn't make any sense, we've all done it a million times, it will play like washing the boss with a garden hose. Set the game in the late eighteenth century, give the player a big-ass flintlock musket that takes an entire mini-subquest to reload and fire once (in mortal peril and pants-wetting terror), and make it put a hole right through the boss at close range in one shot.

Designers, you're not above the power fantasy of players stepping into the shoes of a mythologized version of their ancestors facing beasts of godlike power with nothing more than a sword. Why not, instead of pandering to players' fantasies of their modern selves with modern firearms, lean into the ancestors in between, who played such a huge part in what made them feel that way about guns in the first place?


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in reply to @verticalblank's post:

Good post!! Enjoyed reading it.

fun minor little sidestory to this: i recently learned that most of the large cannons of the (middle-to-late) eurasian medieval era were designed such that an expert team of cannoneers could fire perhaps five or six shots a day. The focus in the early siege weaponry days was Big Rock, Big Boom. Which to a degree made sense when the main goal was to break through meter-wide medieval fortress walls -- the best example weapon here being the comically large Basilic, supposedly used to break the Constantinople walls in 1453 (and also reportedly took full on hours to cool off after every shot).

It wasn't until the age of naval warfare that the breakthroughs came in the way of realizing that Big Rock is not quite as useful as Smaller Rock, Shot Very Rapidly. That's when you get the multi-gun ships of the British and the French, which take advantage of smaller cannonballs, shot much more often.

So it's just kind of interesting to me that you can see similar "advancements" in personal weaponry -- as it turns out, it's generally more useful in warfare to just put more bullets out there, and less so to worry about precision or "stopping power".

Firstly thanks for posting an InRangeTV video. Karl Kasarda is the exact opposite of the average guntuber in that he's explicitly leftist, vocally against the right-wing current, AND still informative.

Adding to the napkin math with my own: To the best of my knowledge, a .69-caliber musket projectile (spherical, made entirely of lead) fired from a U.S. flintlock and propelled by about 110 grains of blackpowder should send some 400 grains of lead out of the muzzle at 1,500 ft/s. The muzzle energy is in the ballpark of 2,000 ft-lb-force, almost double what a typical 5.56 will do out of a modern carbine. What happens afterwards is severe drop and loss of velocity, because a spherical projectile flies worse than a modern spitzer (pointy with a boat tail) does.

W.r.t the entire writeup: Interesting read and good observations, particularly about the fantasy of more powerful guns shot-for-shot in video games, though that's not limited to things like the Desert Eagle, I think it also plays into the enduring fascination for the sniper as a concept and sniper rifles in general. I could be cheeky and mention the AWP as the ur-example of that.

As far as the relationship between guns, gun culture, and video games featuring real firearms, I think I can feel safe solidly blaming all the decisions that I'll collectively refer to as "everything that created the post-9/11 world:" the emphasis on counter-terrorism, the militarization of police and the sordid effects of Killology training, and the knock-on effects all of those things had on U.S. gun culture. Excepting certain games of purely European (mostly Eastern-European/Russian; though some of those have their own problems) origin, the vast majority of games with that "wow, real guns!" appeal have been made either as U.S. military propaganda pieces, are blatant copaganda, or are heavily influenced by either

With that said, specifically about that sentence:

Maybe it’s time to lean into plasma rifles and railguns again.

...I think we already do? Just not in the same kinds of games? There will always be a demand for games featuring realistic equipment and games featuring more fantastic gear. The problem was always how much the current hegemony favors not the realism of the equipment, but whose equipment and why. They are propaganda pieces first, gun porn second, if that makes sense.

✨ I think a lot about the fact that Project Wingman, an Ace Combat-like game that seems fanatically-devoted to deconstructing the conventional aesthetics of military games by being as invested as possible in military aesthetics while having a plot that is more akin to a bleak 1980s manga like Area 88 wherein every single person involved is a big shithead making bad choices with military hardware, made the single most satisfying weapon to utilize, and the apex demonstration of skill and player power by its presence as a key loadout slot on both of its top-end fictional superplanes... a gigantic spinal railgun with a lengthy charge time and sluggish firing delay that will kill basically anything it hits in a single shot, and then asks you to use it at Mach 2 to snipe down airships which have the narrative and physical texture of dragons.

It understands.