Peace and Pixels

Anita Sarkeesian of Feminist Frequency deserves much admiration for the impressive way she recently weathered a storm of trolling, but there are many other things to like about her too. We like this list of her top ten iPhone games that feature non-violent fun.

What non-violent games would you recommend?

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The Board Administration Team
(hapax, Kit Whitfield and mmy)



Comments

[Froborr]

Gonna show my old-school cred off a bit: Tapper.

[chris the cynic]

Was a big Tetris fan.

[bitwise]

These aren't iPhone games specifically, but some great non-violent games that come to mind are:
1. The Myst series. While I haven't played Revelation or End of Ages yet, I can say that the rest are among my favorite games of all-time. Very high emphasis on puzzle-solving and exploration.
2. Sim City. I have a preference for Sim City 2000, which can be played through DosBox on a newer machine. (Does burning down the whole city count as violence? *grin* )
3. Manufactoria. It's online and free. It's an engineering / computer science game that simulates building turing-style machines. Personally, I find it extremely entertaining and absorbing.

[BrokenBell]

Games! I can talk about games. Favourite games that lack violence in any pretty much any capacity... Portal 1 and 2 spring to mind, although it feels like a rather obvious answer. Clever, exceptionally polished, and they have a few really interesting puzzles where the biggest obstacle isn't so much what the game is asking you to do, but how to get your brain to adjust to the abilities you're given. Spacechem is wonderful just for being a puzzle game about chemical engineering, and is super challenging to boot. I've never seen anything quite like Uplink, which just makes me think I haven't been looking hard enough, because how could it even be possible for something so interesting and original and cool not spawn dozens of clones and copycats? There've been a lot of games that have tried to implement some form of computer hacking, and they usually end up being tedious diversions, but Uplink did it perfectly.

The majority of point-and-click adventure games end up being non-violent, so rather than list a bunch of those that I love, I'll put forward The Longest Journey as being the one I liked most. An interesting story, a sumptuous fantasy world that isn't just Middle Earth all over again, and a fantastically snarky female protagonist. What's not to like?

It would be completely fair to deem Dear Esther inadmissible, since it's sorta hazy on the "game" part of the equation. It might be more accurate to call it a digital poem, or something. Still, it's a fascinating experience, not to mention absolutely gorgeous. Similarly, The Stanley Parable is a work of genius, an incredible dissertation on the nature of choice in games, and the effect that interactivity has on the worlds we inhabit. Not to mention really very funny. However, though it may be about games, it would be quite reasonable to say that it's not actually a game itself.

Honorable mentions... I do love Recettear. The meat of that game is the economy, and while there's a lot of dungeon crawling on offer, you have so little time to spare that any day trips happen almost at the expense of achieving your actual goals. Similarly, my favourite thing about Minecraft is architecture and sculpture, and I've definitely spent a lot of time in creative mode and peaceful mode, but I feel like the monsters are a little too prominent to definitively call it a non-violent game.

Finally, and this definitely doesn't count because it's super violent and revolves around fighting but shh hear me out OK: Just Cause 2. Panau is just too gorgeous. I've spent a lot of time just wandering around, climbing mountains, and watching golden sunrises while standing on top of planes, sailing over clouds. It continues to be my favourite thing when I need to relax. Just put on some music, pick a destination, and drive. And then the game spoils it all by trying to pick a fight with you, but still.

[chris the cynic]

Portal 1

Non violent?

Even though you broke my heart and killed me
And tore me to pieces.
And threw every piece into a fire.

You have a funny way of judging something non violent.

[Mike Timonin]

Since we're about to buy our first iPod touch, I am paying very close attention to this. Non-violent games, especially with some educational value, are exactly what we want to give to the 9 year old in the back seat... (and thanks for the Sarkessian link - I've been meaning to subscribe to her Youtube feed, and now I have!)

[BrokenBell]

Interesting point. I actually kind of forgot about those sequences, since they felt so out-of-place in what were otherwise puzzle games. Although, now you've got me thinking about it, there are also quite a lot of turrets in both of them. I'd mentally filed them away as obstacles, but they're still basically trying to shoot you. You're right, they don't fit the discussion.

[Moon_custafer]

Very old game, but I loved Rocky's Boots (boolean logic puzzle game) as a child, and it's now available in an online simulacrum. I guess it's violent against abstract shapes, though.

[Ross]

Well, that raises a good point. What do we mean when we say "nonviolent"? There's very few adventure games where the player controls a gun and shoots other characters with it, but there are plenty where you cause other characters to meet unpleasant, often cartoonishly violent ends. But my sense of it is that when most people talk about violence in video games, they're refering specifically to action games involving shooting gun-like weapons. So Mario bouncing off the head of a Goomba doesn't count as violence, the same way that Hansel and Grettle pushing a witch into an oven to be cooked alive doesn't count as family-unfriendly violent fantasy.

[chris the cynic]

On the subject of Portal being puzzle game at heart, I wish that Mirror's Edge had focused more on the non-violent elements because those felt, to me, like the heart of the game.

If the reason that I had to get from point A to point B so fast was that I was delivering a vitally needed thing (organ, or papers so someone isn't arrested, or whatever) and the reason that I needed to avoid the police was that they were going to arrest me rather than shoot me to death, I don't think the game would have suffered for it.

[Froborr]

@Ross: I disagree; when I here people decry violence in video games they're generally talking about first-person shooters and the like, not Mario, but when I here people talk about non-violent games, they usually mean things where you don't hurt living things.

[anamardoll]

Kairosoft! I love those games. Have been playing Mega Mall Story in bed all week.

[Mike Timonin]

How is Mirror's Edge on the iPod? It doesn't look like it would actually be all that good - just a basic side scroller, rather than an innovative game involving parkour.

[cjmr, on her son's netbook]

@Mike Timonium--"Stack the States" and "Stack the World" are fun geography learning/balance games. I got hooked playing at my friends' house, but they are for Apple products only...

[cyllan]

Oooh!

May I take a moment to rave about Auditorium? (http://www.playauditorium.com/game) It's lovely and puzzle-y and awesome and has the most amazing score. Cipher Prime's other games are good too, but Auditorium is utterly amazing. Go forth and have lovely things.

Osmos for the Android phone is also pretty fun and challenging.

[Firedrake]

Somewhat oddly, given how much I enjoyed Unreal Tournament, pretty much all the games I play now are essentially non-violent. (They're also all on full-size computers, since I don't do the smartphone thing.)

MS Flight Simulator [Windows only], FlightGear [Windows, Linux, Mac; freeware from http://www.flightgear.org/] and X-Plane [Windows, Linux, Mac] - I believe there are add-ons to let you fly a fighter and shoot down other aircraft, but basically these are about simulating civil air traffic.

Orbiter [Windows only, freeware from http://orbit.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/] - much the same idea, but it's a space flight simulator. With (free) add-ons, you can fly pretty much everything that's left Earth's atmosphere and many things that haven't.

atc [a terminal-mode game in the bsdgames Debian package, not sure if it survives anywhere else] - very crude but enjoyable air traffic control simulation. Or for a slightly more sophisticated version, http://atc-sim.com/ (playable free but many features want a registration).

The Sims 2 [Windows only] - there's a bit of violence in it, but it's pretty cartoonish (a dust cloud with occasional limbs poking out, when two people are having a fight) and clearly trying to be inoffensive.

simutrans [Windows and Linux; freeware from http://simutrans.com/] - a bit like Transport Tycoon, build a transport network and move people and goods as efficiently as possible.

I did quite enjoy Portal (1, didn't get into 2 at all) but I'm inclined to agree with Chris that while you don't get a gun it still isn't a non-violent game.

[Anonymus]

I rather like Tatham's puzzles. They're fun little logic puzzles. http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/

[Madhabmatics]

It's the age of rad non-violent games. The BIT TRIP series is too much fun - BIT TRIP BEAT is like a single player pong where the longer you go without missing a ball, the more elements the beat has. If you miss too many, the screen goes monochrome and there is no music.

The various hacking games that are out now are basically puzzle games with command lines - Hacker Evolution and Uplink.

World of Goo is classic.

[Mike Timonin]

Ok - world of Goo - the eldest was poking at that at the library. Is it really worth $20?

See, this is my problem. It may well be the age of rad games, or the renaissance of indie games, or whatever, but it's not the age of cheap games.

[Froborr]

Actually, it *is* the age of cheap games. Super Nintendo games were in the high $40s, Playstation and Playstation 2 $50-60. Nowadays you can easily find good games for $5-$30. (Part of this, I'm sure, is that portable and PC games were always cheaper, and those two categories (especially portable) are starting to dominate over consoles.)

[Andrea]

You can easily and legally get World of Goo much cheaper than that, Mike, and I would not consider it worth anywhere near $20.

From one of the Steam indie bundles a while back, Night Sky was amazing (platformer with no enemies; there are a couple stages with gun-like objects but they're for knocking down barriers and getting enough pellets into a container to make it drop from gravity). I recently played Continuity, an amazing spatial relations puzzle game, and apparently there's a sequel on iTunes for 99c. That's got a squelching noise if you fall off the edge of the screen but that isn't really violence.

[Attention TBAT]

I'm guessing the above comment could use a TW for link content if not for the link itself, unless it's just a trolly comment?

[Izzy]

Likewise, cannot speak to iPhones specifically: my phone is not smart. But here are some general nonviolent games:

Dance Dance Revolution and its sequels: non-violent *and* you get exercise. Plus, the music is awesome for waking up on a workday. Also, in the same tradition, Rock Band et al.

Fruit Ninja? You're slicing things with knives, but those things are fruit. It's also really fun, and again with the exercise.

I'm not sure if I can think of any entirely non-violent Infocom games, but the majority of them don't focus on violence, and it's often a bad solution.

[A Slacktivite Pseudononymized]

One of my favorite genres of console games is broadly non-violent: Marble labyrinth sims. (Though on the Wii, they all tend to use the "hold the wiimote perfectly level* for hours or lose" control scheme, thus negating the thing that made playing them on a console better than playing a physical marble labyrinth). There's one particularly neat series called "Mercury Meltdown", whose neat gimmick is that instead of a marble, you play a bead of mercury, with physical properties that can be changed by the environment

(*Or "hold it perfectly level but the wiimote loses track of its orientation, thinks you've turned it upside-down and you fail anyway")

[The Board Administration Team]

@Attention TBAT:

Comment removed for containing a link to deliberately distressing material. The commenter has been blocked.

[The Board Administration Team]

@ Slacktivite Pseudonymized: You're free to keep using that handle if you wish, but are you doing it deliberately or did you forget to change it? You may want to double check.

[Froborr]

Oh man, I had Marble Madness on my Commodore 64, it was teh awesome and I hadn't thought about it for years... *goes to happy place*

[A Slacktivite Pseudononymized]

@TBAT: Thanks for the reminder. Will decloak in the future.

[storiteller]

Dance Dance Revolution and its sequels: non-violent *and* you get exercise. Plus, the music is awesome for waking up on a workday. Also, in the same tradition, Rock Band et al.

I love DDR and Rock Band! Rock Band is the one way I can carry out my rock god fantasy without doing karaoke, which has always been disastrously bad.

In terms of classic games, I loved SimCity and Dinopark Tycoon as a kid. Dinopark Tycoon was just like Rollercoaster Tycoon but you got to run Jurassic Park, including buying dinosaurs at auction, which made it so much cooler. Occasionally the dinosaurs would escape, although I don't remember them eating anyone. Not exactly non-violent, as there was cartoon horror-movie violence and a nuclear weapon under a swimming pool, but I really enjoyed Maniac Mansion as a kid as well. I never owned it, but my aunt and uncle did, and I'd play it for hours when visiting them. A terribly clever puzzle game playing off of horror movie stereotypes that's unfortunately not available (except through crummy emulators) because of the LucasArts licensing issues.

[picklefactory]

Some favorite non-violent games:

-- PixelJunk Eden. A game where you jump, spin, and grow a digital garden while fascinating ambient music plays. Occasionally things bump into you, but that's about as violent as it gets.
-- 1000 Amps. You're a robot in a sort of 2-dimensional abstract maze, figuring out how to power it up.
-- VVVVVV. A deliberately throwback platform game where you can choose whether gravity makes you go "up" or "down". You can fall onto spikes and things, but the result is that your little ASCII-art guy flashes some, and then you immediately jump back a few seconds. It has a reputation for being incredibly difficult and twitchy and somehow not frustrating.
-- Another vote for NightSky and marble games in general.
-- Stacking is really great -- a puzzle game featuring Matryoshka dolls stacking into each other. There's some zany cartoony stuff, and I recall being able to bop dolls with a boxing glove, but it falls under the Comical Hi-Jinks setting more than violence.
-- LittleBigPlanet. Another jumping around sort of game, where the "world" is constructed out of craft materials. Perfectly possible to build your own levels, as well. There are sometimes "explosions" and of course various obstacles, but the worst that happens to your little zippered Sack Boy/Girl is being turned into a purple puff of smoke for a minute.

If you want to play LucasArts adventure games, allow me to recommend ScummVM, which is an emulator, but hardly a crummy one.

[Anonymus]

A lot of games that I like are games that I don't consider violent but I'm not sure whether or not others would. For example, there's Unreal World which is set in Iron Age Finland. It's a survival game, so you try to get enough food and build a house and clothe yourself to keep warm in winter. You can get food by fishing or growing and harvesting crops, or by active or passive hunting. You don't have to hunt: you can survive comfortably by fishing or as a vegetarian. You can plant grains and vegetables, harvest them, thresh them, grind the grains into flour and make stews and bread and all of that. But if you do hunt, you will need to hunt game and you will want to tan the hides to make clothing. You can also attack human non player characters and some non player characters will attack you, but if you want to play non violently you can run away from them and you can make a raft and build your house on a small island where nobody will bother you. The violence is completely optional and it is also not graphic. The level of detail is stunning. It's the sort of game where in winter, you have to break a hole in the ice before you can drink water.

Another game I really like is Bloons Tower Defense. This game is violent in the sense that there are cannons and snipers and all of that, but it is non violent in the sense that there are no living targets. The point of the game is to pop balloons that travel down a path, and you place monkeys along side the path who pop the balloons in different ways. There monkeys that pop the balloons with darts. There are monkeys that pop the balloons with corrosive glue. You can have a cannon aimed at the balloons or a gatling gun. Because of the presence of guns and cannons, some people may decide it's too violent for them. But because you can't aim them at living targets, other people may not mind this sort of violence.

I also like puzzle games, as I said before. The ones I linked to above run on windows, linux, mac, and android. There was this game Chip's Adventure that I used to play on Windows 95. A modern clone with levels written by fans is available by the name Tworld (Tile World). It's a puzzle game: you run around collecting computer chips and then run to the exit and you have to do it without stepping on the same square as a monster (nothing graphic happens if you do, it just plays a sound and you have to start the level over), or without getting stuck in any traps. You can't step on fire without having fire proof boots. You can't swim without flippers. Etc. It's pretty fun. The monsters aren't scary looking. One of them is just a pink ball that bounces back and forth.

Another puzzle game I like is called Einstein. You have to arrange six different types of symbols according to clues. My best time is 2 minutes. Runs on windows, mac, and linux.

I also like Performous, which is a karaoke game. Unfortunately, it keeps telling me a sing like a novice. Hmm, must be a bug! ;)

[chris the cynic]

How is Mirror's Edge on the iPod? It doesn't look like it would actually be all that good - just a basic side scroller, rather than an innovative game involving parkour.

I have no idea. I've just played it on PC.

[cjmr]

@TBAT

Just the NAME of the game on Good Snape's link above suggests that it is going to trigger-y content. I am not going to go confirm.

[The Board Administration Team]

Thanks cjmr: Removed and blocked

[Mike Timonin]

Oooo, Chip's Challenge! I'll have to look that up. Thanks, Anonymus.

[Winter]

Carmen Sandiego. It's been so long since I played any version of that, but I'm pretty sure your cases never end in a wild shootout or anything violent. I really wish it'd see a revival. On the other hand, the Oregon Trail game on 3DS is supposed to be really bad.

It took me forever to work out that "peroxide" hair meant blonde. I think I thought it meant white for a long time.

Hmm... do the old Super Solver games count as non-violent? Midnight Madness and the one at the TV station (Outnumbered, I think) had some cartoony things like pies to your face and zapping an electric snake with a remote control. But the one I want to see again most is probably "Gizmos and Gadgets" since it's the science-based one. I remember robotic gorillas and sedative bananas or something like that.

[Nick Kiddle]

//It took me forever to work out that "peroxide" hair meant blonde. I think I thought it meant white for a long time.//

Peroxide is bleach, so peroxide hair ought to mean any shade of bottle blond. Including what I just got when I lightened my hair - a wide range of shades ranging from ginger to white, based on my inability to spread the creme evenly.

I think of myself as not playing computer games, but I am obsessive about certain card games, especially Spider solitaire. Also the various Mahjong games that my brother's Linux came with. Do they count?

[storiteller]

Hmm... do the old Super Solver games count as non-violent? Midnight Madness and the one at the TV station (Outnumbered, I think) had some cartoony things like pies to your face and zapping an electric snake with a remote control.

Oh my goodness, yes! I remember those from playing them at the library before I had a computer and didn't know the name of them for years. Thank you! I don't think I ever played Gizmos and Gadgets though, but it sounds cool.

I loved Carmen Sandiego, both the TV show and computer game. I wanted so desperately to be on the show. However, with the game, if you lost the almanac that came with it you were completely and utterly stuck. I'm sure it would be a lot easier now with the Internet. You could find most of those clues with a quick Google search.

[kisekileia]

OMG, I LOVED the Super Solver games! I don't think I've ever talked with anyone else who'd played them before. I made Champion in Midnight Madness two or three times over. I played those games a TON. I didn't have Gizmos and Gadgets, but I had the others. I loved the Carmen Sandiego game too.

[Ross]

Some of the Carmen Sandiego did have a little violent imagery: they'd show an outstretched hand throwing a knife, firing a gun, or tossing a stick of dynamite at random points in the late-middle game along with the message "A V.I.L.E. Henchman! You must be on the right track!"

[SweetCraspy]

Lunar Flight is a really cool 3D update of the old Lunar Lander games. It's on Steam and Desura. You are the pilot of a lunar lander, and you have to fly around moon bases delivering cargo, finding beacons, and having a fun in your 6-degree-of-freedom, low-gravity, frictionless environment. It's a very approachable simulator, but is missing some features that would give it more staying power and player control over the environment.

Dear Esther is also fantastic. There are two general areas, and the outside one, a Hebridean island, is amazing in its feeling of being a real, desolate, place. The inside area is really beautiful, and a strong counterpoint to the external desolation. The game should probably have some trigger warnings attached, especially for narration about loss of loved ones and depression.

[Izzy]

"The Asylum" is also very good--psychoanalysis of adorable stuffed animals.

[cjmr]

First World Problems--our Wii just died and the kids are livid that they have to wait until after Daddy is home from work and can try to fix it so they can play the new video game they just got yesterday.

This is going to be a looooooong afternoon!

[Froborr]

Fourth World Problems: Darkseid is totally bogarting the Wii; he's convinced Nintendo possesses the secret of the Anti-Life Equation. ;P

[storiteller]

Fourth World Problems: Darkseid is totally bogarting the Wii; he's convinced Nintendo possesses the secret of the Anti-Life Equation. ;P

[groans] I can't believe I know enough about superheros to get that really nerdy joke. It's totally my husband's fault.

[Froborr]

I've been half-heartedly trying to turn Fourth World Problems into a meme. This was my second use of the phrase.