Been on a bit of a purging/cleaning binge lately. What I want, more than anything right now, is less.

Fewer tchotchkes, fewer clothes, fewer kinds of spices in my kitchen, fewer board games in my dining room.

Less clutter.

There are of course, other solutions to the problem of clutter, solutions that don’t involve garbage bags and and boxes of stuff to give to charity. You can organize things better. Buy more bookshelves. Be more careful about what you do buy.

But the purging, the solving of a problem by simply getting rid of stuff — is oddly satisfying. And it’s always the first solution I think of when my house is getting too cluttered for my tastes.

Which brings me to the subject of violence in video games.

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There’s been a lot of talk lately on the subject of violence in video games, and with this One Game a Month thing starting up, I wanted to talk about that a little.

I think about the issue, such as it is, in term of film. A great film can transform you. A mediocre film can still transform you, if you happen to watch it in a particularly vulnerable emotional state.

I feel that fiction would be kind of pointless if it didn’t change us.

And hopefully, the fiction out there will change us for the better, but I’d also say that there’s a lot out there that can make us worse. You can say that fiction can be transformative without going into anybody’s subjective definition of what sorts of transformations are desirable.

Similarly, I believe games can be transformative. I wouldn’t be trying to make games if I didn’t believe that playing my games might somehow make the player grow as a person.

Can playing a game make you a worse person? Probably. But I think the mechanics of that transformation are more subtle than the ‘playing shooting games makes you want to go out and shoot things’ kind of logic floating around there.

If I have any problem with violent games, it is that I don’t find violence a terribly interesting solution to problems. Don’t get me wrong, I like your typical outer space scrolling shooter game. It’s mindless and fun. But everything’s external to you. If only these hordes of space invaders were gone, life would be better. Everything is all their fault.

Externalizing everything and casting yourself as the righteous hero is kind of a terrible way to deal with problems.

Eliminating something in your way is just one way to deal with it. You can sneak around threats. You could make changes to your character that make obstacles easy to deal with. You could be tasked with turning obstacles into assets.

And lots of games focus on these kinds of solutions to problems. For my part, while I’m not nixing violence, I’d like my One Game a Month entries to have fewer threat-elimination scenarios, and more interesting ways of dealing with the threats the player is presented with. Because I think that will lead to better experiences, that encourage the player to think about problems in interesting ways.