While looking into the Museum of the Moving Image's exhibition of arcade video games, we noticed a lack of a broader look into the history of video games. While it showed many "classic" games, games that have achieved a level of popularity that has been sustained years beyond their technological age, specific connections between the years and their corresponding video games was not present. When we moved onto the archive of video game emulations created by the Internet Archive, we noticed a great majority of these games were of a violent nature. So, for our counter-archive, we decided to expand upon the history of violent video games so that we may be able to ascertain an answer to why so many of the video games produced are violent.

Through our research and creation of an archive, we saw how, despite technical limitations at the beginnings of video games, violence was still included and only increased in scale as technology allowed more complex games. For the earlier eras (1970-1990), the simplicity in graphics and coding lead to a restriction of story. We feel producers saw that the simplest way toward creating a compelling story was through conflict. Not only does it provide a goal that can be depicted visually, it allows the producer to exclude the more complex characteristics of story-building and boil it down to A kills B. As graphics and visual representation improved, producers found that the simplicity of conflict could also be translated into a compelling game experience as conflict was made grander and more fantastic.

To demonstrate this, we chose 5 of the top 10 best selling games that included violence in some form. This is true for 1980s to the 2000s, but the 1970s provided a challenge due to the prominence of arcade systems and the difficulty in recording sales. This was due to the fact that sales were limited to arcades rather than individuals and it is near impossible to determine how many quarters were used to play a certain game. Instead of choosing from the top 10 best selling games, we decided to choose the games that we felt were the best representation of the 1970s, based on popularity, controversy, and legacy.

Though we did not rank the games that we chose in terms of which is more violent, we still had to determine the definition of violence. Because violence is not a quantitative, but a qualitative idea, we determined four categories in which violence in games could be determined: freedom of action (what the game allows you to do), amount of gore, scale of violence, and the basis of the story (story on war or story of a monkey). While not all games fit within all four categories, they all fit within one or more, allowing us to measure violence to a certain extent.

Not only does this archive show a very diverse group of violent games in regard to genre, story, and platform (i.e XBOX, Playstation), we can claim that violence in video games is not to appease a growing nature of violence within gamers, but rather a functionally inherent concept within video games. Violence in video games is not purely for the sake of violence, but a tool used to enhance the story so that it may appease the growing appetite for more memorable and captivating fun.