The Simpsons has a long, weird love affair with video games

And so

The best early Simpsons game would arrive a few months after Bart vs Space Mutants. Konami’s 1992 arcade hit, The Simpsons, is an excellent four-player brawler in which the family is pitted against Mr Burns – who has, in a daft plot that is just an excuse to visit a lot of Springfield locations and attack enemies with skateboards and vacuum cleaners – kidnapped Maggie. My favourite example from the 1990s, though, was the 1996 PC release The Simpsons Cartoon Studio, which gave players a range of locations, characters and soundbites from the show in order to create their own mini Simpsons cartoons – a little foretaste of the TikTok memes Fortnite Simpsons fans are bound to make and share.

Meanwhile, the show itself has kept finding new ways to gently satirise video games. Springfield’s regularly featured arcade Noiseland is crammed with amusing coin-operated games from Jane Fonda’s Legwarmers of Death to the wonderful My Dinner With André from season five’s Boy-Scoutz ’n the Hood (press up on the joystick to offer “Trenchant Insight”). But games are also used as a useful pop cultural tool for poking fun at the characters themselves. The favourite game of the godly Flanders kids is Billy Graham’s Bible Blaster, an evangelical preach-’em-up that has Rod Flanders shouting, “Keep firing; convert the heathens!”

Despite how much I am enjoying it, I believe that Ball x Pit may be a work of great evil. A concerningly potent combination of Space Invaders, Vampire Survivors and old ball-bouncing action games such as Breakout, it is a dungeon-delving arcade game in which you fire balls at lines of descending skeleton hordes as you descend down a bottomless pit. The balls bounce off enemies, or burn them, poison them, pass through them; every wave of defeated creatures unlocks a new suite of perks and bonuses and upgrades for you to combine. Above ground, you build a base for your characters and ping them about to harvest wood and stone to build yet more. The screen is always visually cacophonous, crowded with mesmerising waves of creatures and spells and bouncing balls. Most of the time I feel as if it’s playing itself. But still: it’s just so absorbing. Keza MacDonald

Available on: Nintendo Switch, PS5, Xbox, PC, Mac
Estimated playtime: Possibly forever, in 15-20 minute bursts

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Some of Halo’s co-creators have responded to the Trump administration’s use of video game memes to recruit for ICE. Via Game File, Master Chief’s designer Marcus Lehto said: “It really makes me sick seeing Halo co-opted like this”, while designer Jaime Griesemer called it “despicable”. Meanwhile Martin O’Donnell, the composer of Halo’s legendary soundtrack, is running for Congress in Nevada as a Republican and posted: “I will work with the Trump administration to destroy the Flood once and for all!”

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Question Block

Reader Kirk asks this week’s question:

“I’m impressed by the beauty of many games, but I’m disappointed that so many are so violent. Is it, perhaps, that coming up with interesting games that don’t involve fighting is too difficult? Not all games are violent, but all the big-budget games seem to be.”

This is a much-discussed question among game designers and thinkers. Since Space Invaders, video games have presented players with an enemy to defeat: without competition and combat and adrenaline, how do you make it fun? Some see conflict as a driving force behind most stories, an almost inevitable part of game design. Others view video game violence as a failure of imagination.

On Gamesindustry.biz in 2017, the game designer Brie Code posited that most games were geared towards inducing a fight-or-flight stress response in the player, and wrote about how games might move towards a different modality: tend-and-befriend. “What is game design missing? I ask this question in terms of game mechanics and game systems. I ask in terms of adrenaline, dopamine, oxytocin, opioids, and other reward systems. I ask in terms of gameplay, that helps a wider range of people understand themselves and their responses to stress and to the world.”

I am also reminded of a Game Developer essay by Brian Fairbanks. “Life is complicated, messy, stressful and painful. Our problems take so many forms, and our chosen entertainment takes those problems, distills them into a single entity and puts a Foe badge on them,” he wrote. “The issue here is, in nonviolent games, we don’t have access to that power in the same way. Our games are structured so that the challenge and progression does not revolve around literally destroying your problems with weapons. We have to find other ways to get there.”

By the way, there are a great many non-violent games around. Some of them, such as Animal Crossing, certainly count as blockbusters. There’s no comprehensive database off them, but ThinkyGames is the closest (you can filter out action, combat and timing), and there’s also an active non-violent entertainment curation page on Steam. For family friendly, violence-free games, Common Sense Media is a good resource. KM

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