Undertale exposes gaming’s penchant for violence and other anti-social behavior. The nature of the game’s FIGHT/MERCY mechanics raises questions about how players interact with video game worlds and the consequences they face for their actions.
When I first played Undertale in 2016, I thought that the option to spare monsters rather than kill them was a neat idea that made the game stand out. Playing the game again recently, I now understand and appreciate its messages much better, and it has had me thinking about the role that violence plays in the broader video game landscape. When I look at the rest of the game industry with Undertale’s design philosophies in mind, I question why violence is what publishers and developers have prominently wanted to make games about for the past thirty years.
To me, what makes Undertale special in this regard isn’t the fact that it gives you the choice to spare or kill its characters, but that it is blatantly against violence and gives you consequences for committing it. Most games do not necessarily promote or condemn their violent gameplay, it just simply exists. Even Grand Theft Auto, a series that some consider to be pro-violence, does not portray running over pedestrians or shooting innocent bystanders as something that is good or bad. It just simply allows the player to do those things, with the only in-game consequences being potentially getting hunted down by police. Undertale is unlike most other games because it takes a firm stance on the player's actions and tells them through dialogue and storytelling that violence is not a good thing. It does so within the first five minutes, in fact, when Toriel encourages the player to talk to the training dummy instead of attacking it. If they do attack it, she scolds them for doing so. The player is instead encouraged to find a way to spare everyone they meet, even if it means dodging or blocking a character’s onslaught of attacks until they lose the will to fight.
This leads me to question why more games do not offer the choice to avoid violence and death or portray violent actions as inherently bad and consequential. I can think of two other games that explore these concepts, these being Moon: Remix RPG Adventure and Far Cry 3 (I’m sure that more exist, but only these two come to mind). Moon portrays the violent actions of a typical RPG hero as the unnecessary death of innocent creatures (which was an inspiration for Undertale’s gameplay and story), while Far Cry 3 shows how committing mass violence takes a toll on the personality and psyche of its protagonist and how this experience conditions him (and the player by extension) to become more comfortable with taking lives. Violent video games can be a lot of fun, but I wish that there were more titles that took time to reexamine the role that violence has in gameplay and maybe come to realize that there are other options. Undertale may have been a cultural phenomenon in the years following its release, but in retrospect it does not seem to have provoked these kinds of questions in many other people as it has in me. Then again, it has only been eight years since the game first came out. Perhaps once the people who played it at a young age get a bit older and start making their own games, we will see Undertale’s philosophy on violence and pacifism appear more often in new releases.