In the original Postal video game, you play a man gone berserk, beating up innocent bystanders just because you've had a bad day. In the second version, you attack a Middle Eastern shop owner, dancers at a gay club and a marching band. In the latest iteration, due out this spring, you mistakenly set off a nuclear explosion, killing everyone in town.
Four men -- software developers, artists and producers -- are sitting around a dining room table here in the city's foothills debating where to take the game next.
Violence has always been key to the game's success, turning it into a profitable franchise for the company behind it, Running With Scissors Inc. That success has bred lots of imitators and helped establish a whole genre, but like many in their industry, the game's developers are now confronting a new question. Is it wise -- or even feasible -- to push the scenarios to further extremes?
Steve Wik, 39, the company's lead creative director, says he feels too many games have become dependent on violence for violence's sake and that has made violence, well, boring. His colleague Bill Kunkel, 54, adds that some games are too dark for even his taste. He's seen one scene in which the main character is "chopping people up with a butter knife in an alley." Mike Jaret, 23, points out that game review sites on the Web recently have become filled with similar criticism about games from the people you'd least expect -- fans.
"So many people these days are obsessed with vulgarity. Sure you have a gun and sure you can kill, but that shouldn't be the point," adds Vince Desiderio, 51, the company's co-founder.
Such sentiment was not always the case at Running With Scissors. Condemned by U.S. Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.) and the U.S. Postal Service, the game has the distinction of being one of the first violent video games that allowed a player to be the bad guy. Postal, which first came out in 1997 , has been denounced by some game reviewers as a "murder simulator" and has been outlawed by the governments of at least 14 countries.
That notoriety, however, put the company in the right place at the right time. Sales of video games overall climbed to record highs last year, reaching $7.3 billion. Sixteen percent of all games sold rated "M" for mature audiences versus 12 percent in 2003 and 13 percent in 2002, according NPD Group, a research firm.
But it's one thing to be condemned by the establishment and another to become a pariah to the masses, a failure in the marketplace. In the gross-out world that characterizes many of today's video games, the Scissors team knows it is walking a fine line.
The developers decide that they are not comfortable with putting children in the game. Mixing sex with violence is also out of the question. No recreation of the Columbine massacre or the Twin Towers falling. Plus no singling out a single racial or ethnic group or gender for violence. Postal is an equal opportunity world Everyone has an equal opportunity to fight -- and be killed. Most everything else, they conclude, has been done.
"There's a reason why they say there are only seven scripts in Hollywood," Desiderio said.
Incremental increases
The graphic violence in games has increased little by little over the years. In the 1970s and 1980s many companies had policies that dictated -- along with the limits of early graphics -- that violence be abstract. But some games began to show people fighting each other in a wrestling/boxing-type rings. Others began to show spilled blood. Among the first games that allowed you to kill made you the hero, running around maze-like worlds killing aliens, monsters or Nazis.
Then Postal came on the market.
The title is a reference to a series of shootings in the 1980s at post offices, although the game does not feature any postal service employees. It not only allowed -- but encouraged -- you to be bad by killing people who have done nothing wrong. You played the Dude, a guy who lives in a trailer park.
The game succeeded in part because the violence is accompanied by a perverse sort of humor; the storylines hold a dirty mirror up to America and make fun of everyone, regardless of their race, gender or ethnicity.
The genesis of the game came from Desiderio, son of an Italian immigrant who grew up in Brooklyn and previously worked as a nightclub promoter and financial firm headhunter. He had made a name for himself in the video game industry as a developer for educational software for kids, including games featuring Sesame Street and Muppets characters. But sometime in the mid-1990s, he said, he became bored and he and a few of his developers began working on Postal in their free time.
When they finally put it on the market, the game sold 15,000 $50 copies in one week. The company eventually sold more than 1 million copies worldwide, and made several million dollars off its release.
The success of Postal spawned a new generation of games, one whose goal according to psychology researcher Douglas Gentile is "to basically be a sociopath."
The top title in the U.S. in 2004, with 5.1 million units sold: Take-Two Interactive Software Inc.'s Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, which allows you to steal cars, kill cops and pick up prostitutes.
Success, though, depends on pushing the envelope.
"The more we play these games the more we get desensitized and then you have to push the boundaries more to get the same shock value," said Gentile, the director of research at the National Institute on Media and the Family in Minneapolis.
A backlash
The surging popularity of mass-marketed games has prompted a backlash. Over the past few months there has been a resurgence in bills to ban the sale of violent games to minors. Lawmakers in the District and Maryland recently joined those in California, Georgia, Illinois, Missouri, Pennsylvania and Michigan to introduce fines for retailers selling games rated "M" to those under 18 years of age.
One weekday afternoon, the Running with Scissors team is working on the next Postal sequel, code-named "Catharsis."
They are at Desiderio's home. Half-empty bags of chips and Wonder bread lay about. The walls are decorated with things from the company's fans and enemies -- a picture sent by a special forces commander in Afghanistan who loves the game, a snapshot of a grinning Lieberman at a congressional hearing on violent video games, the infamous letter from the U.S. Postal service expressing its revulsion at the game.
Desiderio is in a stained navy robe and flip-flops and playing host by cooking lunch for the other developers: Jaret, the youngest, a beefy former biology major at the University of Arizona who dropped out because he played video games too much and who moonlights as a bouncer at some local clubs; Kunkel, a balding video game veteran who became famous for developing a popular wrestling game and was founder of an early game review publication; and Wik, a mild-mannered former comic book store clerk who says he finds real violence so scary that he can't watch five minutes of the Ultimate Fighting Championship without his stomach turning.
Wik is summarizing a proposed plot of the new game.
The year is 2007 and the Dude has just left the town that was destroyed in the last game after accidentally finding and setting off a "weapon of mass destruction" misplaced by the U.S. government. He flees the atomic Armageddon and finds himself at a political rally for a presidential candidate in a nearby suburb.
The plot unfolds as the player attempts to get random temp jobs that will cause him to cross paths with the presidential candidate, the Taliban, environmental advocacy groups and others.
'Everyone's fantasy'
Except there's a twist: The next Postal will be a violent video game about non-violence. You'll still have access to a slew of weapons, but you'll be rewarded with a better outcome if you play peacefully. For instance, while driving around one day the Dude will encounter a wounded person on the street. The player can either run over the guy, ignore him or give him a lift to the nearest hospital.
"The three scenes represent three moral paths," Wik says.
Depending on the choices the player makes, he'll end up either as a serial killer, an eco-terrorist -- or . . . the new presidential candidate.
Kunkel mulls this over. He likes it: "The challenge is you want to make the good characters as cool as the bad. It turns the whole game on its head."
"I'm uncomfortable with allowing people to play a terrorist," Desiderio objects. "Couldn't you be a comedian or a government worker?"
"Well," Wik says. "You're an ECO-terrorist. We're basically making fun of those . . . people that burn down houses to save the planet."
Desiderio: "Hmm . . . maybe."
As the meeting continues, the team debates whether this kind of game will sell and how to balance a player's desire for mayhem with a goal of promoting non-violence.
Jaret suggests players be penalized if they use their weapons too much. Their options are limited -- a game without the guns and knives would be too radical.
"People are playing Postal because they want to be bad," Kunkel says.
Desiderio nods. "That's everyone's fantasy."
