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INTRODUCTION

“…The baddest bad word is Kill. The central activity in most [games] is killing things.

The image and the act are good, but the word is bad, even if the word does not suggest the image

or the act.” (Douglas, 1993)

Early Nintendo games had a very strict publishing guideline circa 1985, of which

“depictions of excessive and gratuitous violence” were prohibited. This didn’t, it would seem,

curb the act of killing in video games by any means. For instance, in Super Mario Bros., players

routinely kill creatures and the only motivation is that they are there. (Douglas, 1993)

The concept of killing enemies as part of a game is a trapping of the medium that many

players take for granted. When Halo developer Bungie finally shut down the Halo 3 and Halo:

ODST servers in 2012, they published some staggering results from the metrics the servers had

been cataloguing. The end tally was over 138 billion kills in the game’s online “player versus

player” matches. Anecdotal evidence for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare puts the average kill-

count at the end of a single match at around 25 kills. In many senses, killing, in video games, is

as normal an activity as breathing or sleeping.

Some games do actively encourage pacifism, although it is usually mixed with an anti-

war or anti-military message. The Metal Gear franchise encourages players to use stealth and

non-lethal combat tactics to navigate the game. Often times, the game offers a multitude of

different non-lethal tactics to shape the playfield to the player’s advantage. However, the game is

steeped in military action, and the encouragement not to kill is more from a pragmatic standpoint

rather than one of any sort of moral conviction. The player is taking on the role of a covert-ops

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soldier; killing enemies raises the alert of the surviving enemies. All-out combat against the

player is likely to result in the player’s premature demise.

In less action-oriented games, the kill count may be lower, but hard statistics tend to be

harder to find outside of modern first-person shooter games. In the classic Role-Playing Game

(RPG) genre, killing enemies (usually not other players) is a core part of the gameplay loop. The

player encounters an enemy and based on numerical statistics in a turn-based combat system may

kill the enemy. The player is then rewarded with EXP, short for experience points, which

progress their avatars towards increasing their LV, or level. Once the level increases, their

numerical statistics increase and the process for killing enemies becomes easier, allowing the

player to progress through the game and encounter stronger enemies, which, in turn yield a

greater EXP reward, and the gameplay loop continues until the player has completed the game.

In general, the concept of who or what the player is killing is rarely acknowledged in

classic RPGs. It’s taken as a given that monsters are there to be killed by virtue of their being

monsters. Human enemies are usually given a story-relevant reason why it’s okay to kill them, or

they are violent criminals such as bandits or thieves. The classic RPG genre is usually flush with

traditional fantasy settings, which allows the relatively more violent medieval backdrop to

explain away the necessity of violence to solve most encounters. In very few circumstances does

the player ever have to deal with what the reality of such a gameplay loop would actually look

like, both in terms of body count and in ecological damage.

This is why Undertale is fascinating as a subversion of RPG genre trappings and how it

approaches the role of violence in video games.

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LITERATURE REVIEW

In preparing for this paper, several other published works were examined. First and

foremost was the artifact in question, of which two full play-throughs were performed with notes

and careful observation taken. Second was the text Rhetorical Criticism by Sonja K. Foss which

provided a method of approaching this artifact for critical examination.

Other papers included several published works about Undertale in specific, including

Undertale: Violence in Context (Müller, A. 2017) which provided a critical look at specific

design choices and how they supported Toby Fox’s idea,” … that we can develop more games

that show that there are non-violent ways of dealing with conflicts and that teach people to be

friendlier.” (Müller). The Rhetoric of Undertale (Seraphine, F. 2018) provided a few brief

examples of ludonarrative dissonance and how their inclusion forced the player to become less

immersed in gameplay and pay closer attention to the themes and narrative.

Other works cited are Joe Neeves’ 2016 paper How Does the Use of Narrative Affect the

Interactivity of Video Games that largely discusses the tradeoff between narratives in games and

emergent narratives that come by result of the actual gameplay. Saving the Game (Geerts, F. L.,

2017) discusses the impact that the mechanic of saving in games and uses Undertale as an

example of how the narrative and mechanic complement each other. This helped illustrate the

semi-permanence of player’s actions and decisions that occur in-game. And finally, Mahshid

Mayar’s 2016 work, A Case of Serious Play: Virtual Pacifism in Historical Digital Games

helped create more framework around the concept of pacifism in general and in video games

specifically.

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BACKGROUND

In 2015, independent game developer Toby Fox unveiled the gameplay trailer for his

work, Undertale, with the tagline, “The traditional role-playing game where no one has to get

hurt.” (Referral Candy, 2016) The game stands apart from traditional RPGs by allowing the

player to interact with enemies during the turn-based combat which provide an alternative to

simply beating the enemy to death. These alternatives may be simple actions such as, “Pet”,

“Play”, “Compliment”, or “Ignore”. The player, upon choosing the correct action can then

choose to “Spare” the enemy, rewarding the player with gold (the in-game currency) but no

EXP. By utilizing this mechanic, it is possible for the player to complete the game without ever

actually killing an enemy monster.

This game received widespread acclaim, winning twelve awards, including “Most

Fulfilling Crowdfunded Game” and the “Matthew Crump Cultural Innovation Award” at the

SXSW 2016 Gaming Awards. And while the core game’s aesthetics are generally considered

passible, the writing and characters of Undertale are what set it apart from other games in the

genre.

The core concept of Undertale, wherein “no one has to get hurt”, goes beyond a simple

mechanic in combat to spare enemies if given the chance however. This paper illustrates how the

implications of violence are explored in depth in Undertale in both the game’s narrative and in

the game’s mechanics.

METHOD

“In an ideological analysis, a critic looks beyond the surface structure of an artifact to

discover the beliefs, values, and assumptions it suggests.” (Foss, 2018, p. 237) A detail-oriented

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playthrough was conducted which explored both a “neutral” ending for the game and a “true

ending” for the game. Supplemental material was gathered from the Undertale Wiki which

includes in-game quotations as way of citation.

KILL OR BE KILLED: TRADITIONAL RPG MECHANICS

The game starts with the player encountering a small yellow flower who introduces the

player to the battle system, albeit in a comedic style. The game enters into the combat window

while the flower, known as Flowey, starts to introduce the player to basic RPG mechanics. He

describes how your player’s SOUL starts off weak but can be made stronger by increasing its

‘LV’, which Flowey explains stands for “LOVE”. This ‘LOVE is exchanged through “little

white friendliness pellets”. Upon touching one of these ‘pellets’ the player’s HP (short for Hit

Points) drops to one, and Flowey drastically changes. “You idiot. In this world, it’s kill or be

killed.” He states, before surrounding your SOUL icon with white pellets.

This exemplifies traditional RPG mechanics. When the player is in combat, genre

expectations dictate that the player has two options: kill the enemy or be killed by the enemy.

The gameplay cannot proceed if neither one of these conditions are met. Some RPGs do employ

a ‘Retreat’ option, but this will usually yield neither EXP or any reward at all, so it does not

progress the gameplay loop but rather stalls it for another time.

As the player progresses through Undertale, it’s explained that to increase your “LOVE”,

you need to accrue EXP. By doing so, your attacks will deal more damage and you will receive

less damage from enemy attacks. These are all standard RPG genre trappings. As the player

continues further, they are introduced to the ‘Act’ mechanic, wherein they have the possibility to

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avoid violence altogether. The gameplay loop is reinforced during the entire first section of the

game, up until the first boss fight against Toriel.

Toriel does not react to any of the ‘Act’ commands nor will she allow you to ‘Spare’ her

from the outset. She reinforces that monsters in the Underground are likely to try and kill the

player on sight and that if the player is unwilling to fight back then they are liable to die swiftly.

She reiterates that the world is ‘Kill or be killed”. The player is apparently forced to kill her to

progress through the game.

As the game continues, the player is confronted by random encounters by a variety of

different monsters each with the apparent option to either kill or spare the enemy. The game

presents you with several memorable monsters, some of whom are hostile only because of

misunderstanding. Others are hostile through rage at humans in general. And as the game reaches

the climax, it becomes more and more apparent that the final boss at the end of the Underground

that the player will be facing is a foe that will give no quarter and has every intention to kill the

player.

Moments before the climactic battle, the player is met with a friendly non-player

character (NPC) who has talked with the player several times before. This time, the NPC

explains to the player that the gameplay mechanics of “LOVE” and “EXP” are much darker than

they initially appeared.

“What's EXP? It's an acronym. It stands for 'Execution Points.' A way of quantifying the

pain you have inflicted on others. When you kill someone, your EXP increases. When you have

enough EXP, your LOVE increases. LOVE, too, is an acronym. It stands for 'Level of Violence.'

A way of measuring someone's capacity to hurt. The more you kill, the easier it becomes to

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distance yourself. The more you distance yourself, the less you will hurt. The more easily you

can bring yourself to hurt others.” (Undertale, 2015)

SUBVERTING MECHANICS

Traditional RPGs run on the concept that overcoming obstacles makes one stronger. And

so increasing LV through accumulation of EXP makes sense in the genre as a means to an end.

The reason your player character deals more damage as they increase in LV is because your

player character is becoming stronger. This is subverted in the narrative of Undertale.

“If a monster doesn’t want to fight, its defenses will weaken. And the crueler the

intentions of our enemies, the more their attacks will hurt us. Therefore, if a being with a

powerful SOUL struck with the desire to kill…” (Undertale, 2015) By reframing the RPG

mechanics of EXP and LV into “Execution Points” and “Level of Violence”, the game informs

the player that they aren’t dealing more damage because their player character is becoming

stronger, but that they’re becoming more and more violent.

This becomes more apparent if the player attempts what is known as the “Genocide

Route” through the game. The game allows the player to “level grind”. This is a process wherein

a player doesn’t progress the plot of a story but instead intentionally encounters enemies in order

to accumulate EXP as quickly as possible to increase their LV faster. By attempting to do so in

Undertale, however will result in all of the monsters who are antagonistic towards the player to

be killed off. The game’s lighthearted music becomes slow and ominous and NPCs that populate

towns are gone. Shops that once sold supplies are now vacant with only a note left for the player:

“Please don’t hurt my family.” (Undertale, 2015)

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While the loss of obtaining supplies would be a detriment to most games, attempting a

Genocide Route means that the player’s desire to kill is absolute, which makes most combat

encounters very easy. With two notable exceptions all enemies can be felled with a single attack.

Many of the comedic and delightful interactions and scenes are removed and the game no longer

resembles its more light-hearted and entertaining nature. In short, for the most part, the game is

no longer engaging to play should the player commit to violence in the extreme. Even the

annoyance of random encounters doesn’t abate in this playthrough. Random encounters still

occur, but the battle screen only displays the text, “But nobody came.” That these systems

remain for the player to not be able to interact with anymore highlight the guilt and negative

emotions the player are likely to have. (Seraphine, F. 2018)

Undertale does everything in its power to deliver the illusion that the game world, the

Underground, is a real place, and that actions that occur in it have larger repercussions. There is

virtually no monster encounter in the game that isn’t referenced somewhere else. The player can

meet the families of the monsters that they have encountered. Main NPCs that the player has to

fight can and will change story elements later on depending on whether or not they spared them,

and even the true final ending of the game can only occur if the player has spared every monster

in every encounter and taken it upon themselves to befriend several key NPCs. The social web

woven in the game make it impossible for any single death to go unnoticed. Key characters are

related to each other either through romantic entanglement, friendship, or just by being

neighbors. Killing one leaves a hole in that web that will be remarked upon by others. “In terms

of game mechanics, Undertale portrays realistic emotional and social consequences to each

death the player causes and each character they spare.” (Müller, A. 2017)

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This leads to a better understanding of why the Underground is as hostile to humans as it

is, and even that revolves around a schism that occurred when the prince was killed by humans.

The grief that the monsters of the Underground felt became fear that they would be next.

During a boss fight with Muffit, should the player kill the spider-woman, after she

dissolves into dust, one of the spiders that were in her care comes into the battle screen and upon

seeing Muffit’s demise, leaves and returns with a single flower which it places in the center of

the play field before the combat finally ends. As Müller states, “Muffet is missed. Someone, …

is sad enough about her death to leave flowers on her grave. Her death, … has an emotional

impact on someone. It is also an immediate reminder that the monsters in the Underground have

feelings, just like humans do.”

Far from being hordes of faceless enemies that only exist to allow the player to increase

their LV, each monster is a unique creature and the world is noticeably less populated by their

destruction.

DISCUSSION

Undertale tries to apply real life logic to a fantasy world. By reasoning that sentient

monsters would not blindly line up to be slaughtered so that the player can more easily slaughter

their king, the game opens up a discussion of morality that is absent from many games. It takes a

deep introspection into the genre’s main trappings and attempts to provide a critique on the

actions inherent in RPGs. It reframes the standard RPG “level grinding” into a mass murder

performed by the player. It removes the feeling of increasing power by subverting the narrative

aspect to imply that the only reason the player is more powerful is because they have less

concern for life and are losing themselves to bloodlust.

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By altering the gameplay and a majority of the game itself based on how the player

approaches violence as a solution or even as a gameplay mechanic, the game subtly rewards the

player with more game content and a more satisfying narrative should they choose to avoid

killing. The game frames itself as a microcosm. A small world that is influenced by the players

decisions, and not just a finite program being run for amusement. It plays on the empathy it

engenders in the player through clever writing and memorable characters to make players feel

guilty for choosing certain actions.

It also works hard on not letting game mechanics interfere with the weight of the

message. Undertale includes some key mechanics that force the player to live with their

decisions, regardless of game mechanics that would allow them to reverse time and choose

another path. The most memorable is the first boss fight with Toriel. Should the player choose to

kill her, they are seen that her SOUL looks similar to the human’s, moments before it breaks into

two and shatters into dust. “Being killed by the player was emotionally painful to her. Killing her

was both an act of physical and emotional violence.” (Müller) Should the player restore the game

to an earlier save, Toriel’s pre-fight dialogue will change to intimate some passing knowledge of

what occurred before, and the encounter with Flowey immediately after the fight informs the

player that he still remembers what you did, even if no one else does. This forces the player to

face the weight of their decisions on the game world. It’s not surprising then, that many players,

after completing the game, actively refuse to play the game again, as doing so would reset the

happy ending given to these characters and negate the struggles they all faced together. (Neeves,

J., 2016)

The Pacifist Route tends to be more difficult than a middle of the road route, or even the

Genocide route (with two notable exceptions), as the player is still objectively weak and has very

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little recourse to boost their own stats. It instead relies on the player’s determination, which is

referenced in-game as the ability to reload a previous save, to overcome all obstacles as

peacefully as possible. In some aspects, the gameplay shift during a pacifist run makes it less of a

RPG genre and more of a puzzle-action genre with RPG trappings.

The ultimate statement the game seems to make is that while violence cannot be entirely

avoided, the decision to choose mercy is never the wrong one. Mercy engenders more possibility

and excitement, but violence and death in Undertale illustrate only an end to possibility.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Crockford, D. (1993). The Untold story of maniac mansion. Wired. Retrieved from

https://www.wired.com/1993/04/nintendo-2/

Foss, S. (2018). Rhetorical Criticism. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, Inc.

Fox, T. (2015). Undertale [computer software].

Geerts, F.L. (2017). Saving the game is shaping the game: defining and understanding the save

mechanic. (Master’s thesis, Utrecht University, Utrecht, Netherlands). Retrieved from

https://dspace.library.uu.nl/handle/1874/351188

Madhavan, M. (2016). How indie game undertale became a top selling game on steam in 2015.

ReferralCandy Blog. Retrieved from https://www.referralcandy.com/blog/undertale-

marketing-strategy/

Mayar, M. (2016). A case for serious play: virtual pacifism and historical digital games.

Bielefeld University. Retrieved from

http://www.academia.edu/29541766/A_Case_for_Serious_Play_Virtual_Pacifism_and_H

istorical_Digital_Games_in_press_

Müller, A. (2017). Undertale: Violence in context. (Master’s Thesis, Maastricht University,

Maastricht, Netherlands). Retrieved from http://summit.sfu.ca/item/17572

Murphy, D. (2012). Halo’s final statistics: 235,182 years played, 136 billion kills. PCMagazine.

Retrieved from: https://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2402479,00.asp

Neeves, J. (2016). How does the use of narrative affect the interactivity of video games?.

Linolium.co.uk. Retrieved from https://www.limonium.co.uk/writing/

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Sarkar, S. (2016). The Witcher 3 takes top honors at yet another award show, the SXSW gaming

awards. Polygon. Retrieved from: https://www.polygon.com/2016/3/21/11277046/sxsw-

gaming-awards-winners-2016

Seraphine, F. (2018). The rhetoric of Undertale-ludonarrative dissonance and symbolism.

Fukuoka Institute of Technology. Retrieved from

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/323545890_The_Rhetoric_of_Undertale-

Ludonarrative_Dissonance_and_Symbolism

Undertale Wiki. (n.d.). Retrieved March 7, 2018 from the Undertale Wiki:

http://undertale.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page