To Shoot or not to Shoot: Ethan Thomas and Violence
The following article contains major spoilers about Condemned: Criminal Origins and Condemned 2: Bloodshot.
The immediate ramification of shooting Serial Killer X in Condemned: Criminal Origins was Ethan Thomas’s suspension from the SCU “Serial Crimes Unit.” The long term result was alcoholism, homelessness and an overall level of grizzledom seldom seen in videogames. By killing SKX, Ethan not only prevents two police officers from receiving justice, he also sinks to the level of criminality he is trying to prevent. For a character like him, who has so much at stake, I felt like the choice was not mine alone. You can choose to kill SKX or to save him, but whatever the case Ethan’s personality has been changed. At its core, Condemned is a game about investigating crimes with cutting edge technology. Outside of those small segments, investigating turns into an axe in the face and the crimes are actually being perpetrated by the player guiding the protagonist.
Ethan Thomas has a good reason to kill SKX. He was just used to track down serial killers so SKX could stalk and murder them. Ethan was a bit worse for wear having battled—more like dismembered—a demonic representation of his inner hatred. He was angry, confused and maybe a little out of his mind, but he was still an officer of the law. The characteristic thing to have done would have been to turn in both SKX and Malcolm Vanhorn into the proper authorities. Instead, he chose to shoot SKX. He did because I told him to. This has an enormous impact on his life.
Whether or not you kill him is secondary to the fact that Ethan has killed hundred of other people to get to this point. If we look at the sheer level of violence he engages in, I don’t see how his psyche could be intact by the end of the first level. Granted, Ethan is a police officer and has been trained to defend himself. One could say that he was only acting out of defence, but he only attempts to speak with a criminal once. The guy responds to his warning by yelling, “Fuck you.” Maybe that’s where Ethan snapped.
Metro City, the location where Condemned takes place, is home to thousands of transient lunatics. With a recent 28 percent rise in assaults with deadly intent, abnormal amounts of serial killer activity, increased homicide rates and a mysterious rise in bird fatalities, Ethan has his work cut out for him. As an agent of the SCU, Ethan tracks down serial killers while detailing and understanding their gruesome methods. And he’s got the stomach for it. You explore each location encountering gruesome crime scenes to investigate. Each level is filled to the brim with psychotic enemies from sledgehammer wielding maniacs to quadrupedal drug addicts. You bust in heads with axes, you shoot gun-toting lunatics and you deal with the paranormal. It’s a battle of attrition that taxes heavily on both the player and Ethan. Why then, is killing SKX so impacting on his personality?
It has to do with choice.
SKX says that he and Ethan are alike. This statement is the overarching theme of the story. The similarities between SKX and Ethan become apparent as you play. You are both seeking out serial killers, you both have a sense of justice and morality, and you are both bound to the same curse. They only differ in method. To put this major difference into perspective, Ethan kills about 150 people, SKX kills just about 8 people. This is the first sign of Ethan’s criminal behaviour. Occasionally an enemy will become dazed and fall to their knees. You are given four options as finishing moves. You can head butt, snap their neck, punch their lights out or slam them into the floor. Of those options “apprehend” should have been included. The title Condemned: Criminal Origins is then a more appropriate title for its main protagonist than it is for SKX. Sure, Ethan is fighting for his life but he’s still an officer of the law. He’s human and killing people, no matter who they are, is generally considered to be wrong. The problem is he can’t choose to abstain from violence. The game has a pathological tendency to throw enemies at you who hinder the story's progression. Moving forward in the narrative is your justification for killing anyone who stands in your way.
The player is usually given a moral justification for killing the bad guys. They’re zombies, they’re Nazis, they’re serial killers, or they’re after me. These are all generally reasons to morally justify using violence as a means to an end. The player can justify killing Serial Killer X because he is insane and is an unlikely candidate for reintegration into society, though he would have made a good SCU consultant. Ethan can’t justify killing hundreds in order to clear his name. When Ethan is given the rare choice to use violence or abstain from it, it becomes a make or break decision. The gravity of the situation isn’t really passed onto the player until the second game where we see that this act led Ethan to a life of crime and alcoholism. It’s a big change in personality, and something I honestly didn’t see coming.
Ethan doesn’t really develop a personality in Condemned. He’s not bland or without character, but you don’t see the kind of development you might expect from beating criminals to death. A game like Kane & Lynch: Dead Men illustrates what a life of criminal violence does to people. The characters are gritty, they swear, they beat people to death and they are realistic. We see a great amount of character development in Kane as he tries to save his daughter and attones for his past. He breaks down, he makes mistakes, and he develops as a protagonist in such a way that reflects his criminal lifestyle. Ethan realizes that his criminal tendencies have been flushed out by the choices we made for him. He just doesn’t know how to react to the escalated level of violence. At the end of the game, Malcolm says that he can never return to society, and he was right, but Ethan never really had a choice in the matter.
The problem with Condemned is that no normal person can go from killing someone with some rebar to calmly talking over the phone. Ethan is a trained officer and has probably shot one or two criminals. He is a team member of the Serial Crimes Unit and has probably seen really messed up things. He is also being controlled by a bloodthirsty player in a game where you have no choice but to fight. Ethan should not be able to sit in a café and calmly sip some coffee while talking to Rosa.
Violence isn't a bad thing in videogames. If anything it helps build upon a character's personality and thus his ability to relate to the player. In Condemned there is a level that takes place in a department store. You fight enemies that are dressed up as mannequins. This part of the game reminds the player that even though these enemies are portrayed as innanimate, behind the simulacra are human beings.
For Ethan, who at this point has killed over 100 people, each fight represents another hit to his psyche. The constant degredation of Ethan's reality could be seen as his psyche meter. His visions become more vivid and it becomes difficult for him to distinguish them from reality. In Call of Cthulhu your character can only witness a certain amount of violence and horror before losing control of his mind. This kind of psyche guage helps limit the entertainment aspect of violence and adds a means to understanding it. As we see in Condemned 2, Ethan's uncontrolled violent behaviour and brutal tendencies led to some serious ramifications at work and in his mind.
Condemned 2: Bloodshot was a modest title. It wasn’t a big budget release, but it did do one thing right. Ethan was at a laughable but honest level of grizzledness. In Metro City where crime is rampant and murder is normal, the level of violence Ethan participated in still surpassed any serial killer in the game. The problem was he had no choice in it. The way Condemned was designed forced him to murder hundreds. We intentionally made Ethan into a criminal by slaughtering enemies instead of doing the right thing. Granted, the game didn’t provide the player with a peaceful compromise. For a protagonist who up until we started playing a game had upheld the law and it tenets, what right did we have to radically change his life?
Condemned remains one of my favourite games and Ethan Thomas one of my favourite protagonists. Ethan is strong willed, intelligent and deliberative, but he was also driven to the edge. Violence messes you up and he is a testament to that fact. The way violence is presented in videogames is unrealistic and is intended—in most cases—to provide a means to an end. If you’re playing as a hardened and cold blooded mercenary there’s not much on the line, except maybe a pay check. But if you’re Ethan there’s a lot to lose. He became a part of the insane situation. The player was there not to mediate this, but there to ensure that Ethan made it out alive using the most brutal methods possible. And when given the choice, only some of us made the right decision.
