Shadow of the Colossus and the powerlessness of violence

Section 1: Shadow of the Colossus

Shadow of the Colossus tells the story of a young man called Wander, who wants to resurrect his love, Mono. Wander travels to the temple and prison of a god called Dormin, who can save Mono, but only once his power is restored. To restore Dormin’s power, Wander must defeat 16 enormous creatures - the titular colossi. 

The gameplay consists of travelling through a large, detailed open world, navigating puzzles, and fighting the colossi. The world is gorgeous, the puzzles are beautifully designed, and the game manages to stay fresh and engaging through 16 iterations of the same task. 

Shadow of the Colossus was released in 2005, when I was 9. The game won awards for its overall game design, character design, graphics, music and audio design. It won best Adventure Game and Game of the Year from multiple places. I didn’t know any of that at the time, because I was heavily preoccupied with being 9, and not caring what game awards were, but you didn’t need to tell me how incredible this game was, because I played it until my eyes turned square and fell out. Even though our Play Station was in a crowded garage attached to an old, grainy, tiny CRT television, I was glued to this game. 

I played this game again as a teenager, and it was just as powerful, just as transfixing. It had been re-released for PS3, which I didn’t have, but the re-release reminded me of how much I loved this game, so I dusted off the PS2 and jumped in once again. Playing it again a little older I understood the subtler elements of the game more explicitly, but what I understood more was that the real genius of the game was that I still felt exactly the same about it. I understood with a more adult lens what the game was doing, but even when I was 9 I felt what the game was doing.

On February 7th of this year the game was released yet again for PS4. At this time, I have played the game through to the end on Normal. I know what I’ll do next is play it again on Hard. I know what I’ll do after that is play it again. Something about this game is different, and it’s probably what makes it different to other games that makes it recognised by whole communities of players, as one of the - if not the - greatest game ever made. 

As you, or rather as Wander travels through this world, hunting his enormous prey, the game generates powerful feelings. These gigantic creatures leave you awed, and when you kill them, and the mood of the music, framing and gameplay change, you feel sad for them, ponderous, perhaps regretful. The journey, and the quest itself, give you this feeling of destiny, but as the colossi fall you become less sure of yourself, and the sense of destiny becomes a feeling of powerlessness, laying  so low down you might not recognise it at first. 

So let’s talk about Shadow of the Colossus, and the powerlessness of violence. 

Section 2: Violence in Shadow of the Colossus

As I see it, Shadow of the colossus presents two themes regarding violence - one concerns violence in video games, the other examines violence and conflict in a wider sense. It might be fairer to call this one theme with two sides, but I’m going to talk about these ideas with those two frames of reference. 

Shadow of the Colossus shows violence in video games as something that limits the storytelling ability of the game, and violence generally as a moral failing of free will. When violence happens in the game, although it moves the plot along, it highlights Wander’s lack of choices, and the violence in the game happens between the characters with the least agency. 

Dan Olson did a great video on the morality of Shadow of the Colossus (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhJ_qTU61g4) on his channel Folding Ideas, and I recommend it. I’d say it’s a good foundation for this video, as I agree with almost all of it. The only place where I disagree - and I don’t even really disagree - is where Dan talks about complicity. 

He says that “The player’s participation is not in complicity but in re-enactment” and “the player ultimately inhabits the role of Wander in the same way that an actor becomes Macbeth without assuming the guilt for Duncan’s murder”. I would say that while this is true, the distancing serves a second purpose, which is to completely remove Wander’s agency. The character of Wander is just separate enough from the player to be another entity, while also not being far enough away to have any agency or decision-making power at all. The only other characters with as few choices as Wander are the colossi, which just exists, perhaps move around in their designated area, and then are slain. 

In fact, of the characters in the game, except for Mono, who spends 90% of the game literally dead, you could argue that Wander and the colossi have the least agency. Dormin has a plot that is playing out through the whole game, Lord Emon is large and in charge, and even Agro, Wander’s horse, has a mind of its own. When you get on Agro to ride him, you don’t become a man/horse unit like in some other games. You aren’t controlling the horse, but instead you control Wander controlling the reins, and if you try to run Agro too close to a steep edge, or a large obstacle or even… apparently… a small tree (just go around you maniac) Agro will resist you, panic and refuse. Wander will only refuse your controls when it would mean jumping off a cliff, and you can still make him do it. 

With a few exceptions, the colossi leave you alone if you leave them alone. You aren’t locked into the arena by a door that opens when they die. You have to get their attention, fight them and kill them. In this, the game shows that during a conflict, both parties are powerless, contradicting the default conception that if one person kills another, the victim is powerless and the assailant has all the power.

When Wander kills a colossus, it falls down dead, and turns black. The game then gives you a little bit of time to do whatever you want. The first time you kill the first colossus, what you probably did here was either stay and look at the body, or start to walk back to the temple. However, whatever you do, the tendrils of Dormin’s power seek Wander out, and there is no way to escape them. The order goes cut-scene, free-play, cut-scene, but during the free-play nothing you do matters, because you’re already doomed, because you already killed the colossus.

At the end of the game, when Lord Emon’s men arrive, Wander is in a really bad way - the dark power of Dormin’s energy has taken his body completely, and he is deteriorating rapidly. At this point, Wander is a literal husk, controlled by Dormin, his free will now completely lost. He is killed by Emon’s men, and Dormin’s darkness pours out of him, surrounding him and transforming him into a colossus (or at least, THE SHADOW OF THE COLOSSUS). During this scene, you control a colossus as Emon and his men first attack you and then flee - you can try to fight them, but you are now big and slow, and they are small, difficult to see and fast moving. In an excellent subversion of the rest of the game, you get to see the other side of the conflict.

Next, Lord Emon drops the sword - your sword - into the base of the tower, creating a vacuum that pulls in the dark shadows, and then Wander’s body. You get to control Wander’s body as the vortex pulls it in, and although the consensus is that this is Wander, it is unclear whether this is really him at this point - whether his will exists at all at this point. Again, although you can control it at this point, Wander’s body cannot escape. At last, Wander’s body is pulled into the vortex, and later, Mono finds a baby with horns.

The baby, a tie-in to the previously released game, Ico, is an interesting figure, considering the events of Shadow of the Colossus. At the same time, the child has total innocence, and yet bears this symbol of evil and potentially danger - the horns. We know from Ico that people later discriminate against the boy and try to sacrifice him, but after all of Wander’s - or if you’d rather, your - actions, a question that hangs in the air is “Does this child have a violent destiny, or can he choose peace?” 

Has the story you just acted out decided his fate for him?

It’s there, perhaps, that if you sped through the game, you might reconsider, what you’ve actively done, by passively participating, to poor Wander.

The game gives you the whole world to explore, and if you want, you can seek out the colossi yourself, using Dormin’s descriptions of their locations. You can explore the whole world, and know it inside out, so that when Dormin tells you to go to the place where trees nary grow, you know where to go. If you get frustrated though, if you get bored, if you just want to go straight where the next enemy is, you can. The game gives you a mechanic to point you in the right direction - and what do you use to find your way, to skip the exploring? Your sword.

Section 3: Violence in video games

Violence in video games has been a hot topic for concerned parents now for decades. There are many great analyses of violence in video games, and its effects on the medium and the audience. To see why there is such an abundance of violence in video games, you need to consider the fact that video games are one of the youngest art forms, and compare them with different kinds of media.

There are two forces at play here, one is maturity of a medium, and the other is commerce, or capitalism. Generally speaking, the effect of maturity is that as a medium gets older, people figure out how to convey more complex ideas and at the same time become more confident that their audience is smart enough to understand them. The effect of commercialising media is somewhat the opposite - usually, commerce drives art to appeal to as many people as possible, and to abandon more complex or controversial messages. This is what people mean when they talk about the Lowest Common Denominator.

Video games are one of the youngest media, and at the same time as a medium is very commercial. This means that when it comes to complex ideas, video gaming ends up a little under-supplied. This is why a lot of media critics historically have looked down on video games, but more recently, as they become more independent and more mature, they are being accepted more by the art world.

So why does violence mean appealing to the lowest common denominator?

Well, conflict is generally considered to be the foundation of storytelling, and violence is an abstraction of conflict. It therefore follows that to entertain a wide ranging audience, you should simplify your media down to a singular conflict, us or them, my Marowak or Gary’s Venusaur, Blazkowicz or the nazis, Wander or the colossi… 

What Shadow of the colossus does, in creating a huge and beautiful open world that contains technically infinite choice, but no real interactions except for the predefined conflict, is show the player that the world could be bigger, contain more, but it doesn’t, because of violence. This is theme number one: violence in video games is limiting the complexity of storytelling.

Section 4: More to life

The whole of Shadow of the Colossus is puzzle-solving. Even the combat with the colossi mostly revolves around exposing weaknesses, figuring out how to climb them, luring or provoking them, or using their patterns against them. This is the main way that the game manages to stay engaging and fresh throughout.

I said before that violence is in so many games because conflict is the foundation of storytelling, so how can game designers create games that contain less violence?

The answer is that games are not inherently story-based. The differentiating factor of games as a medium is that the audience has some degree of control. This makes video games more experiential, which means that story doesn’t have to be everything.

Looking at some of the most popular games ever made, you see examples of game mechanics other than combat - game mechanics that don’t rely on conflict or storytelling. One of the best puzzle-solving games, an obvious influence on the aesthetic of Shadow of the Colossus, that continues to thrive today is Legend of Zelda. 

Other games such as Pokemon use collecting as a secondary mechanic. In fact, collecting has become such a popular mechanic in games that almost all console games now contain trinkets, easter eggs, and trophies - including Shadow of the Colossus itself, as of the PS4 re-release.

When Minecraft came onto the game scene in 2009 it exploded, and combat in Minecraft is such an unimportant mechanic that there’s a whole mode of play that makes it irrelevant. Instead, Minecraft uses collecting, building and decorating to engage the user.

Perhaps above all else, exploration is a part of games that completely enthralls people. One of the most basic questions asked of every new game now is whether it is open or closed world. In 2016, No Man’s Sky demonstrated Procedural Generation as a way to generate an almost infinite universe to explore, clearly a response to the powerful demand for exploration. However, exploration means more than just travel. Even in closed world games, the user can explore by interacting with NPCs or seeking out the small details. In all of the games I’ve mentioned there are elements of exploration, and as far as game mechanics go, it is a pretty good symbol of the big wide world - I mean, it is the big wide world.
And yet Shadow of the Colossus undercuts such a popular game mechanic with the guiding light of the sword - as if to say “There’s more to life than the quest, but if you blink you’ll miss it all”

In Japan, the name for the game was “Wander and the Colossus”. This is a reference to the titular character encountering the colossi of course, and also a reference to the ending in which Wander himself becomes a colossus, but you can read it as two options. You can choose Wander - you can choose to wander, in which case he has a certain freedom, but the myth of himself as the slayer of giants is never fulfilled, or you can choose Colossus - you can choose to fight the colossi, and then to be the colossus.

Section 5: Comparison: Wolfenstein - Colossus vs Colossus

I’ll talk about Wolfenstein II: New Colossus in another essay, but here I want to specifically focus on a comparison, between the violence in Shadow of the Colossus and the violence in Wolfenstein.

While Shadow of the Colossus shows violence in a negative light - it is sad that you are killing these big, beautiful beasts - Wolfenstein has a more complex take on it. While moments in Wolfenstein are shocking, visceral, sad and cruel, the gameplay is a gory celebration of video game violence. Marked moments are sad or shocking but overall, violence is the fun of the game.

Wolfenstein presents an aggressive enemy, the Nazis, who are everywhere and won’t leave you alone, and have to be stopped. By setting up this premise, Wolfenstein suggests that violence may be necessary at times. However, the nazis in Wolfenstein also lack the ability to surrender, to not fight, to be non-violent. The nazis, just like the colossi, lack agency.

Actually, Wolfenstein presents a similar theme of violence and powerlessness. In New Order, Blazkowicz is forced to choose between sparing Fergus or saving Wyatt. If you choose to save Fergus, who is older and has been at war longer, he later tells Blazko that he wishes he had died instead. Later, in New Colossus, Fergus gets a robotic arm, that swiftly becomes murderous and tries to grant Fergus’ deathwish - in other words, violently rendering your choice to save Fergus irrelevant. If you save Wyatt however, in New Colossus he starts to experiment with LSD, and forgets his weapons while tripping, choosing to care for a cartoon lizard only he can see.

In a similar, echoing moment, Blazkowicz, Caroline and whichever of Fergus or Wyatt you chose to save are held captive in New Colossus. This time, you are not given a choice, but instead, Frau Engels intends to kill everyone. Caroline is executed and then Engels insists that her daughter, Sigrun has to execute Fergus/Wyatt. Sigrun refuses, but then Engels goes ahead to attempt to do it anyway. Not only are you, as Blazko, held captive, powerless watching this violence, but Sigrun is powerless too - she chooses not to be violent, but her parent overrules her anyway.

This brings us to the cleverest part of New Colossus. At the start of the game, right after re-making the choice between Fergus and Wyatt, you are shown a flashback to Blazko’s childhood, in which his dad tells him he has to kill his dog. You can choose to do it or not, but if you choose not to, Blazkowicz Sr. takes the gun and kills the dog anyway.

When I started writing this I turned to my girlfriend and said “What happens if you kill the dog?”. There are three people in our house and none of us chose to kill the dog. Next I went to research it and I found full forum pages of people asking the same question and more people who all chose not to kill the dog. I knew there must be some difference in the plot for people who do kill the dog, as the choice comes so close to the choice between Fergus and Wyatt, which is enormous. 

I looked around for a while and eventually I found what changes if you kill the dog: nothing. The plot doesn’t shift an inch if you choose to kill the dog - but something else changes entirely, and that is the relation between the player and the plot. You see, if you choose to kill the dog, then in the scene shortly afterwards, when Sigrun refuses to be violent, and her parent is violent in her place, taking away her agency, you don’t relate to her. Blazkowicz doesn’t change depending on your choice, and yet the way you experience the game does.

Section 6: Comparison: The Last Guardian - a gentler colossus

After comparing Shadow of the Colossus to a game that is deliberately, gratuitously violent, we should look at it next to a game that barely features violence at all. Even better yet, we’re going to talk about the latest game by the same creators who made Shadow of the Colossus. This is of course, The Last Guardian.

The Last Guardian revolves around a small child and the biggest, softest lovely special friend in the whole world. In The Last Guardian you play as a young boy who befriends a beautiful big dog bird who makes you cry every time large creature called Trico. The game starts with the boy waking up in a room with Trico. Trico is obviously hurt and you don’t know what has happened. After first helping Trico to get back on his feet and feeding him, the main goal of the game becomes apparent - to explore whatever this place is and get this boy back to his home, wherever that is.

You, with Trico’s help, solve puzzles and progress through the world. As you do, you start to piece together a picture of the civilization that used to occupy it. The breathtaking architecture and design of the city draws you in, and at the same time you grow this real connection to Trico. This is because he feels real to you - Trico is distracted by things, he gets hungry, he is scared of the spooky eyes around the citadel, and he doesn’t like going in the water. In much the same way that Shadow of the Colossus stripped away extraneous elements to look at only a simple, myth-like story, The Last Guardian focuses on the relationship between this child and this lovely good doggo magnificent creature and little else besides. 

Unsurprisingly, like its predecessors Ico and Shadow of the Colossus, The Last Guardian revolves largely around solving puzzles. The direct conflict, and particularly the violence, show up in a really interesting way here, because the player character is a child. 

When you encounter enemies, they take two forms - either adult sized automatons which want to pick you up and carry you away to some unknown fate, or evil versions of Trico, wearing masks and armour - and both of these forms make the enemies way more powerful than you. There isn’t a way for the small child to personally fight the suits of armour, only struggle free and run away, and in a scene where the main evil trico chases you, it bats you about like a mouse or a ball of string, and you are totally helpless.

Because of all this, the direct conflict in the story doesn’t feel like the plot progressing. In other games, beating enemies means that you’ve moved forward, but in The Last Guardian enemies show up and get in your way, stopping you from reaching your destination. During a lot of the actual fights, between Trico and evil trico, your character simply has to stay out of the way and not get killed.

In the climax of the game, many evil tricos descend upon lovely soft boy your Trico and tear at him. It isn’t a fight, it’s just an assault, and you cry for days and then again whenever you think about it it genuinely upsets you. This again, is the powerlessness of violence. There isn’t a way to fight them off, there isn’t a way to end the suffering of your friend.

Another theme in The Last Guardian is powerlessness versus free will in general. Trico has lost his mask, seemingly marking a transformation into a creature with free will and thus an enemy of the other tricos and the citadel. Near the start of the game though, you find a mirror shield that when shone at something, will make Trico shoot lightning from his tail at the target. Trico has a marked gain in agency, and nonetheless, when you use the reflective shield, you are still controlling him. This is more than the control in which you give him directions and he maybe does them if he wants to - his tail reacts physiologically to the presence of the light, and this again, relates to the theme of the powerlessness of violence.

During the attack, one of the evil tricos rips off Trico’s tail, and to destroy the tower you have to use the lightning from the severed appendage. Doing this knocks out all the evil tricos, presumably freeing them from their servitude, and saves Trico from them. However, symbolically it also maps the change from Trico having freedom of choice but still being a remote controlled weapon, to being totally free. He is free to choose not to be violent. 

In the words of everyone’s favourite colossus, The Iron Giant, “I am not a gun”

Section 7: Conclusion

In conclusion, Shadow of the Colossus is an excellent demonstration of the powerlessness of violence, a theme you can see throughout many games. I say that it is a demonstration deliberately, instead of saying that the intention of the game is to demonstrate this. I personally think Fumito Ueda wanted to communicate this sort of idea to do with mythology, destiny, and conflict, and that shows in his other games, but I could be mistaken. He might not have wanted to communicate that to the audience at all, but I think it’s telling, or at the very least interesting, that Ueda has said he next wants to create a First Person Shooter.

Whether this message was the intention of the author or not, it can be read so clearly because it is good writing, and it is good writing because it reflects a truth we can see is there. When one game changes from showing characters who are violent as being in control to showing violence as scary because of the lack of choice that is intrinsic to it, other creators saw that, knew it was real, and good, and they started including it in their own works.

The creator of a piece doesn’t need to have intended a message for it to be there necessarily. If it’s true, and the text is well made, the idea will often be demonstrable anyway.

You might actually be thinking of other games right now that contain better examples of this message. You might think I should be talking about Fallout, or GTA, or Bioshock. I might respond that there are other ideas in Bioshock for example that should be --

What’s this?

Bioshock Infinite Wants You To Murder America To Death

Appendix 1:

General note: My comparisons seemed more like general mini-analyses/mini-reviews of the other two games, but I hope it came across that my method of comparison here was to establish that a theme exists in the original text, and then looks at whether/how the theme exists in other games and how it is treated there.

SotC: I said in the essay that there are essentially no interactions in SotC except the conflict, and you might have thought I was ignoring the interactions such as the animals, the fruit, the secret garden - all the secret hunting essentially - and I am. I'm deliberately ignoring all of those because it exactly fits the theme that to get those more interesting interactions you need to try harder and use your imagination. Actually it fits the theme better to say that than if they weren't there. Shit. Maybe I should have said that in the video.

Wolfenstein: I played through some more of Wolfenstein New Colossus & New Order since writing this and I would like to point out that Fergus and Wyatt both say that they wish that you had saved the other one, and that Wyatt is not totally nonviolent as I initially recalled, but his arc does focus more on hope and escapism than violence. Additionally, the penultimate fight of Wolfenstein: New Order is against a mechanised version of whoever you chose not to save, which is pretty awful, but certainly fits with the themes I'm examining.

 Last Guardian: There is at least one scene concerning Trico, mind control and violence that I have not mentioned here, simply for brevity, but they are still worth considering. In one heartbreaking scene for example, Trico thinks he has killed the boy while under mind control. Check it out, it's sad as shit.