Tactical Breach Wizards is an easy game to like. It’s well-designed, and funny in a slickly cynical way. Its portrayal of cops is careful, if funambulatory. But something about it has nagged me from the beginning. Why should a game about creative problem solving underpinned by actual magic employ the most tired imagery in gaming?
Games have a checkered history with guns. The first home video game console, the Magnavox Odyssey, was made by a military contractor, and its first peripheral was a light gun. Activision Blizzard made handshake deals with Remington to “reach young gamers” via Call of Duty. As a kid in Missouri, where going to Walmart meant a stroll past the rifle aisle, I learned to hate firearms. Yet I can tell by sight a KRISS Vector from an MP5 from a PP-Bizon, and I even have opinions and preferences about them. I received this intuition from games, not gun shows.
The glut of military shooters renders the mere sight of a gun in a video game exhausting. Doubly so, if you keep up with current events. Wizard games, even if they aren’t pacifistic, offer some reprieve. Guns in games are a shorthand for instantaneous destruction, but magic provides options less linear than a bullet’s path. Which makes the military imagery of Tactical Breach Wizards, a game where creativity is required and rewarded, even stranger.
Lately, game developers have directed greater effort towards addressing players’ fears, with cosmetic arachnophobia modes appearing in Grounded, Lethal Company, and the Star Wars Jedi series, to name a few. In an age where deaths by gun violence outstrip deaths by spider bite by tens of thousands, I wish similar attention would be paid to the symbol of the gun.
Into The Spine