Earlier this year, in the midst of reading over some statistics about how violent imagery in games affects players, I found myself wondering how they affect the people who make them.
We regularly celebrate the artists and animators who pepper games with the lovely and the magnificent; I rarely hear much about the people who spend their days creating the gruesome, disgusting, and just plain gross aspects of contemporary games.
I’m not just thinking of horror games here -- developing even an austere sci-fi shooter like Halo requires that some folks on the team spend significant amounts of time poring over pretty gruesome reference material in order to create disquieting monsters and levels.
To do their jobs well, some developers spend a surprising amount of time studying disgusting material for their day job; they’re rarely celebrated, and it’s even rarer that they talk openly about how their work affects them personally. While I don’t have any meaningful stats to share on this topic, I do have some stories to share that help shed some light on what it can be like to be an artist or animator assigned to viscera detail on a big project.
Vic DeLeon, long-time Halo artist
"What I thought was neat at first really came to bear down on me."
Former Halo artist Vic DeLeon has seen some of the more gruesome aspects of his day job spill over into his personal life. While working on Halo 3 as an environment artist, DeLeon found himself tasked with helping to create a level in which players explore a Covenant ship infested by the parasitic Flood (two such levels would make it into the final game).
"I took two weeks to gather a bunch of different reference images: scientific stuff, biological stuff, a lot of just really gross stuff,” recalls DeLeon. "We wanted a lot of long stringy tunnels, and I'd gotten the idea of looking at colonoscopy videos for reference. So I was watching all these colonoscopy videos to get ideas on what I could do to mimic their style, that feeling of being inside something."
The Flood-infested "Cortana" level from Halo 3
DeLeon didn’t stop there, either; the former Halo dev says he started studying images of tumors and other lesions in order to get an idea of how to texture and sculpt in-game surfaces, then took a “deep dive” into mycology reports to study the grossest mushrooms and slime molds he could find.
“I remember looking at different types of gross biological things and saying ‘Okay, we can integrate this, and that...but not that,’ and then later in the day I would suddenly start thinking about these super-gross images, just...out of nowhere,” says DeLeon. “My tolerance is pretty high, but I would still, all of a sudden, just be overcome with nausea. It was a rough couple of weeks.”
Like other artists I’ve spoken to, DeLeon says he was surprised at how studying this sort of repugnant reference material led to a change in his mental state. Despite feeling like he has a higher-than-average tolerance for disgusting images (“I was a bio major in college”), the artist found these images seeping into his day-to-day life.
“They’d come up when I was least expecting it. Something would just pop into my head -- an image or something -- and for a while there I felt...I wouldn’t say traumatized, but haunted, like when you’re a kid and you see something really disgusting or gory or scary in a movie,” says DeLeon. “I started associating that level with feeling disgusting. Once it was built it took months and months of polishing, and in those months I couldn’t wait to work on something else. The level was so disgusting, and what I thought was neat at first really came to bear down on me.”
DeLeon’s fellow developers weren’t unsympathetic, either, though they eventually also learned to steer clear of his desk if they didn’t want to ruin their lunch.
“People would walk by my desk and just like shudder, or scream,” says DeLeon, recalling that it became a standing office joke that people would avoid looking at his monitor while passing or visiting his desk. “I was working on that level for eight months! So for eight months, people had to step real careful around me.”
"I was working on that level for eight months! So for eight months, people had to step real careful around me."
While DeLeon moved on to work on other projects, his strategy for coping with the mental stress of working on that Flood level wound up evolving into a permanent part of his personal life.
“I started looking at other scary images, but images that weren’t particularly gross, gory or gruesome...classic stuff like Frankenstein, or the old Romero Night of the Living Dead stuff,” says DeLeon. “I tried to look at those things and get back in touch with my childhood fears, because at least I can manage that. I figured if I could reintroduce some of the old stuff that used to scare me into my mind, maybe some of the new stuff wouldn’t affect me so strongly.”
And it worked -- sort of. DeLeon’s coping mechanism grew into a renewed fascination with classic horror, and he began posting a vintage horror image to Twitter every night before bed. People kept asking for more, and now the spooky image post is part of DeLeon’s evening ritual.
“I’m telling you man, it’s now been six years of me, every night, posting a scary picture on my Twitter account at 10 o’clock,” says DeLeon. When I ask him if he’s sleeping better or worse in the years since he started the ritual, he answers without a moment's hesitation. “Better, for sure. I’ve completely desensitized myself to this stuff now. I’m the proud owner of a human kidney.”
Wait. What?
“It’s a long story,” DeLeon says, with a laugh. He explains that a friend in New York was going through a collection of university cast-offs that had gone to auction, and spotted a misshapen fleshy thing in a jar. Knowing DeLeon’s background as a biology major and his fascination with oddities, he gave the artist a ring.
“He didn’t know what it was, or that it was a human kidney, and $100 later...I’m now the proud owner of a preserved kidney,” says DeLeon. “I had some weird stuff before, for sure, but I’d like to think that I took it to the next level and became even weirder thanks to working on that level.”
Steve Bowler, animator on Mortal Kombat
Animator Steve Bowler, by contrast, says his time spent animating fatalities and “X-Ray” attacks in NetherRealm’s 2011 Mortal Kombat didn’t have a meaningful adverse affect on his life.
“A lot of the time, while we’re working on these things, there’s this degree of separation,” he tells me. As a Mortal Kombat animator he mostly found himself working with the actual character model of an attacker and just a blank, featureless male or female model (“we called it ‘Naked Guy’”) in place of the victim.
“So while the motions and stuff were gruesome and violent, we had this detachment because it was like, ‘well, I’m just attacking this plain dude.’ Even though I’m ripping his arm off, it’s clean; there’s no gore, there’s no blood,” says Bowler. “It’s almost like the system we created to just get through the work also sort of protected us from the hyper-violent, disgusting aspects of it."
An X-Ray attack in Mortal Kombat 9
I tell him about DeLeon’s deep dive into colonoscopy videos, and over the phone I can almost hear Bowler wince. “I think artists have it the worst,” he says, and tells the story of how even the most grisly sequences can appear outlandish and cartoony from an animator’s perspective.
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