The 18th and 19th centuries’ embrace of linguistic delicacy and extreme avoidance of taboo bestowed great power on those words that broached taboo topics directly, freely revealing what middle-class society was trying so desperately to conceal. Under these conditions of repression, obscene words finally came fully into their own. They began to be used in nonliteral ways, and so became not just words that shocked and offended but words with which people could swear.

The definitive expletive of the 18th century was bloody, which is still in frequent use in Britain today, and is so common Down Under that it is known as “the great Australian adjective.” Bloody was not quite an obscenity and not quite an oath, but it was definitely a bad word that shocked and offended the ears of polite society. It is often supposed to be a corruption of the old oaths by our lady or God’s blood (minced form: ’sblood), but this is another urban legend that turns out to be false. Either it derives instead from the adjective bloody as in “covered in blood” or, as the OED proposes, it referred to the habits of aristocratic rabble-rousers at the end of the 17th century, who styled themselves “bloods.” “Bloody drunk,” then, would mean “as drunk as a blood.”

The career of bloody is interesting, because one can clearly see either its perjoration (becoming a worse and worse word) or the rise of civility in action — or perhaps both. In the late 17th century, dramatists had no problem including the word in plays seen by genteel audiences, and printers had no problem spelling it out in their editions of those plays: “She took it bloody ill of him,” is just one example, occurring in the 1693 Maids Last Prayer. Henry Fielding, author of “Tom Jones,” uses it in one of his plays in 1743: “This is a bloody positive old fellow.” And Maria Edgeworth has her hero exclaim of another man, “Sir Philip writes a bloody bad hand,” in 1801’s “Belinda.” If Miss Edgeworth — who wrote novels about young women finding love and good marriages for a largely female readership, as well as morally improving children’s literature (six volumes of “Moral Tales for Young People”) — had her young hero say “bloody,” it can’t have been that bad a word. Miss Edgeworth gets her “bloody” in at almost the last moment it is possible, however. At around this time, the word starts to get more offensive: It begins to be printed as b——y or b—— and falls out of polite use, where it continues through the Victorian era. When George Bernard Shaw wanted to create a scandal, but not too big a scandal, in his 1914 “Pygmalion,” he had Eliza Doolittle exclaim in her newly perfect posh accent, “Walk! Not bloody likely! I am going in a taxi.” The first night’s audience greeted the word with “a few seconds of stunned disbelieving silence and then hysterical laughter for at least a minute and a quarter,” and there were some protests from various decency leagues, but on the whole a scandal never materialized. Bloody became “the catchword of the season” and pygmalion became a popular oath itself, as in “not pygmalion likely.” Had he scripted Eliza to say “Not fucking likely!” (which he very well could have in 1914) there in all likelihood would have been a real scandal, akin to that generated by shift in “Playboy of the Western World.”

This was bloody at the turn of the century — a bad word, but not so bad that it was not in common use, according to Shaw, “by four-fifths of the British nation.” Perhaps because of this somewhat equivocal status, bloody comes in for more than its fair share of opprobrium from Victorian language mavens. In their definitions for fuck and related terms, for example, Farmer and Henley do not editorialize, merely defining the terms (“to copulate,” etc.) and providing examples of use. But they go off on poor bloody. It is

an epithet difficult to define, and used in a multitude of vague and varying senses. Most frequently, however, as it falls with wearisome reiteration every two or three seconds from the mouths of London roughs of the lowest type, no special meaning, much less a sanguinary one, can be attached to its use. In such a case it forms a convenient intensitive, sufficiently important as regards sound to satisfy those whose lack of language causes them to fall back upon a frequent use of words of this type.

Note the typical association of bad language with low social status and lack of education — the London roughs say “bloody” a lot because their vocabulary isn’t rich enough to furnish them other options. The original OED (1888) takes a similar line — bloody is “now constantly in the mouths of the lowest classes, but by respectable people considered ‘a horrid word,’ on a par with obscene or profane language, and usually printed in the newspapers (in police reports, etc.) as ‘b——y.’” Perhaps the OED would have had similar things to say about fuck, but the Victorian editors decided not to include it, along with cunt. And Julian Sharman, whose 1884 “Cursory History of Swearing” does not include any obscene words, attacks bloody for several pages. A sampling:

We cannot disguise to ourselves that there is much in its unfortunate associations to render its occurrence still exceedingly painful. Originating in a senseless freak of language, it has by dint of circumstances become so noisome and offensive … Dirty drunkards hiccup it as they wallow on ale-house floors. Morose porters bandy it about on quays and landing-stages. From the low-lying quarters of the towns the word buzzes in your ear with the confusion of a Babel. In the cramped narrow streets you are deafened by its whirr and din, as it rises from the throats of the chaffering multitude, from besotted men defiant and vain-glorious in their drink, from shrewish women hissing out rancour and menace in their harsh querulous talk.

(To chaffer is “to bargain, haggle, bandy words.”) Again, bloody is portrayed as a word beloved by the ignorant, morally degenerate lower classes. Bloody, unlike a word such as fuck, was perfectly placed to attract the anger from society’s growing intolerance of obscenity — it was “a swear-word,” as the Pygmalion press described it, yet it was not quite profane and not quite obscene. This made it offensive, but not so bad that one couldn’t with any decency draw attention to it.

Bugger was the other early obscenity used nonliterally, with the true flexibility of a fully developed swearword. It was, in the past as now, a blunt, direct word for anal intercourse (or for the person who does the penetrating during said anal intercourse, the pedicator, if you will remember your Latin). Randall Cotgrave used it this way when defining levretée, the girl “buggered” by a greyhound. Even more frequently, however, the use of bugger was divorced from its literal meaning, in examples such as these: “God damn him, blood and wounds, he would bugger his Soul to Hell, and these words he used frequently to Man, Woman, and Child, bugger, bugger, bugger” (1647, reported); “Go, get thee gone … thou frantic ass, to the devil, and be buggered” (1693); “B——st [blast] and b-gg-r your eyes, I have got none of your money” (1794); “Damn ’em bugger you an’ your ballast” (1854); “Take the bugger off, he is knifing me” (1860); “Previous to this the soil had, in the expressive phrase of the country, been ‘buggered over’ with the old cast-iron plows” (1868). One final example shows that the biblical epidemic of crotch grabbing had not entirely died out in the Victorian era. A witness for an 1840 divorce petition described how Susan Shumard “came out and met him [Francis Shields, her brother], and as she came up to him, she grabbed him by his private parts; there was considerable of a scuffle; she held tight, and he hollowed to her, you bugger you, let go.” (This was evidence that Susan had slept with her brother; her husband wanted a divorce because she had supposedly married him without informing him that she was four months pregnant with her brother’s child. The General Assembly of Ohio refused to grant the divorce — they felt that the testimony on both sides was so fantastical and unreliable that they could make no determination about the truth of the matter.) It is interesting that in the 19th century, bugger was apparently a term that could be applied equally to men and women, while today it is used almost exclusively toward men. Along with Francis Shields and the gentleman who called “bugger bugger bugger” to “Man Woman and Child,” we have evidence from the masterpiece of Victorian pornography, “My Secret Life” (1888), in which the protagonist reports that a low-class prostitute with whom he is consorting calls her landlady “bugger.”

This movement contradicts two trends in swearword evolution. With the development of feminism, many swearwords have become more equal-opportunity, not less. Bitch can now be applied to men and women, as can cunt. In the 19th century shit as a noun was reserved exclusively for men — the “West Somerset Word-Book” defines it as “a term of contempt, applied to men only,” as in “He’s a regular shit.” Now, women too can work, vote, own their own property, and be called a shit.

When swearwords don’t become more equal-opportunity, they often begin to be used solely for women — Geoffrey Hughes calls this the “feminization of ambisexual terms.” Words such as scold, shrew, termagent, witch, harlot, bawd, and tramp were all at one point in their histories terms for men; furthermore, the terms were usually neutral and sometimes even adulatory. Scold, for example, comes from the Old Norse word for “poet.” When these terms were feminized, they perjorated, going from neutral or positive to insulting. Bugger bucks this trend, too, going from a word used of men and women equally to an insulting term reserved almost exclusively for men.

In these examples, bugger shows great grammatical flexibility. Geoffrey Hughes categorizes swearing into eight classes, while Tony McEnery finds 16; either way, the above buggers can occupy many of the slots. The word can be personal: “you bugger you!”; personal by reference: “take the bugger off”; a curse: “bugger you!”; destinational: “bugger his Soul to Hell”; and a figurative extension of literal meaning: “the soil was ‘buggered over.’” Hughes notes that “as terms become more highly charged, so they acquire greater grammatical flexibility.” As words become charged — obscene — they are able to be used in more and more ways. Once the worst word in the language, fuck can be used in all eight of Hughes’s categories and in fourteen of McEnery’s sixteen.

As we can see with bugger, most categories of swearing require the word not to be used in its literal sense. When Francis yells “you bugger you” at his sister, he is not suggesting that she goes around having anal intercourse — he means “I have a strong negative emotion toward you, let go of my balls!” When soil is described as “buggered over,” no one is suggesting that teams of sodomites traversed the field, doing their thing — it means, figuratively, “really messed up.” Along with grammatical flexibility, this figurativeness is the hallmark of a fully obscene word, a word used not as a literal descriptor but to shock, offend, or otherwise carry emotion — a swearword.

Bloody and bugger were the two most prevalent swearwords in the 18th and 19th centuries. There is ample evidence of their use, from multiple sources, because they were employed frequently (remember Shaw’s contention that bloody is “in common use as an expletive by four-fifths of the British nation”) and because they were considered less offensive than many other obscene words. It was possible to print the two, even if they had to be disguised as b——y and b-gg-r, where f——k would have been impermissible. But there is tantalizing, if sparse, evidence that our other modern swearwords were making the same transition at the same time, becoming not just obscene words but swearwords, used where one once would have used an oath. By the 1860s, swearing probably sounded much as it does today, with obscene words doing much of the work of swearing, and with religious words — damn it, Jesus, oh God — employed frequently but to less effect.

The evidence for the most part comes from records of court proceedings, where people’s spoken language was recorded verbatim; from pornographic books, where obscene language went hand in hand with obscene doings; or from dictionaries whose editors were brave enough to include bad words. Let’s take fuck, for example. Around 1790, a Virginia judge named George Tucker wrote a poem in which a father argues with his son the scholar, “‘G—d— your books!’ the testy father said, / ‘I’d not give ——— for all you’ve read.’” According to Jesse Sheidlower and Geoffrey Hughes, the third ——— is replacing “a fuck,” producing the first recorded example of the modern teenage mantra, “I don’t give a fuck.” This poem didn’t see the light of day until a scholarly edition of Tucker’s work in 1977. Tucker’s great-granddaughter published some of his poems in 1895, but she somehow didn’t see her way to including this one. By 1879, the evidence is less equivocal. A character in the mock Christmas pantomime “Harlequin Prince Cherrytop and the Good Fairy Fairfuck” (1879) declares, “For all your threats I don’t care a fuck. / I’ll never leave my princely darling duck.” (The panto relates the story of Prince Cherrytop, who has become enslaved by the Demon of Masturbation. The Good Fairy Fairfuck helps him conquer his addiction to self-abuse, so he can embrace the joys of holy matrimony with his betrothed, the Princess Shovituppa. It was written by an eminent journalist for the Daily Telegraph, whose work had also been published by Dickens and Thackeray.)

In 1866, a man swore in an affidavit that one Mr. Baker had told him he “would be fucked out of his money by Mr. Brown.” The notary who recorded the testimony editorializes, “Before putting down the word as used by the witness, I requested him to reflect upon the language he attributed to Mr. Baker, and not to impute to him an outrage upon all that was decent.” Luckily for us, the witness insisted he copy it down, outrage or no, and so we have the first recorded use of fuck meaning “cheat, victimize, betray.” In 1836 Mary Hamilton was charged with using “obscene language” in the street — she followed a group of other women, called them “bloody whores,” and “[told] them to go and f … k themselves.” An 1857 abolitionist work relates the story of a slaveholding doctor who whipped one of his slaves on Sunday. The woman “writhed under each stroke, and cried, ‘O Lord O Lord!’” The doctor “gazed on the Woman with astonishment” and said “Hush you ******* b h, will you take the name of the Lord in vain on the Sabbath day?” (“******* b h” = “fucking bitch”). Again we have circumstance to thank for the preservation of this insult. The authors of the antislavery tract were invested in making slaveholders appear as foul and morally bankrupt as they could, and one easy way to signal that was with obscene language. And though they provide no examples in their slang dictionary, Farmer and Henley describe both the adjective and adverb forms of fucking as “common.” The adjective, they note, is “a qualification of extreme contumely” (“fucking bitch” is a pretty good example of that), while the adverb (“I am fucking furious!”) is “intensitive and expletive; a more violent form of bloody.” If fucking was “common” in 1893, when the volume containing F was published, it was probably in pretty wide use for some years before that, as the 1857 example implies.

Ruan Gates, a third-year game design student at Witwatersrand University, is lost in the dirt roads of Johannesburg. He’s trying to make it back to campus, where Wits is hosting a presentation on mobile game design. His GPS picks up the location, but each route it maps leads to a metal gate. He's in Northgate, an upper middle-class suburb. Every house is walled off and topped with barbed wire and advertisements for private security companies with names like “NYPD Security.”

White Americans' attitudes on whether blacks and Hispanics are 'givers' or 'takers' is affected more by their politics than their class

Poorer whites are often assumed to hold more negative opinions of other racial groups than wealthier whites, but the latest research from YouGov, shows that class may not play an important role in white Americans' racial attitudes. 

Respondents in a recent YouGov survey were asked whether they think that various groups of people give more to society than they take, or whether they take more than they give. Working class people come out on top in the eyes of most Americans if you look at society as 'givers' and 'takers'. 72% of Americans say that working class people give more than they take, while only 10% say that they take more than they give. Middle class people (65%) and women (59%) are the only other groups which most people describe as 'givers'. Upper class Americans (55%) are the most likely to be described as 'takers'. 

Apart from the upper class, only two groups tend to be seen as 'takers' rather than 'givers': black Americans and Hispanic Americans. 45% of the country views black Americans as 'takers', while only 20% see them as 'givers'. 35% say that Hispanics are takers and 31% say that they are givers. 

50% of white Americans say that blacks take more than they give, while 16% say that they give more to society than they take. 44% of Hispanics say that black Americans take more, while 45% of black Americans say that they give more than they take. 

Respondents were asked to identify which class they consider themselves. 45% of white Americans identify as working class while 52% identify as middle class. There is very little difference between working class whites (49%) and middle class whites (51%) in how likely they are to view black Americans as 'takers'. 

Ideology, however, has a significant impact. Liberal whites tend to say that blacks give more than they take, with 41% of white liberals, something working class white liberals also agree with. Most white moderates (53%) and white conservatives (69%) say that black Americans take more than they give. 

White Americans (38%) are much less likely than either black Americans (83%) or Hispanics (62%) to say that their racial identity is important to them. There is very little difference between working class (38%) and middle class (40%) whites on this issue, though conservative whites (44%) are slightly more likely than liberal whites (37%) to say that their race is important to them. 

Most white Americans (62%) say that your class has a bigger impact on your life in America than your race (19%), something black Americans definitely do not agree with. 67% of black Americans say that race is more important than class, something only 23% disagree with. Hispanics are split 41% to 41%. 

Full poll results can be found here and topline results and margin of error here. 

Birds fly over Mississippi's Lake Ferguson. (Via Flickr/Jimmy Smith)

He holds out hope that there are other developers quietly working away in Mississippi, but he's been on the programmer prowl for about a year and hasn't found much. He founded a Facebook group, Mississippi Video Game Developers, in August, and so far it has two members: Weymouth and one other guy who plays around with GameMaker software. Weymouth's company, War Room Studios, is registered with Mississippi, and he's working on a Super Smash Bros.–style brawler called Vellum Wars, though both his artist and musician are out of state. He calls Mississippi a wasteland for technical prowess.

"That's what it feels like to be a game developer or even just a creative person in this area," he says. "You live in your own little bubble, and that's not how creativity flourishes ... This is a real industry, and it's not going anywhere, and the fact that our state is not capitalizing on it is just a travesty. There's people in Florida doing it, there's people in Louisiana and Alabama. Why are we this dead zone in the middle of all that?"

The dream

Despite Mississippi's digital deficit, Weymouth has hope for the state's technological future, because he believes in the people of Mississippi. He knows artists and sees opportunities for education, training, entertainment and creative expression everywhere -- even in run-down, closed-up buildings.

Parts of Mississippi are still recovering from the carnage that Hurricane Katrina dumped on the region in 2005. Weymouth says rental fees are high in his town because of inflated insurance rates since the storm, resulting in rows of vacant storefronts. He passes these empty buildings every time he drives down Gulfport's main highway, and they fuel his drive to do something, anything, to help his community recover and create something beautiful.

Google Maps captured one abandoned building along a Gulfport highway.

"It just drives me nuts," he says. "I'd love to be able to remove the wall for anybody who wants to be creative, even if it's just a local band that just needs to use sound equipment. A video game studio has that."

Weymouth thinks big. He imagines an incubator outfitted with computers (complete with major game-engine licenses), sound equipment, a physical-art space, experts-in-residence from a range of fields, and, grandest of all, a motion-capture studio. He wants to host game jams and tournaments at the studio, and he'd encourage schools to bring students on field trips. He dreams of a community hub for creativity and collaboration.

The incubator wouldn't just be a place to learn and create -- it would be a lifeline for Gulfport's vulnerable youth. It certainly would have helped Weymouth when he was a kid. He comes from a large family, and he left home as a teenager so his kin could afford to live a better life. It was a "one less mouth in the house" kind of thing, he says. As a young adult, he floated between the streets and stable housing, and he met other young people in similar situations along the way.

Another potential home for Weymouth's gaming incubator, captured via Google Maps.

"I've just seen all these people go through this horrible stuff, and I'm like: That person was a beautiful artist," he says. "If they just had a place to paint, they might not have gone down that terrible route. They could have seen a future."

Weymouth had a leg up in terms of job placement. He loved video games from an early age, and that interest put him on a technical path. He taught himself how to program and eventually ended up fixing computers at a "big blue box" retailer. He's 29 now, married and with a three-year-old daughter.

"There needs to be more business here for creativeness, gaming, entertainment in general," Weymouth says. "If you don't want to go to a casino or go to a bar around here, as a young adult, you really don't have much else to do."

The gaming incubator could be that business. Weymouth isn't all talk; he's been trying to sell the idea to potential investors in groups and at private dinners for a year at least. In his pitch, the gaming incubator offers an affordable monthly subscription that provides access to the studio's tools and experts. The program helps burgeoning developers create and publish video games, and then takes a slice of the profit to keep itself afloat.

No one has bitten yet. Weymouth says investors have typically responded with things like "No one cares about video games in Mississippi," and "There is no game industry in the state -- for good reason."

Weymouth says Vellum Wars is like Super Smash Bros., but you won't need a Wii to play it.

He attempted to secure small-business loans and funding from banks, with similar luck. Interest rates were too high ("financial suicide," as Weymouth puts it), and other complications blocked those avenues. That's one reason he's working on Vellum Wars, his party brawler for PC. If he proves that video games can be financially successful, his incubator pitch might carry more weight.

"I decided, Well, I'm going to have to do it the hard way," he says. "I decided to sit down and create a game with as much inner resources that I could. Everyone's always told me my whole life that I don't do things simply. I always go over the top on things, and here I am doing it again."

The reality

Weymouth's incubator idea is mired in red tape, but it isn't completely unheard of. Rock Band Blitz and Dance Central co-developer Fire Hose Games launched an incubator program based out of Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 2013, with the goal of helping new developers create and sell their first games. So far, the studio has brought Chris Chung's cat simulator, Catlateral Damage, to PC, Mac and Linux, and it's working with Batterystaple Games on the action platformer 20XX, which is on Steam Early Access.

Embody a feisty feline in Catlateral Damage.

These are two of Fire Hose's successes, though its first incubator game, Let's Quip, didn't do so hot, according to studio co-founder Eitan Glinert. Fire Hose eventually removed that one from the App Store.

"Two out of three? That's pretty good!" Glinert says.

Even though Glinert calls Fire Hose's incubator (or "accelerator") a success overall, he advises caution for someone like Weymouth, who's attempting to start a program from scratch in a tech-barren region of the country. Glinert correctly guesses that it will be difficult for Weymouth to find both developers and investors in Mississippi.

"No sensible investor wants to invest in video games right now -- it's a horrible industry to invest in at the moment, at least on the small or indie scale," Glinert says.

Weymouth's biggest issue may not be funding, though. Glinert says that the most problematic aspect of running an incubator is actually finding talented teams that can keep the business running. Searching for these developers takes time, and supporting their efforts takes money, and it's best to invest only in those that will churn out profitable, attention-grabbing games.

20XX is on Steam Early Access and it's already selling well, Glinert says.

"I didn't expect how hard it would be to do this when I started," Glinert says. "Plus, you're limited largely by region -- it's hard for us to compete with accelerators on the West Coast, so we're really only looking at folks on the Eastern Seaboard."

A new accelerator would work best if it's tied to an existing source of quality developers, such as the Independent Games Festival, IndieFund or even a university with a gaming program, Glinert says. That last part might be difficult for Weymouth, since there are no video game–specific programs in Mississippi universities, according to The Art Career Project.

Plus, Glinert says, it's nearly impossible to find funding for these things. Fire Hose ended up bootstrapping its own accelerator.

"I think your best bet to fund an incubator, if you don't already have the money, is to find successful or rich game devs who understand the industry, believe in you and what you're doing, and want to back you," he says.

Overall, Glinert says an incubator can definitely be profitable, but it's a long road packed with massive, money-shaped potholes.

Limbo

All of this may not be terrible news for Weymouth.

He isn't interested in working only with the top developers in the nation; he wants people from his area to have a place they can express themselves and network with other creative types. His incubator is community-focused; it includes plans not just for video game development, but other forms of art, too. He hasn't explored all of his funding options, and alternative routes like Kickstarter are still on the table, even though Weymouth says he has a problem taking money from people before he has an actual product to deliver. He even likes the idea of running a nonprofit business. Still, he'll have to figure out some way to keep the lights on.

Finding an investor will be incredibly difficult, but Weymouth already knew that. Besides, he doesn't want just any investor to throw money at this project. He wants someone who cares about Mississippi.

"The investor who is in the state is doing it for the people here," Weymouth says. "If I get somebody from out of state, they're not going to feel the same as I am about the local people here."

Vellum Wars should be ready to brawl in about six months, Weymouth says.

Weymouth wants to build a hub for future video game developers, filmmakers, musicians and artists to flourish. He wants young people to be proud of their home state, and, in turn, he wants Mississippi to be proud of its creative pioneers. Weymouth wants to show his neighbors, family and friends that there's a bright future in Mississippi's gaming and art scene, if only it's allowed to take root.

"You deserve a future," he says, speaking to the hypothetical artist at his incubator's door. "You have talents and skills that you've acquired through hard work. You deserve a future. You're not lazy. You just have struggles -- and we all have struggles. It would be cool to just be able to remove the wall and allow creative prowess to get some exposure and a future."

Weymouth's dreams are immense, potentially naive, and maybe impossible to achieve. But he's been dreaming big all of his life. Why stop now?

"I'm not in this to make money," he says. "If I wanted to make money, I'd go get a nine-to-five where the money is guaranteed. I'm in this for a future where I'm not a cog in a machine. I'm doing something to help people."

Games are a medium just like film is a medium, although we never hear about something being criticized for not "being a movie," the same way that claim is held against certain games. A part of this may be due to the fact that violence is often seen as the default interaction for many big-name games, while everything else is seen as icing on a particularly bloody cake.

Which is why, looking back on 2015 with a bit of distance, I'm much more impressed with The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt than I am with Fallout 4. They're both amazing games, and will long be remembered in the year's canon of games one should play to understand where the industry was. However, one game seems to relentlessly funnel you toward combat, while the other allows for a much more subtle form of storytelling.

To see what I mean, let me tell you about a race.

A missed opportunity

I didn't expect to hear the cries of an announcer yelling animatedly about a race while I was wandering around Bethesda's fictional Boston wasteland in Fallout 4, especially when his excitement came through bad speakers from a decaying racetrack. I approached the location, enjoying his announcements of strange names.

Looking through my sniper scope, I watched as various robots "ran" the track, although many, to be more accurate, floated.

The crowd was cheering while sitting on the bleachers watching the spectacle. Perhaps, I thought, some had gambled their life savings yearning for a dream that would never become reality. I had some spare caps and decided I wanted to bet, too. The scene ignited my imagination.

Only, I had forgotten: This is Fallout 4.

The default for a situation in Fallout 4 is to kill everyone. There was to be no engagement with this lovingly crafted setup, and no interaction with the audience or the managers that wasn't in the language of bullets and death. Instead, my mere arrival resulted in the announcer summoning the audience to attack me. The scenario in my head remained there; the game was more interested in violence than world-building.

The fight was memorable, if only because I found a switch that led to the detonation of all the mindless robots. Other than that, it was the same firefight with faceless characters that I'd been having since the beginning of the game.

This is not an issue I only have with Fallout 4, but it speaks to a wider problem. There is often little room in these worlds for situations that aren't resolved by violence, even when the possibility for something more is present. These beautiful worlds are created, and then filled with bullets.

Battlefield worlds

These stunning environments, created by talented artists, become mere battlefields for the same mechanics of slaughter that have existed since the first shooters.

Bloodborne's gorgeous Yharnam is there to let its gutters gush with blood. Watch Dogs' Chicago has a thin mask of interaction, dressed in the magic called "one-button hacking," that almost always ended with your hacker wizard shooting people.

Indeed, you use magic hacking software to assault NPCs, sometimes even before they've committed a crime — because "the software" tells your character to. The best outcome for side quests is physical assault by a character who is not even law enforcement. The worst is the NPCs are killed. The tools are merely set dressing for the violence.

The problem isn't that these games include combat, but that combat is relied upon as the primary method of engaging with their detailed, incredible worlds. Developers are now so effective at creating detailed versions of both realistic and fantastical environments, but our interactions remain fixated on violence.

Something feels wrong when mission after mission can be whittled down into a repetition of the same one you did a few minutes ago ... only this time, in a different location, maybe with one or two different enemies. These games look better than ever, but their worlds are wasted on superficial combat. When you compare the recent Fallout games with even past versions of the Fallout universe, there is a case to be made that interesting and non-violent options have been removed from the series.

Kotaku's Patricia Hernandez created a video about what was cut from Fallout 4, and you can begin to see a bit of the team's priorities. There were hints of some really neat stuff ... that was ultimately struck down by the figurative red pen.

Hernandez spoke about the Combat Zone, a location in the game where you meet a companion. It looks like a space where you could bet on and watch cage fighting. But, just like my own experience with an area where a fun betting activity appeared to be set up, this becomes another bullet-by-numbers slaughterfest.

Hernandez shows a trailer where it appears the player is watching a cage fight happen. "There's a souvenir shop," she says. "There's a bar, there's a fighting cage and even seats for the audience." Wouldn't it be great if these things meant something? Instead, it all becomes a well-decorated, lovingly crafted backdrop for blood and bullets.

This isn't a problem that's unique to Fallout 4 but, considering what fans have written and tell me about the franchise's history and Bethesda's, this latest iteration seems to have deliberately viewed noncombat interactions as secondary. The world looks to be much richer than its predecessors, but you interact with it via your weapons.

Even something as powerful as Fallout 4's base building, while unique and expansive, is optional. You won't "lose" by not building. Indeed, even after spending hours playing mayor to numerous towns, I felt little in terms of impact. There were no new stories to tell; the systems didn't feed into ... well, anything. The little towns just kind of stood there, lit and loud and patrolled, but I felt little for them.

Fallout 4's stripped-down dialogue system is another example of this. Your dialogue options rarely result in different outcomes. Dialogue "choices" serve as minor directions to let another character give exposition, not as a way for your character to actually have meaningful conversations with others. What you say doesn't matter, although the game tries to fool you into thinking it does.

The best attempts to focus on nonviolent or noncombat playthroughs don't work. Christopher Livingston attempted to avoid combat and ultimately failed.

"As much fun as I'm having with Chuck, I don't feel like I'll get much further with him," Livingston said. "Charisma and Luck are great when they're maxed out, and there are some enjoyable perks, but they definitely need to be paired with combat or stealth. I'm just not finding enough situations that I can talk my way in and out of, and even maxed-out luck isn't enough to survive a real fight. More and more often as I play, the dapper Chuck is winding up on the ground covered in blood."

Fallout 4 has no meaningful dialogue; the skill tree, with its lack of a level cap, means there's nothing unique about your character. You can eventually unlock everything, and the endings seem to be variations on the same theme. Your choices mean little.

The worst part is that some big-budget open-world games have worked around violence. And they did so in 2015. Let me tell you about an old lady's cookware and weddings.

The story of the pan and the wolves

The Witcher 3 was my personal game of the year (even if I had issues with it). CD Projekt Red's open-world action adventure was incredible, garnering numerous 2015 Game of the Year awards from many outlets. [Editor's note: Not on Polygon, but it was close!]

I fell in love with the game because I found (and am still finding) stories in it that are stunning, humorous and tragic — stories that didn't require me to kill my way through them. The Witcher 3 contains a beautiful, well-realized world that is matched by the interactions that world offers.

During one scene, an old lady demanded that I enter her tiny shack and retrieve a pan for her. Some soldier, you see, had come by a few hours earlier and commandeered her house. There is no fighting: you enter her awful abode, scratch around and find her pan. From the soot in it, Geralt is able to weave together a story of what happened. You return it to her, and she gives you some food. That's it. That's the quest.

Yet the woman is hilariously crotchety and Geralt's reluctance is charming, and the story he figures out from the soot is tragic. From the black powder, Geralt uncovers a message, and he pieces together the rest of the tale after examining other aspects of the environment. The world feels alive; you're not pushed into death.

Throughout The Witcher 3, you encounter many situations that are almost entirely about conversations. In one of them, Geralt speaks with a troll; the entire quest is about getting paint for the troll. There's a scene in the expansion Hearts of Stone in which Geralt allows himself to be possessed by the ghost of a womanizing brute and attends a wedding with a woman he adores. He catches pigs, dives for shoes and dances.

Geralt fights often. He is, after all, a witcher: a monster killer for hire. But conversations matter as much as combat, and investigating the world of The Witcher 3 — even if it's just a basic button press — is essential. Not only do the stories themselves matter, but Geralt often has to piece stories together to solve quests. Gathering knowledge is how he comes to know his targets and how he prepares for battles.

The Witcher 3 is not a game that feels like it has to rely solely on combat to keep the player interested. Indeed, its most memorable moments for me are entirely about refined stories and interactions with characters. I still roar with laughter thinking of Geralt badly performing poetry on stage, or leading pigs to a magical cave.

Default to destruction

It's clear that diversifying interaction makes your game more memorable; it's one reason so many people love the indie darling Undertale. The mixture of an interesting, if somewhat controversial, bullet hell mechanic with turn-based combat freshens everything up.

DayZ, despite all its flaws and frustrations, remains interesting due to the various ways in which players can interact with its world. Players engage in negotiation, bartering and fragile alliances with total strangers. DayZ benefits from the fact that other characters are controlled by real people, so these interactions don't have to be written ahead of time. But the real benefit is the world: Arma 2 provided the backdrop for DayZ's interactions.

Starting with an existing setting and adding interesting ways to play with other people is part of the magic. One could only imagine what would happen if other developers were able to use the worlds of games like Grand Theft Auto 5 to facilitate more interesting ways to play.

There's nothing inherently wrong with combat or violence or brutality in a game. It's just disappointing how many games continue to rely on it as the only or the main method of engaging with their world when it appears to be more available at first blush. There will always be a market for Call of Duty, but the games that funnel us into violence often remain frustrating, especially when it seems like there should be more there.

I say all this as the only person I know who's genuinely excited for the upcoming digital temper tantrum that is Doom, and as someone who loved the combat in both Bloodborne and Fallout 4. Wanting more variety doesn't mean wanting these games to never exist — indeed, it's wanting more to exist than just the ability to decorate beautiful game worlds in blood.

Shooting and combat don't need to be this ubiquitous. Watch Dogs didn't have to be about guns. The Division didn't have to look like another third-person shooter. Fallout 4 didn't have to resolve all its quests with slaughter. But there's an idea out there that seems to state that that path is the quickest way to sales.

It's not true. It's unfortunate. And we can do better.

By now you may have heard that on February 7th of this year, 2013, the state of Mississippi officially  abolished slavery by adopting the 13th amendment to the Constitution.  Here’s the text of the document that Mississippi only got around to officially ratifying two weeks ago.

Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

Let’s face it, due diligence in rectifying the crimes of the past hardly wins you any merit badges in Mississippi, a state where 46% of “hardcore Republican voters” polled in 2011 thought inter-racial marriage should be against the law, and in which a middle school in 2010 couldn’t understand why it was a problem that only white students were permitted to run for class president.

So it’s little wonder that “someone forgot” to file the paperwork to officially get rid of slavery until 148 years after the 13th amendment became a permanent part of the US Constitution in 1865. Oops.

Now, defenders of Mississippi will argue that this isn’t entirely true.  Mississippi didn’t just officially end slavery.  The  year Mississippi took its brave stand against enslaving African-Americans was not 2013.  It was 1995.  Only 130 years too late.  So there.

But in the ensuing years, everyone in Mississippi simply “forgot” to officially notify the US Archivist of the amendment’s ratification by their state, so it never counted, until now.  It seems someone was watching the movie “Lincoln,” saw that Mississippi had yet to ratify, and he raised enough trouble back home to get the thing done.

But seriously.  Come on.  They just forgot?

You forget to get toothpaste.  You forget to pick up the laundry.  You might, on a really horrifically bad day forget your anniversary.  But you forget to end slavery?  Really, Mississippi?

You know what else Mississippi forgot?  To ratify the 19th Amendment, giving women the right to vote in 1920.  Mississippi finally got around to that one in 1984 – 64 years too late, and dead last among the states.

We can all laugh at this story, but these are the kind of people we have to deal with, negotiate with in Congress, to get things done in this country.  These are the kind of people who make up a good part of the base of the Republican party.  If it’s not about God, gays or guns, they’re not interested.  So it’s no wonder America is falling behind the rest of the world with regards to the civil rights of gays and trans people in comparison to, say, Mexico.  Mexico doesn’t  have to deal with Mississippi.

In Mississippi’s defense, when the resolution passed in 1995, it was unanimous.  Sort of.

“It was unanimous,” Frazier recalled. “Some didn’t vote, but we didn’t receive a ‘nay’ vote.”

Yes, not everyone voted to end slavery, but no one voted against ending slavery.  And in Mississippi, you take your civil rights victories however, and whenever, you can get them.