Shooting things in games is intrinsically compelling. Firing, watching something blow up, and then seeing our score ping higher on the screen creates an exciting feedback loop that gives us immediate agency and power. Shooters are the most popular genre of video game in the U.S. and account for 25% of all games sold. The defining titles of our era are battle royale mass brawlers such as Fortnite and Apex Legends, and epic narrative adventures (with plenty of shooting) such as Grand Theft Auto, Far Cry, and Uncharted.

But after years of playing games like these, I’ve started to ask myself: Would it be possible for any of these mainstream blockbusters to exist without guns? Have developers overlooked other ways to explore stories? Are there more interesting dynamics we could play with in games, designs that could encourage a different kind of feeling in players?

The obvious answer is to swap out guns for something just as intuitive and rewarding, but without the lethal force. Nintendo’s brilliant Splatoon is a multiplayer online shooter with paint guns rather than assault rifles, and in the excellent Marvel’s Spider-Man, our hero webs enemies to walls and hangs them from threads, rather than murdering them. “You can imagine a get-hit-and-you’re-out version of Battle Royale, but with a Frisbee rather than guns,” said game designer Mitu Khandaker. “There’s a rich wealth of mechanics to explore when we draw inspiration from playground games.”

“If I were designing for a broader audience, I would look beyond the known adrenaline/dopamine reward loop.”

Another replacement for gunplay could be photography, which demands the same point-and-shoot action — yet doesn’t involve anyone getting their head blown off. The horror series Fatal Frame of the early 2000s had the player taking photos of ghosts, while Pokémon Snap and the recent indie title The Bradwell Conspiracy used photography too, but these have been outliers. Could a mainstream action title use this mechanic?

Game designer Holly Gramazio told me she could imagine a paparazzi adventure with the same “action at a distance” thrill of a shooter. Perhaps you’re given the freedom to roam a city, stalking celebrity targets to get the most profitable shot. “There have been a good few physical real-world games that work like that — giving players the challenge of photographing other participants without getting captured in an image themselves,” she said. “It really encourages a lot of the same kind of sneaking and hiding and waiting and plotting that makes guns so popular in online games.”

Photography can also engender a sense of creativity and immersion. Imagine a game where you’re a war reporter seeking to capture the most iconic, representative images in a battle environment: You’d still get the sense of peril that audiences expect from action adventures, but your relationship with the environment would be more profound. It would be Call of Duty from the perspective of a creative participant rather than a violent interloper.

Some designers have already started to explore a more environmental experience, such as the “walking simulator” games Dear Esther, Gone Home, and Firewatch. Bruce Straley, co-creator of award-winning post-apocalyptic adventure The Last of Us, would like to play a game about the Shackleton expedition or the first crew to summit Everest. “[It would have] deep traversal mechanics and a world with a lot of feedback while climbing different snow and ice surfaces, and a story of how the crew isn’t getting along under rising tension, à la The Descent,” Straley tweeted earlier this year. “You could have different surface types you’d have to read in order to find a safe route, and avalanches, and some sort of skiing mechanic. You’d explore ice caves, acquire useful tools and ideas for routes from previous dead explorers.”

Several designers I spoke to suggested variations on the disaster movie, where you guide survivors on a sinking ship or a failing space station, or heist games where you select a crew and bust open a series of evermore challenging bank vaults. The dynamics would be interesting and complex — trust, fear, self-preservation, altruism — all without firing a single shot.

Last year, the game designer Brie Code set up a new studio called TRU LUV to explore possibilities in design and play that didn’t revolve around violence and tension. We started talking about the idea of a narrative action game set in a society with complex rules for etiquette, gesture, and engagement — maybe a stealth romance in the 18th century English city of Bath, or a bitchy simulation of the fashion trade. “I would totally play Devil Wears Prada: The RPG,” she said. “The guilds would be different fashion blogs or magazines and the main things you do are networking and casting and photo shoot design.”

While most action adventures are based around the “fight-or-flight” response to stress, Code is interested in “tend-and-befriend” — a more altruistic instinct to care for other people and form social communities. “In traditional games, designers encourage a flow state in the player by managing an ever-increasing balance between challenge and winning,” said Code. “But about half of us, or maybe all of us some of the time, have a response to stress that involves the desire for care and connection rather than the desire to win. If I were designing for a broader audience, I would look beyond the known adrenaline/dopamine reward loop.”

TRU LUV’s first app, SelfCare, is a series of mini-games in which you lie in bed, cuddling your cat, consulting tarot cards or sorting laundry into colors. “There is a reward structure,” said Code, “it’s just that it’s based on connection rather than challenge. Almost anything that humans find rewarding could be put on a design curve — gardening, decorating, fashion design, throwing parties, knitting, cooking. These experiences are about deepening connection rather than [increasing] tension.”

“The idea of killing to win is becoming far too real for it to be entertaining for many people.”

We could have a mainstream narrative game about crafting stuff and helping people. We could have Uncharted meets Animal Crossing — it just requires a shift in how we think of compulsive design. “I’d love to make a game where you travel through a war-torn country healing people, fixing demolished architecture, working to rebuild what was lost,” tweeted Mary Kenney of Insomniac Games. “The heart of it would be that war never changes, but people can.”

At a time of enormous uncertainty, widespread gun violence, and climate crisis, maybe it’s time for a new era of mainstream games that provide an escape from conflict, rather than reveling in it. Game designer Robin Hunicke has been thinking about this her whole career. Starting out on The Sims series, she was the producer of Journey, one of the most beautiful and thoughtful adventure games ever made. Now, at her development studio Funomena, she and her team are working on peaceful, interesting video game projects, such as the virtual reality experience Luna, an interactive fairy tale set in an enchanted forest, where players can create their own relaxing aural environments. She thinks the time is right for this kind of approach to enter the mainstream.

“The idea of killing to win is becoming far too real for it to be entertaining for many people,” she said. “When I play a game like Edith Finch or Dear Esther, Papers, Please or Return of the Obra Dinn or Florence, I see the power of making meaning through game mechanics — of combining story, play, and systems to engage players without resorting to gun-based action. This work represents a return to thinking of games as contemplative experiences that are more about discovering the reality of a character, system, or world.”

We all get the appeal of action games, the way that nested systems of attack and react make for compulsive experiences; shooters are never going away. But games need to look beyond violence as the only expression of drama in epic narratives. As Hunicke puts it, “When I contemplate the emerging climate crisis, what’s the set of ‘laws’ that encourage altruism and loving kindness in a large group of people? How do we move beyond the tragedy of fear and violence as the solution to scarcity? If game designers have one skill it is systems design. We should all be thinking very hard about how to design better, more responsive, kindness-reinforcing systems.”