ABSTRACT
This chapter examines on how design choices made on the aesthetic level of game design, challenges, and rule structures that afford but also limit certain gameplay experience. By investigating the often compulsory act of killing the generic characters in contemporary cinematic action-adventure games, the chapter answers the questions of how genre conventions give shape to the role and function of generic adversaries in the overall structure of a game, and how these conventions lead to gameplay experiences in which dark play is a norm. In general, people can say generic adversaries play a specific and trivial role in the hero's journey of games with explicit narratives. While being adversaries for the hero, they are not like the archetypical villain, which is responsible for initiating a hero's story and is the primary source for its conflict. In terms of gameplay, killing endless numbers of generic adversaries while playing a hero is recognizable, justifiable, and pleasurable behaviour for players.
