Stuntman and indie action filmmaker Eric Jacobus fought for 15 years to make it in the entertainment business. He finally got his big break as the stuntman for Kratos in Sony Playstation’s God of War (2018). He then set out to build an action design and motion capture studio housed in Las Vegas, with the smash hit game God of War Ragnarök as his target. But to get such a massive contract, Jacobus had to give the pitch of a lifetime to the game’s developers: He would design the action based on a new hypothesis of human violence which he had been developing for years. The presentation was a success: SuperAlloy opened its doors with God of War Ragnarök as the first contract, which was followed by a string of hits like Sifu, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II, Destiny 2, Midnight Fight Express, and Mortal Kombat 1, as well as films such as Zack Snyder’s Army of the Dead.
Throughout the company’s life, Jacobus honed his hypothesis of violence. With a daily reading regimen of 60-100 pages spanning subjects like anthropology, history, military science, archaeology, primatology, neuroscience, social sciences, psychology, evolutionary science, linguistics, and media studies, Jacobus feverishly sought the mechanism behind the apocalyptic nature of human violence so he could design the best action possible. But to his shock, theories of human violence were always complex and gradual, vague and indeterminate. It was as though they were written by people who knew nothing about it. Indeed, no author in history ever mechanically differentiated human and animal combat. He began to wonder, how great it would be if someone familiar with violence wrote a book on it?
Jacobus pieced together a very simple concept: whereas animals use combat to form hierarchies, humans cannot use combat due to the apocalyptic danger of our violence. We are indeed unique, as we’re the only living beings on the planet whose combat presents an existential threat to ourselves. This unique danger stems from the fact that we alone can use objects in combat, usually an unknown object, forcing antagonists to escalate to extremes in the face of uncertainty. Human combat therefore produces an infinite series of ways for us to kill ourselves. Jacobus narrowed violence down to this minimal mechanism, which he called “reciprocal, object-based aggression” (ROBA).
Violence (ROBA) was no longer some evolutionary stowaway from primates; it was our very operating system. And language, art, and all of culture were no longer traits that helped us survive the environment; they how we survived each other, and how we still survive each other to this day. Jacobus had inadvertently flipped the script on the mainstream sciences. If These Fists Could Talk is all about how he did it.
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