[CW: violence/gore]. As the title suggests, is there a left case to be made against ultra-violence in video games? I’m thinking mostly about MK11 and MK1 fatalities, as opposed to less gratuitous and less hyper-realistic violence–in Dark Souls or something. Whenever this topic is brought up, other factors usually take up the oxygen in the room: People might immediately think of family-values conservatives, such as the Media Research Center, who act like wet-blankets towards entertainment. Or we think of nerdy Joe Lieberman, who showed the 1993 Sub-Zero spine fatality to Congress (lol). There was Hillary Clinton who decried the Grand Theft Auto franchise, and the host of rightwing politicians who blamed Doom for the Columbine shooting (clearly as a way to absolve gun legislation from any culpability). So this is what I mean when I say that the conversation on video-game violence has been ceded entirely to these dudes, as opposed to something left spaces can discuss without sounding like squares or censors. This came to mind after I was reading about the video game designer who developed PTSD after working on Mortal Kombat 11. His dreams became excruciatingly violent, and his day-to-day was interacting with coworkers studying medical anatomy and watching videos of slaughtered animals. That can’t be good for anyone. I guess what I’m asking is: should leftists see this as harmless fun, or something problematic? And, will photo-realistic Fatalities exist in the communist future?
depends on the violence and depends on the game, blanket statements about ‘what subjects belongs in media’ are ill-considered. for example, i would say that call of duty is ‘worse’ than something like Halo, since it is more engaged with the american cultural context of imperialism and glorification of imperialist militaries, whereas halo is essentially the same aesthetically as a child banging plastic sci fi aliens and spacemen together going ‘pew pew’, even if it does have an element of jingoistic NATO realism in its plot.
Games are also at a weird intersection of Fiction and Sport and Technology, the story in Halo is essentially filler to justify the Fun Jumping and Shooting, the fun jumping and shooting is only there to justify the Xbox Hardware, and the contrivance of it even being a Shooting game is a result of the common control surfaces in gaming (another poster mentioned FPS as a solution to camera control), and the fact that doing ‘sports’ on a screen is necessarily less engaging than real life, necessitating some kind of narrative ‘stakes’ that make the on-screen activities seem Important and Momentous and Meaningful - and yanking the in-game stakes up to (virtual) Life or Death instead of just ‘Win or Lose A Game’ is a convenient way to accomplish this.
definitely agree that a major game corporation forcing employees to look at gore as a condition of employment is fucked up, but at the same time i don’t think like, a solo indie dev that chooses to do that to themselves while making a free game should be criticized or penalized in the same way.
also in general we should base decisions like this on like, tangible empirical material studies, instead of trying to derive media policy from first principles. for example its possible that ‘violent games made under western neoliberal capitalism’ are bad, and that ‘violent games made under worldwide communism’ are not bad, due to all kinds of hard to quantify cultural factors, there are far too many variables to isolate to flat out say ‘all violence in video games makes you a worse person’, based purely on one’s personal anecdotes, that is an absolutely unhinged take