(Pictured: some innocuous image the vile filth I'm talking about)
I've been playing video games from a very young age; some of my earliest memories are of playing Sonic the Hedgehog at least a year before I started kindergarten at age 5, perhaps even earlier than that. I was introduced to Call of Duty by a friend in 4th Grade and in 2011 convinced my friends to give Team Fortress 2 a try now that it had been made free. My love for the games I grew up with evolved into a Bachelor's in Fine Arts for video game development, and I've dabbled in genres aplenty.
I say this not to complain about the new-fangled ways and cry for a return to some unrecognizable halcyon, but to provide context for my relationship with the medium. Violence in video games has been a part of video games since the beginning, and while I was exposed to extreme acts of violence depicted in the format at a young age, nowadays I play all manners of bloody gruesome games without so much as a second thought while other mature topics feel heavier.
Part of this, in turn, reflects predominately Western ideologies on mature topics, of which I've been surrounded in for decades. While violence is normalized on film, with action heroes gunning down a country in the news lately and twisted tales of revenge told through gunfire, and on television with police procedurals and crime shows amid a sea of adult dramas like Breaking Bad and The Walking Dead, sexuality and even profane language are seen as taboo, with language often being the breaking point for parents buying Grand Theft Auto for their kids and set-top boxes to mute swears on television having been sold for decades. Judy Blume, a children's author, has come under fire for her books about kids in the midst of puberty, for representing the hormonal urges teens tend to have too accurately for moral guardians. Sex work is seen as immoral and taboo, but the same hands that obscure prying eyes celebrate and applaud the police officers who continue to kill more and more civilians year-over-year for offenses that at worst still should not end in bloodshed.
This same sort of double standard of course bleeds into our games. Team Fortress 2 infamously bears a cartoony aesthetic and very light language (mostly occasional uses of hell or damn), which in turn makes the game feel the lightest and silliest of the Orange Box's offerings despite being the only game in the box where you can gib your enemies into handily-labeled meaty chunks or watch them burn to death. We seem conditioned to accept violence in our media at this point, able to watch the Doomslayer find new ways to rearrange the internal organs of imps and archviles without a second thought or watch Ellie gun down a squad of scavengers in an abandoned mall in The Last of Us Part II, but then get squeamish as she gets high and makes out with her girlfriend in the opening hours of the game.
This normalization of violence and the push towards photorealism in realtime rendering have met an interesting crossroads for games that celebrate their violence. Netherrealm Studios, the team behind Mortal Kombat post-Midway (and comprised of much of the same peanut gallery that worked on the series prior) have continued to push the boundaries in their rendering tech, and boasted about the realism behind Mortal Kombat 11's fatalities in the leadup to launch. While absolutely meant to be a huge selling point and very much appreciated by hardcore fans, it didn't take long for artists in the team to speak out about their work, some of which were later diagnosed with PTSD from watching execution videos and researching real-world gore for reference material. The Callisto Protocol, likewise, has faced similar controversy for these practices, and at a certain point we have to wonder where the event horizon is.
At a certain point recently, I realized that I actually don't care how realistic the blood and gore is, and to some extent prefer the lack thereof. Death Stranding stands out to me as you are given the option of less-lethal munitions which incapacitate your foes, who will eventually get back up. There is an in-game reason to not kill the enemies with conventional firearms, including creating new encampments of BTs to deal with and stressing out your baby in a pod, but even in instances where those are not problems, where I am shooting a ghost with bullets coated in blood, I found myself preferring the rubber bullets over lead, and completed the game without a single human kill to my name. To give another example, H3VR's sosig AI characters were designed to provide similar gameplay feedback to human characters, but with their only human-like traits being their voice and clothing. Sosigs bleed mustard and say quips before exploding into chunks of beef sausage, and are canonically run through a grinder and recased outside of gameplay, thus dampening any of the actual emotional and psychological roadblocks one might have to killing a human agent in VR. Additionally, Anton has worked to ensure that they never feel too pitiful to fire upon, opting for goofier retreating lines or keeping them quiet to making them fear for their safety around your gunfire. The Sosigs have quickly become some of my favorite AI agents in a video game and are deserving of a write-up of their own, but I will abstain for now; I will say I deeply appreciate the work that has gone into making them fun to shoot at, even from an emotional standpoint.
This is not a soapbox speech about omitting violence or even gore from games, but rather a scorning of a games industry that puts their employees and artists at emotional harm and a culture that celebrates that. It's also a critique on the odd way we censor some things to preserve a sense of wholesomeness but will leave the violence behind as if it were a necessary part of partaking in the media landscape. It's also a critique on the idea of a mature title, and a culture that leaves twenty-somethings like me so desensitized to violence I can play Resident Evil or Doom without a second thought but so meek around the concept of sexuality that the thought of my own body in that context leaves me squeamish. I think we can start exploring the other aspects of the M or R rating, as it seems that we've (pun unintended) done gore and dismemberment to death, as it currently stands.
