Gamers with Jobs has an interesting article about our history with violence over the years when we play videogames. Have you ever sat back and thought about the countless foes you’ve killed, butchered, and disposed of? The big D word, desensitization, is employed as well. A philosophical look at your videogaming habits.
So many of our games are inextricably linked with violence, but it’s a violence which typically does not move us in any way. Think about every game you’ve played. Think about every character you’ve killed. Try and compose a mental list of in-game obituaries. For how many of these deaths do you feel anything resembling remorse?
As I’ve mentioned before, the /real/ videogame violence that I’ve experienced has always been griefers, people not playing the same game as everyone else, and always at the expense of everyone else. In Halo PC, they’d teamkill their own team-mates, and then when Gearbox patched it so that people that shot their teammates were auto-kicked, griefers changed up their tactics by merely shooting their teammates and then provoking others to kill /them/, so the victim because the supposed victimizer (according to the logic of the patch) and were autokicked while the real culprits remained. /That’s/ videogame violence, not the person sitting in a chair and taking part in the spirit of the competition. In that sense, Doom is no more violent than Pong if the players are all playing according to the rules of the game and playing fierce but fair, demonstrating sportsmanship in the process.
Phy on 05 17th, 2006