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Screen violence: At what point does "But it's only fiction!" stop working for you?
Thirith
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Registered User regular
Yep, I just watched the Caprica pilot this morning, and in the according thread there was a discussion about the holodeck-type fun'n'games in that one. Which made me think: the more 'real' games become in terms of representation (visuals, sound, touch, smell, taste etc.), is there a point where game violence becomes too much for you personally, and where you believe that it goes too far? Or, as it's virtual and therefore fictional violence, is it always okay?
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
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Long answer, maybe, someday. I can imagine the horrors something like Silent Hill 2 could bring if it had access to my sense of smell and touch.
Games always remain gamey.
Oh, and I dislike having to harm dogs in games. Dunno why it's dogs and no other animals. Incidentally it means there's a single log recording in Bioshock that I simply cannot listen to ever again. You know the one.
In short, it never becomes too much for me objectively, but depending on how the enemies are portrayed I might feel a bit guilty.
SCREW GAMES THAT DO THIS
The guy is obviously not going to shoot me if he wants to live that badly, so why make me kill him?
Fallout actually does this. I beat the crap out of a bunch of raiders and the last one was hiding behind a beam whimpering that he didn't want to die. When I approached, he just ran off.
The problem is in most FPS games there is no where for them to run off to.
Getting input and output directly from people's brains is a sort of "holy grail" that has been around for a while. Considering that there are rather major practical applications of it (most obviously: output -> movement for the physically disabled, input -> sight for the blind) it's inevitable that it will be eventually possible. Once you can send a signal directly to your brain, there would be no upper limit on how realistic something could be.
We're talking about games (or "movies") that come with a coupon for Depends so you don't shit your pants, here.
If the upper limit is that the game is indistinguishable from reality, aside from your own personal knowledge that it isn't real... then you really wonder how much people could take. Would it even be legal? What if a game existed that convinced you that it was a game but never "intercepted" your movements, directing you through your own environment (heavily filtered so you wouldn't recognize it) to go shoot people? What if a particularly meta game played off on that niggling little doubt, making you incessantly think, "oh shit, is this actually a game?"
Rise of the Triad used to do the first part, as in they would put their guns down and kneel on the floor, but if you let them live they'd shoot you in the back. I hated that, I'd rather have that they just kept shooting so you could kill them without remorse.
When you came up against a squad of 3-5 grunts with an Elite or Brute leading them, and you kill the Elite or Brute, the grunts just disband and go hide in the corner. Sometimes they might peak their head out to throw a sticky, but more often than not, they just tuck their head under a rock and hope to god you leave them alone.
In response to the OP question. I don't think I'll ever hit that point in regards to disgust. Now, I'm openly admit that I couldn't get past the 3rd level in FEAR when I tried to play it a couple months ago, because it scared the bejesus out of me.
Pokemon Safari - Sneasel, Pawniard, ????
That, and innocent bystanders. No war game ever had the guts to include civilians running for their lives and getting in your line of fire.
1. In GTA IV, when you have the choice to let the dude fall from the construction site near the beginning, and when you have the choice to kill Dwayne's old gf. I killed them both, but felt kind of bad afterwards.
2. I shot all the caged animals in the lab in RE5.
3. Whenever you smack Toad in the Mario Kart games and he sounds like a tortured little child.
Switch - SW-3699-5063-5018
What are you talking about? Arcade games do this all the time.
Pokemon Safari - Sneasel, Pawniard, ????
ArmA has civilians.
The ArmA sequel will include civilians and I am pretty sure the first one had civilians too. I can't remember if OpFlash did though.
edit- beat'd
Pokemon Safari - Sneasel, Pawniard, ????
Hahaha. Yeah, IIRC the God damn armor alone is 45lbs, plus 9lbs for your weapon and 9 more for the kevlar and however much all that fucking ammo weighed.
edit- Which doesn't even include any extra gear you might have. Claymores, shape charges, NVGs, etc, etc.
It was almost as embarassing as that Life episode with Prince of Persia.
I hate Law and Order; they're so preachy and bias that sometimes they rival 7th Heaven.
"You mean he played...to death?"
Or was that CSI...
Soldier of Fortune did as well. It was mission over if you executed an American civilian, but killing Iraqi civilians was fair game and had no penalties.
The devs patched that out pretty sharpish and called it an "accidental oversight" when the press asploded on that one.
Frankly, though, I'd welcome realism in games in terms of violence if only because it would open the possibility that violence would no longer be the default stance of the player. If there are real out-of-game consequences to a violent act, rather than "-10 to your GoodNice score!", then it becomes possible to put a player into situations where they can't easily just smack things repeatedly with a hammer, while retaining it as an option.
To be fair, the episodes in SVU and vanilla Law and Order that used video games as a "scapegoat" have, as I remember, always ended with the perp being guilty, and the "vidja games made me do it!" defense being laughed out of court.
This. CoD4 has a lot of powerful images. Firing on targets from a circling AC-130, while the pilots and AWACS confirm kills in a monotone voice, for instance. A spoiler for all two of you who haven't played yet.
The son of the major enemy killing himself while you charge at him in slow motion, powerless to stop him.
Watching your squad get gunned down at the end, barely killing the big bad guy of the game, and seeing the medics give up reviving your CO.
Seriously, epic scenes there.
Really doubt that.
Bloody Mess > realistic violence
Wow, really? Fallout 3 didn't strike me as particularly gory in any detail. I mean compared to a guy getting a cigarette put out in his eye before his throat is cut, or using a pair of pliers and a knife to take a bullet out of your leg, or living through the last moments of someones life after a nuclear blast, or hell, grabbing someone, punching them, and hurling them into someone else as a weapon seemed a lot worse to me than watching someones corpse explode in entirety from a single bullet
Trust me, its a horrible smell. A smell I do not have the words to accurately describe. There is just no way a sane person or a person who can actually smell would subject themselves to it willingly. Especially over a 10 hour or so game. More so if its a game set in the Middle East where the heat amplifies the stench.
edit- Of course if you misinterpreted my post and thought I meant that once they smell the smell they will never play any violent game, then that was not my intention. I was just saying they will never play another violent game that would also have that smell.
In response to Khavall.
If there's no psychological aspect to what's happening on screen then most of the time it just feels like mechanics and ragdolls. Maybe that'll change the day we really do have lifelike representations of humans in games, to the extent that I'd automatically emote with them on some human level. But they'd have to be more than just "technically" human in their appearances, they'd have to behave like humans as well otherwise you may as well be shooting robots.
When games start representing people realistically enough that I could come across a random enemy in-game and think to myself "you know, this guy and me, we could be buds in another situation" is likely the day I'm too uneasy to continue and stop playing altogether.
Given the kinds of directions that the industry's interested in going though, I think it's pretty unlikely. And if I'm honest, considering the kinds of advancements necessary in AI to get a facsimile of convincing and lifelike behaviour on-screen, I doubt we'd even have the necessary technology for it anytime soon either.
But more blood and chunks? That's easy, we've got the mechanics, and we can up it with the processing power with every generation.
Justify why you need to kill another man who is scared and crying for his mother. Even if it is a computer generated one.