[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?
The example of the Mortal Kombat developer really seems more like employee mistreatment rather than a problem with depicting ultra-violence itself. Nobody should be forced to look at gore for their job. Mortal Kombat fatalities are not “realistic” by any stretch anyways, no idea why they felt the need to go the “extra mile” there.
On the consumer end, I would say the context and framing of violence matters much more than the degree of brutality or the detail of its depiction. If I play an RPG Maker game where a pixel guy walks out of frame and then I hear a gunshot followed by the sound of a puppy whimpering, that will impact me much more than seeing Scorpion rip out Sub Zero’s heart and then burn him alive. Or the infamous Fullmetal Alchemist example where the dad fused his dog and his daughter together, not graphic in the slightest but it was and is a genuinely haunting scene. Meanwhile, nobody is actually traumatized by going on a murderous rampage in GTA San Andreas or playing MK9 as a 14-year-old.