this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2024
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[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?

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

I believe violent video games worsen us as humans. I believe the media we consume is largely tailored to reinforce worldviews that, even if only grudgingly, accept casual cruelty and violence at every level of society, and especially convey a sense that this is how it needs to be - and this is how American capital has largely captured the hearts and minds of its citizenry - even those of us unwilling to actually cooperate find ourselves pulled and forcibly immersed in this context that's reinforced by this kind of media.

This sort of thing, I believe, is why it's so common, even obligatory, for grimdark "prestige" entertainment to have a redundant message of "this world sucks but attempting to improve it is naive, childish, stupid, and/or wrong and may make this world even worse," which results in any character in the fiction attempting to improve society somewhat being shown as a fool, an idiot, or just a villain by comparison to the rest of the cast. disgost