Thorns

I've been paying more attention to video game criticism lately, and it feels like there's this growing backlash against the ubiquity of violence in video games. And to some extent I entirely agree: the idea that "real gamers play RPSs at the hardest difficulty"/"real games are FPSs with the latest graphics" is really restrictive and exclusionary, both of the variety of people who play games, and the variety of kinds of games we could be playing. One of the reasons violence is used so frequently as a core mechanic is that it's relatively easy to code and design, and that warps the narratives of games: Someone at Pax was talking about how if the only problem solving tool you have is "the protagonist kills someone" that really limits the kinds of stories you can tell, and warps the stories you do tell.

But there's a difference between 'we shouldn't default unthinkingly to using violence in video games" and "we should stop using violence in video games" and sometimes it feels like people are leaning towards the latter. I'm not some paranoid Gamergater thinking anyone's going to take my FPSs away, but I think dismissing genres like FPS out of hand lessens our ability to discuss and make games better.
( Read more... )

There's been some very interesting discussion of violence in fiction recently, in Militarism, pacifism, fandom naraht has some links and very interesting thoughts about pacifism.

My issue I guess with these posts is with the dichotomy between pro-military and pacifist. Because I love stories about violence, but my gut sympathies are very anti-military and while this is sometimes problematic, I think it's not inherently self-contradictory. This came up in the comments to naraht's post but I'd like to poke at it some more.
( And now some examples )