The Onion Does Violent Game Satire Right

Who woulda thunk it? I was browsing around some of my favorite sites and happened upon the above brilliant video from The Onion. Funny enough, it actually got me thinking about how we as gamers tend to defend the latest gore-fest against allegations from others. I know that in the past I’ve had to explain to my non-gaming friends and my parents that violent games have things to offer other than exploding heads and flying torsos. This is usually while trying to convince those people that I’m not some kind of closet psychotic that gets a hard-on every time I see a piece of what used to be a hypothalamus splat against a wall.

I suppose the real question I’m thinking about is, ‘can, or should, games be excused for gameplay that is clearly dedicated to showing us mutilated bodies in as graphic a manner as possible, because of things like a good story or well-developed characters?’

I’m not sure that we’ve really had a decent game like that, as the games that focus on being as graphically violent as possible usually suck ass (see Manhunt 2, Soldier of Fortune etc.). But the question remains whether a game that is legitimately compelling, but unnecessarily and brutally violent, should be acceptable to us as gamers. Now I don’t mean this in the context of freedom of expression, but as a question of whether or not a game could be good, but so repulsively violent that we have something of a duty to shun it. What would it take to turn you off an otherwise good game? A scene where you realistically torture and kill a man? A woman? A child? Where does the line between video games and the real world get a little too close for comfort?

That’s a tough one for me to answer for myself, and I suppose that everyone will have a different level of tolerance. I do wonder how far mainstream games will go though. Will it be OK to graphically blow limbs off of children in games 20 years from now? Probably not, but it’s interesting to think about.