[King Hadas]

I'm gonna jump into that violent video game argument up there.

I think my problem with the whole thing is the assumption that interactivity makes video games somehow more real but in my opinion video games are probably farther from reality, and therefore less of an influence on our actions, than any other medium. Movies are probably the ones closest to reality or at least what we perceive as reality.

Video game gore at its very best is still not very realistic. Dougclayton posted a video of Johnny Cage being cut vertically in half which looked pretty good; except his guts don't spill out, you don't see his dick flopping around even though his pants have also been cut in half (in fact his pants should slide right off), he splurts blobs of blood rather than bleeds it, his dead arms don't hang like dead arms should, his response to being cut in half is a mild aughhh and most important, even though we just watched Johnny die it's probably unlikely he'll become unplayable and we'll never see him again.

It's not that I don't understand people decrying all this violent imagery, I just don't think the violence in video games is somehow more significant than the violence in other media, it's probably less significant in fact. Can Kratos eviscerating mystical centaurs really compare to those horrible Saw movies where ordinary people are brutalized for crap reasons? I have played only one game in my life where the violence upset me and that was Chiller for the NES, that shit was fucked up.