- What was the most appalling game you have ever played? Did it involve killing humans?
- During the gameplay are you aware of the fact that you are performing an act of killing or is it an automatic action?
- Does it evoke any feelings in you? If yes, what kind? (relief after a stressful day, satisfaction etc.).
- Did gaming immunize you to the view of death and blood?
- How gaming influences your view on murder? Is it less horrifying/appalling?
- If you had an ability to choose one game character and to have its powers, which one would it be? Why?
ok, here's an honest answer:
1. not counting some shitty flash clickbait or obvious racist trash like ethnic cleansing, i'd have to say subversively racist rpgs like mass effect or anything with entire races of evil beings out to get you. no, i didn't have to kill any humans when playing mass effect. that would be illegal and immoral (see below).
2. neither. i am performing a gameplay action to reach a specific goal. those aren't human beings, and there are myriads of specific stimuli telling that to me: their skin doesn't look real or in most cases even remotely human, they move wrong, they don't tract properly to the ground or when interacting with the enviornment, player character making physical contact with them doesn't actually make physical contact with them, they don't have anything resembling individuality for the most part, they don't cry out in pain, crawling away from you or begging you not to hurt them or act in unpredictable ways to high stress situations like real humans would, most importantly i can't smell or touch them, and countless other shit. in short, they are about as close an approximation of a human being as a stick figure or a cardboard cutout, or even less, since those i can touch, and it's blatantly obvious on both a conscious and subconscious level to me.
3. killing characters ingame? not really. the general actions as such carry feelings with them, for example in games with action controls: frustration when the action i planned out to do fails, even more so when it does so repeatedly and i cannot exactly pinpoint why, joy when it does succeed, even more so when it was difficult to pull-off, tension during execution of any given non-trivial action. games with less direct controls tend to evoke those feelings to a lesser degree, but then i am driven by my desire to explore and see what interesting ideas the developers came up with. the only time i actually felt something about a character death in a game was in saints row 2, which i played on the pc and didn't know about the timing bug. there is a mission where you have to chase somebody after a funeral. the chase took me around 10 retries due to the timing bug, at which point i was friggin frustrated and really glad when i finally managed to pull it off and saw the sequence where he is killed (you don't actually do it yourself).
4. fuck no. but having to cook my own meals and handle raw meat myself (or not eat any) did to some degree.
5. i don't know. if it did influence my view, it must have been so subtle and slow that i didn't even notice it changing in the slightest, so i cannot honestly tell that i think it did influence me.
6. superman. because i would not need to sleep, eat, drink, or fear any disease, while also being able to use the equivalent of a bike dynamo to power all my gadgets by hand. plus being able to sculpt metal with my bare hands would be pretty neat.