Getting squeamish about realistic butchery in videogames

[gurugeorge]

This is something I've often thought to mention, but keep forgetting. I've finally remembered and am doing it! (Or I may have mentioned it in a long ago post buried somewhere, but here it is for a thread.)

It speaks to the theme of the double-edged sword of realistic rendering and representation in videogames that's been a developing theme for me over the past couple of years.

As graphics have been getting more and more realistic, I've found myself getting more and more squeamish about the mass murder one often engages in in videogames.

Back when it was just pixels, no problem. But when you start seeing realistically rendered blood and guts, decapitation, etc., of human beings (as opposed to "monsters") one starts to wonder what one is (virtually) doing.

That sets the bar higher for in-game justification - so often the poor, overworked Nazis, or Nazi-a-likes, or even just White men generally bear the brunt of it. But then that starts to make game stories more samey, as education is getting so terrible that nobody seems to have any concept of justifiably-killable human bad guys before the Nazis and North American slavery.

The other oddity is that because of feminism, ironically, one finds oneself realistically butchering females quite often in modern videogames too. That in itself starts to get pretty weird.

 

[Wunderbar]

The last of us 2 is a good example of this. For a game that preaches "revenge is bad, muh circle of violence", it's so edgy and grotesquely realistic, it feels like a borderline torture porn.

 

[NJClaw]

The last of us 2 is a good example of this. For a game that preaches "revenge is bad, muh circle of violence", it's so edgy and grotesquely realistic, it feels like a borderline torture porn.

The scene where you fight as Abby against the big brute woman with the hammer (while escaping with the two kids) has a couple of death animations that forced me to divert my eyes. They were so brutal I couldn't watch them without feeling something in my stomach. I don't think this ever happened to me with any other game.

 

[JarlFrank]

I like killing people in games. I still come back to Postal 2 once in a while to indiscriminately murder civilians and watch them cry as they drag their charred bodies over the floor, or run around screaming while the stump of their arm leaks blood everywhere.

I installed these mods for People Playground just to have a more realistic torture simulator:
Humans scream when they get hit: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2494555615
More human-looking models than the default grey dummy: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2352063595

 

[gurugeorge]

I like killing people in games. I still come back to Postal 2 once in a while to indiscriminately murder civilians and watch them cry as they drag their charred bodies over the floor, or run around screaming while the stump of their arm leaks blood everywhere.

I installed these mods for People Playground just to have a more realistic torture simulator:
Humans scream when they get hit: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2494555615
More human-looking models than the default grey dummy: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2352063595

Postal 2 is too old to bother me, the graphics still look pretty unrealistic. I'm talking about more modern games with graphics that approach photorealism. It's not that I'm squeamish about murdering and torturing in games per se, it's that I've noticed I'm getting more squeamish the more realistic they get. Even if it's stlll cathartic at times, now and then it's like a bell ringing in my mind that there's something off about what I'm virtually doing, that it's starting to look indistinguishable from reality, and I don't, in reality, want to murder and torture people.

Obviously, on a mental level it's not that I'm confusing fantasy with reality, it's that there's something being activated at a deeper non-verbal level by the increasing realism.

 

[Manjuice Nutella]

Speaking of satisfying gibs, I unironically find close to perfection (modded) Fallout New Vegas. The ridiculous graphics of “bloody mess” (with or without a perk) combined with stellar sound - both “meaty”, squishy ludicrous gibs, as well as weapons.

NV is the best gun porn, there is no other game with such weapon variety, and most of them sound fantastic, meaty, punchy with a kick. There are few games that are good at this, hell, in most games even a shotgun sounds like a peashooter. Riot Shotgun packed with slugs/dragon breath is FEAR shotgun level of satisfaction.

Things like I.a. being able to loot an enemy by clicking on his eye that flew 30 meters away is just the cherry on top.

What can I say, it’s my guilty pleasure. Noteworthy mention off the top of my brain goes to Space Marine.

 

[Narushima]

one starts to wonder what one is (virtually) doing

I've started to feel the same as well, but also about the themes used in games more generally, where quite often you are not a hero, but an anti-hero. Like all the satanic imagery of 80s metal, but in games the proximity is greater when you're "actually" summoning demons and doing evil things, like in Hellslave.
Sandy Petersen, a Mormon, famously thought that the demons in Doom were okay, because you're fighting them, but I feel like we're moving in the opposite direction.

 

[HumanTotemPole]

Good post. I find realistic violence against other people and animals off-putting in any visual medium if used clumsily or badly. See the average 2010’s big budget TV show. I couldn’t get into Game of Thrones or the Walking Dead - too much intimate, sadistic violence in service of nothing but dreary nihilism. It’s an even bigger problem for games where the player tends to be the one doing or enduring the violence. Thinking of a few examples:

• TLOU2, obviously. The central conceit is that interpersonal violence is bad and leads to bad outcomes. Fair enough but it doesn’t work if the doing of realistic, consequential and grim violence is the central gameplay mechanic required for progression. Same trite shit as Spec Ops: The Line, just reskinned for 2020’s American cultural context.
• The modern Tomb Raiders. Regardless of the other issues those games have some of Lara's death animations look like they’ve been made by a committed snuff fan. I mean most people don't think like Armie Hammer when they see a woman.
• The new Wolfensteins, more specifically TNC. The grimy violence actually worked pretty well in TNO. Think BJ being revived via bloodshed then going on an exploitation movie rampage in the asylum level or the game's more general story arc i.e. you're an insurgent and have to do grim shit to succeed. In TNO that same grimy violence is no longer aesthetically consistent given that BJ is now part of a pozzed posse of diverse superheroes exorcising their past personal traumas on the world's most liberal submarine. Particularly odd in the finale - very weird vibes flippantly combining some rather tame revolutionary political statements with a lovingly realised and voyeuristic depiction of a live decapitation video.

 

[SumDrunkGuy]

 

[Derringer]

Reality is more disturbing than fiction, video games are a lame duck in comparison.

 

[gurugeorge]

Good post. I find realistic violence against other people and animals off-putting in any visual medium if used clumsily or badly. See the average 2010’s big budget TV show. I couldn’t get into Game of Thrones or the Walking Dead - too much intimate, sadistic violence in service of nothing but dreary nihilism. It’s an even bigger problem for games where the player tends to be the one doing or enduring the violence. Thinking of a few examples:

• TLOU2, obviously. The central conceit is that interpersonal violence is bad and leads to bad outcomes. Fair enough but it doesn’t work if the doing of realistic, consequential and grim violence is the central gameplay mechanic required for progression. Same trite shit as Spec Ops: The Line, just reskinned for 2020’s American cultural context.
• The modern Tomb Raiders. Regardless of the other issues those games have some of Lara's death animations look like they’ve been made by a committed snuff fan. I mean most people don't think like Armie Hammer when they see a woman.
• The new Wolfensteins, more specifically TNC. The grimy violence actually worked pretty well in TNO. Think BJ being revived via bloodshed then going on an exploration movie rampage in the asylum level or the game's more general story arc i.e. you're an insurgent and have to do grim shit to succeed. In TNO that same grimy violence is no longer aesthetically consistent given that BJ is now part of a pozzed posse of diverse superheroes exorcising their past personal traumas on the world's most liberal submarine. Particularly odd in the finale - very weird vibes flippantly combining some rather tame revolutionary political statements with a lovingly realised and voyeuristic depiction of a live decapitation video.

Yeah it's a problem in movies and tv shows increasingly. As the writing gets shittier, more vacant and more rote politicized, they seem to rely on what one might call virtual Coliseum-like spectacle more and more. It's partly an inheritance from comics art, I think - something most of us nerds probably loved at one time. Also gore movies and B movies. But comics, again, weren't realistic rendering, they were stylized, and gore was supposed to be throwaway black humour, not something with any purported weight.

Actually there are a few indie things that are done with great comic-like or anime-like rendering mixed with motion capture and acting, things like Arcane and Love, Death & Robots. Those get away with being sheer violent spectacle because they're highly stylized and very well done. They're like the parts of shitty movies you used to watch "just for the fx." But just hyper-realistic brutality, blood and gore without proper context, just for the sake of something to fill in the time and keep bums on seats - there's something very unpleasant and nihilistic about that, reflective of a society that's losing its way.

 

[gurugeorge]

Reality is more disturbing than fiction, video games are a lame duck in comparison.

True, but I don't watch videos of cartel mobsters chopping people up alive for entertainment.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

 

[Daemongar]

This is just the arc we are going with entertainment in general. At no point is society at large going to pull the brake and say "Well, that's shocking enough. That's the limit." It will continue on the path, in all manners of media. The movie IT had children getting killed and nobody batted an eye or said "that's unacceptable" - I expect more in the future, in more grizzly fashion. So, if you don't like where this is going, don't buy that shit.

 

[Daemongar]

Sandy Petersen, a Mormon, famously thought that the demons in Doom were okay, because you're fighting them, but I feel like we're moving in the opposite direction.

That's kind of inspirational that Elvira, beneath all the makeup and stuff, was devout and took a position on things. She catches a lot of grief for her being kinda bizzare (that hair!) but at least someone in Hollyweird is speaking out!!!!

 

[J_C]

Bunch of pussies ITT.

 

[randir14]

We need another Soldier of Fortune built with Unreal Engine 5 and gore in the highest possible fidelity.

 

[Heroic Liberator]

I take the same stance on gore in video games as I do in horror movies. I don't mind realistic violence and accurate depictions of wounds caused by various things (e.g. guns, bladed weapons, explosions). Just don't be gratuitous about it and don't center your creation around shit like body mutilation or superfluous displays of gore where they don't add anything to the story.

That said, I know that there's a public for that sort of gorehound thing. So meh, to each their own.

 

[HumanTotemPole]

I take the same stance on gore in video games as I do in horror movies. I don't mind realistic violence and accurate depictions of wounds caused by various things (e.g. guns, bladed weapons, explosions). Just don't be gratuitous about it and don't center your creation around shit like body mutilation or superfluous displays of gore where they don't add anything to the story.

That said, I know that there's a public for that sort of gorehound thing. So meh, to each their own.

I'd say absolutely be gratuitous with it if you know what you're doing. I love just about every Verhoeven or Cronenberg movie. Their films are chock full of lurid violence, bodily mutilation and perverse sexuality as a rule but it all works because the creatives in charge are using it skilfully to communicate their ideas or as an entertaining exercise in genre exploitation.

I'd say the same for games. The gore in KF2 (especially with Flex on though it runs like shit) is pretty intense but it is very obviously a genre exercise in monster squashing gratuitousness, perfect fit. Haven't played any of the SoFs but they always struck me as an exploitation riff on a military shooter. I imagine the gore is part of the fun and should be front and centre.

As a slight contrast the DOOM 2016 gore largely works but the takedowns feel strange sometimes. Just half an intimate second held too long on a POV close up of the monster's fear-filled eyes before you cave it's skull in and it's tonally off for me. Odd choice to try to generate even a fleeting moment of pathos for the enemies in the game about exterminating a bunch of literal monsters from Hell.

 

[Heroic Liberator]

I'd say absolutely be gratuitous with it if you know what you're doing. I love just about every Verhoeven or Cronenberg movie.

Robocop and Total Recall are among my favorite movies of all time (also Starship Troopers, but that one's quite tame and it could have used more gore), so I agree. That said, the sort of gore that Robocop had in particular didn't seem realistic enough as to disgust me despite being otherwise gratuitous.

Now on the other hand, the cut content from Event Horizon that is shown in a truncated manner through fast flashbacks is something that I would not have enjoyed watching most likely. Sadly it got lost since the original footage was stored in some Transylvanian salt mine and got deteriorated (due to a flood if I recall correctly, not that it matters).

 

[HumanTotemPole]

Exactly the animation I'm thinking of in the earlier post rusty. Very telling focus on her face and flailing hand movements, doubtless many pasty sickos have busted to that on loop, disgusting.

Gory player death scenes can work e.g. in a pulpy horror game like Dead Space (especially given the slapstick nature of some of the deaths in that game) but the above is odd in how specifically nasty and fetishistic it is for what I understand to be an otherwise run of the mill young woman coming of age story. Maybe the game's lib creators needed to express the desire to literally punish the character for her former status as a virtual and IRL sex symbol.

I'd say absolutely be gratuitous with it if you know what you're doing. I love just about every Verhoeven or Cronenberg movie.

Robocop and Total Recall are among my favorite movies of all time (also Starship Troopers, but that one's quite tame and it could have used more gore), so I agree. That said, the sort of gore that Robocop had in particular didn't seem realistic enough as to disgust me despite being otherwise gratuitous.

Now on the other hand, the cut content from Event Horizon that is shown in a truncated manner through fast flashbacks is something that I would not have enjoyed watching most likely. Sadly it got lost since the original footage was stored in some Transylvanian salt mine and got deteriorated (due to a flood if I recall correctly, not that it matters).

Displaying only snippets of the guro orgy in Event Horizon is probably more effective anyway. Your imagination is left to dwell on horrors unseen.

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

Thread is retarded and OT is a massive fag.

 

[Heroic Liberator]

pls no bully gurugeorge

 

[Naveen]

I suspect your issue is with animations outside your control, things you are forced to watch (and probably up-close,) not so much play. I mean, gory kills, death animations, QTE, etc. And, naturally, cutscenes.

 

[JarlFrank]

gurugeorge is definitely NOT a gurogeorge