Why Does It Feel Good To Kill In Video Games?

[Nine Inch Heels]

4 hours ago, NoisyVelvet said:

I feel like Heels is arguing from her own nature and sensibilities in particular, but that's part of the self-looping irony towards its truth in the first place.  The shilling for cooperation over murder - is itself part of the same package of whether or not cooperation is a better virtue than murder in the first place :P.  It is also perhaps an echo from the primordial soup that formed Heels herself in the first place (unless she's just an anomaly), and a packet of inertia from the very same evolutionary advantages that brought her here in the first place.  (assuming certain evolutionary principals)

I see the Keen side and the Heels side as two layers of the same deep stack.  Maybe violence has virtue if that's all you have, but if there's a path for cooperation instead... maybe that's just better.  (I don't know if a 'cart-before-horse' evolutionary analogy is due here or fits)

As for the first point... I'm talking about myself way less than you might imagine... You've been around for long enough to know that I'm a highly disagreeable and combative person. Anybody who's been around for long enough will probably be able to confirm this based on several examples which can not only be found in this thread, but also in my posting history on this site...

 

As for the second point:

 

What my arguments are based on are primarily the findings of other people, who have looked way deeper into the topic that is human nature as I have, because my academic specialization has a strong lean towards concepts like workforce development as well as industrial and organizational aspects... Anything evolutional I am aware of, as well as some other on-the-side-studies such as psychometry are merely a side order...

 

Regardless, even I, as a confrontational and combative person know about fundamental principles I can and should accept as facts. That being for instance the principle of socialization among humans, which occurs despite our potential to commit atrocities when we're being pushed too far - leaving antisocial personality disorders aside here. In layman's terms, the fact that people gather in groups and smaller communities, such as tribes, before they engage in conflicts between tribes is as much a part of human history as all the wars that have happened are. So any claim made solely on the basis that people have always been at war at some point for some reason is inherently biased when that claim is then being employed as evidence to make the case that humans have a desire to kill... And I have gone to some lengths to explain why conflicts between tribes are not a result of mere primal bloodlust, but primarily a result of human propensity to cooperate in social groups paired with a very high degree of territoriality. Not once have I denied that the potential to kill is in all of us, in fact, most people who say they could never kill someone else under any circumstance are entirely oblivious to what's ticking under their own hood. But if the question is whether or not your average and healthy human being has a need to kill others, let alone beat them to the ground, then the answer is plain and simple "no", because that would make living in social groups completely impossible, since the primal drive that we would have to suppress at all times would eventually break loose, at which point there's bloodshed soon to follow...

 

The capacity for violence that we all have can be a virtue, if your life is being threatened, and it has been argued several times that the conflicts between tribes or ancient civilizations may have been an evolutionary engine to further ensure the survival of the fittest... Last I checked, even that claim is still being debated among evolutionary psychologists, and one big part of the reason why debates about it are still happening is the human tendency to gather in groups and live together in communities. These 2 things are at odds with each other. Likewise, and often ignored when people point to the stone age as an example for unbridled savagery, there have been enough archaeological findings of bones that broke once, but then healed, which gives sufficient reason to conclude that even back when mankind was at its most primitive, conflicts often ended once one side asserted their dominance over the other to a sufficient degree.

 

But regardless of whatever happens behind the doors of researchers, one thing I think we can all attest to is that, at some point, we have been aggressive towards someone else in ways we ended up regretting the very next moment. Be it a shouting match, punching or slapping someone in the face, or much worse than that. Regardless of how educated someone may or may not be when it comes to recorded history, you can't just brush these instances away as if they had no implications whatsoever, and ignore any and all psychological realities regarding how people react in extreme situations versus how they react under normal circumstances. What matters is which buttons are being pressed by externalities within a human's brain, because that's what determines the "tone" of the response. Which, again, is what leads to the necessary differentiation between potential and desire.

 

Keen's line of arguing is that we're a species with a history laced with wars and smaller conflicts, therefore we're bloodthirsty savages. Nobody here, not even I, disputes what's written in history books. What's being disputed is the supposed conclusion that's based entirely on a surface-level observation with very little in the way of substance to back it up. And that conclusion, again, confuses potential with desire, never mind confusing people in normal situations with people thrown into the maw of hell itself. Not to mention that this conclusion was made by a hypocrite, who, at the very first contact with me in this thread went on to beat up a straw man not only I pointed out as entirely unjustified - just as an aside...

 

4 hours ago, NoisyVelvet said:

I have a weird compulsion to quote you here too, lol.  Hmm, likewise, I wonder about what I'd do if I saw the boundaries of other people violated that I respected (both people, as well as the boundaries themselves) - I wonder what I'd do if I saw someone slip an LCD tablet into someone's drink at a party

I mean, I've had the questionable privilege of working in the local nightlife early on during my studies, and this is the kind of thing I have actually seen happen. How anybody else responds in that situation is not something I think I could say for sure, but what I can tell you is that I called in security and secured the spiked drink right after... The culprit was then handed over to the authorities, the evidence was secured, and the rest is history...

 

Having said that, I would not have minded punching that guy in the face, because of how prone any sort of rape is to ruin a person's existence, but what made me hesitate was the fact that I was dealing with a criminal whose "threat-level" I was entirely unaware of... It wouldn't help anybody if I got stabbed to death while enforcing a very loose sense of justice like a vigilante... In hindsight there's probably also an argument to be made that it might have gotten me in trouble as well, but that wasn't a thought I had then and there...

 

4 hours ago, NoisyVelvet said:

This next part is just to fuck with Heels's brain and make her lose sleep because I'm evil:  Do you know the fall-off-cliff example I mentioned?  We have the autonomy to jump off a cliff, but tend to not do it as a whole (or maybe just some people to serve as an example).  What if one had the power to shapeshift as well, the autonomy to transform into whatever just cuz.

I honestly don't know what this has to do with this here thread... But I would assume people would shapeshift into all sorts of creatures for all kinds of reasons, be it out of curiosity, or be it for convenience's sake... If I could shapeshift into a large bird and just fly where I wanted to go, I'd definitely do that often, and with impunity...

Edited January 22, 2022 by Nine Inch Heels

[SleepyVelvet]

Well played.  I can never tell if I'm the least or most self aware person in the room at any given time.  It's a fun curse, a blurse, if you may.

 

I wonder if me posting in Everything Else is a tell for some sort of "end times".  I hope I get out of here before it's too la... sees a thread with 'Neuromancer' in the title... FUCK!

[leodoom85]

Well, this thread is something, ain't it?

From the mechanics to kill or not to kill the enemy on screen to type a whole essay about morality...

 

You know...people need to separate videogames from real life, even if it's based on real life events and there are many games that does that. Yes, it has a satisfaction to kill OR not to kill most of the enemies present in a game in order to complete an objective to progress or to finish the whole game. Yes, I DO feel accomplished when the objective is taken out, killed, dispatched....etc. Yes, to survive in the game, it's either to kill or take out the opposition or to be killed to get a game over.

And yes, humans are an amalgamation of bullshit and stuff like that but....please, a videogame is just something that we created to have fun, like Doom, for example. Heck, even older games are made to kill or dodge the enemies and no one paid attention to it...and I'm not a violent person at all. I know to separate fiction and reality.

 

Just folks...separate those things, will ya?

[roadworx]

9 minutes ago, leodoom85 said:

Well, this thread is something, ain't it?

From the mechanics to kill or not to kill the enemy on screen to type a whole essay about morality...

 

You know...people need to separate videogames from real life, even if it's based on real life events and there are many games that does that. Yes, it has a satisfaction to kill OR not to kill most of the enemies present in a game in order to complete an objective to progress or to finish the whole game. Yes, I DO feel accomplished when the objective is taken out, killed, dispatched....etc. Yes, to survive in the game, it's either to kill or take out the opposition or to be killed to get a game over.

And yes, humans are an amalgamation of bullshit and stuff like that but....please, a videogame is just something that we created to have fun, like Doom, for example. Heck, even older games are made to kill or dodge the enemies and no one paid attention to it...and I'm not a violent person at all. I know to separate fiction and reality.

while that is true, real-life violence and violence in art and entertainment are intrinsically linked to one another; they're inseparable. it's not possible to have a good discussion about violence in the realm of fiction without delving into the how's and why's of actual violence, because both of them rely on the psychology of humans and whether or not we have a love for bloodshed. that will, of course, invite other topics such as morality and human nature as a whole, and discussions of that nature tend to generate lengthy posts and debates that sometimes get a bit heated.

[leodoom85]

15 minutes ago, roadworx said:

while that is true, real-life violence and violence in art and entertainment are intrinsically linked to one another; they're inseparable. it's not possible to have a good discussion about violence in the realm of fiction without delving into the how's and why's of actual violence, because both of them rely on the psychology of humans and whether or not we have a love for bloodshed. that will, of course, invite other topics such as morality and human nature as a whole, and discussions of that nature tend to generate lengthy posts and debates that sometimes get a bit heated.

Yeah but I'm generally the type that I don't care about being in lenghty posts and heated arguments because we all know that ends bad or, staying in the same point through loops.

If they want to stay there for hours, then so be it. And yes, I know that most things coming from videogames that are based in real life goes hand in hand. 

Oh well, humans are so complicated and can't understand to each other when these kind of topics are this spicy. That's why I have this mindset to not mix what happens in videogames with what happens in real life.

If that was simple coming from other people....sigh

[Rudolph]

55 minutes ago, leodoom85 said:

From the mechanics to kill or not to kill the enemy on screen

Well, no.

 

As I pointed out, I am not against killing in video games; I just wonder why it feels so good to kill in video games - or at least, certain video games.

[ENEMY!!!]

Humans have definitely enjoyed hunting down and killing prey over the years - maybe not other humans for the most part, but certainly animals and plants.  Our hunter-gatherer ancestors often needed to do this to obtain food, and sometimes incorporated enjoyment as part of the process.  Nowadays, as we no longer need to hunt and kill animals in order to get food, hunting and killing for pleasure is widely frowned upon, as we saw with the support for the UK hunting ban.  But many of the same pleasures can be sought harmlessly from hunting and killing bad guys in video games.  Instead of getting food, we get increased end of level stats, we get the sense of achievement of clearing out an area.  You could argue that some video games involve killing virtual humans, but it's still not the same as killing live human beings.

[leodoom85]

1 hour ago, Rudolph said:

Well, no.

 

As I pointed out, I am not against killing in video games; I just wonder why it feels so good to kill in video games - or at least, certain video games.

Suck that that's not how it works here in the thread.

Anyway, I'm out for now

[Rudolph]

@leodoom85 Eh, it is okay. The tangent, albeit unexpected, is not an uninteresting read.

[Captain Keen]

On 1/22/2022 at 1:47 AM, Nine Inch Heels said:

Yes, which means precisely what I said already. Your argument that "normal people" commit atrocities, therefore committing atrocities is normal human nature, is moot. Because you say there, quite clearly, that the leadership is what makes the big difference.... And that's because the leadership determines the "climate" in any given country, and totalitarian leaderships do way, way more than just that.

 

Well, not exactly. This is a Doomworld forum, so I may have CliffsNotes-d my opinions a bit into simplicity, but I think it's a mix of things. Our basic nature, our leadership, yes... but also our cultural attitudes. What does society value? What does society dislike? That can make a HUGE difference, especially when it comes to feelings of loyalty vs. individualism, and also the way we act out violence or anger or the way we fight our battles or come together for a common cause. And then there's the individual specifically. We're not all the same person, of course, and we don't all act out in the same ways as individual people. We don't all have the same morals, beliefs, personalities, goals, or desires.

 

I forgot where I read it, but in the mid-2000s I read a book that (again CliffsNotes-ing this) basically said people break into three categories. About 15% are "evil" for lack of a better word. They enjoy inflicting harm on others. They have no empathy. They are completely selfish. They enjoy real violence. Then about 15% are "good" for lack of a better word. No one is perfect, but these people have a set of internal morals which they follow, a code of sorts, and part of that code is genuinely trying to help the people around them and make the rest of the world better. They reject violence as much as possible. Shifting cultural attitudes do not change their outlook. (Again, I'm simplifying all of this down for the clarity of an internet post). And then there's the rest of us... the 70%. And that large chunk of the population could go either way. If societal attitudes and the people around us and our leaders say "love one another", then we try to do that and try to live peacefully. If they say, "go find x/y/z group and ostracize them or beat them or kill them", then they do that, and will quickly flip the way they behave almost seemingly out of nowhere. This book had all sorts of historical examples, and it's something that I believe is psychologically correct, considering my own personal experiences in the last 15 years, and also from learning more and more about history. (History really does repeat, or at least rhyme, as it goes in cycles psychologically.)

 

This is why I used that metaphor of the angel and the devil on our (humanity's) shoulders. Some people don't have that internal debate, they have firmly chosen a side. But society as a whole? It's always being pulled in one direction or another, and it's never ever static.

 

23 hours ago, NoisyVelvet said:

I see the Keen side and the Heels side as two layers of the same deep stack.  Maybe violence has virtue if that's all you have, but if there's a path for cooperation instead... maybe that's just better.  (I don't know if a 'cart-before-horse' evolutionary analogy is due here or fits)

 

I think cooperation (and getting beyond our most basic tribal instincts) has lead to our finest moments as a species. There are also examples where a near inevitable war has been avoided, such as South Africa at the end of the apartheid era. Humans are absolutely capable of both great good and great evil. We can be more than just our most violent, primal selves. Progress is real, and possible. If it came across that I feel we are only our worst selves, let me correct that now, we are absolutely capable of great good too. However, I don't think we can ignore our past, or the one constant throughout our history as a species: war. I sure hope someday we can get to a point where there are no significant conflicts or wars anywhere in the world for long stretches of time.

 

Ultimately, we are discussing the very nature of human beings. This is literally the oldest debate that exists. Thousands of years ago people like Plato and Aristotle asked themselves these same questions. I think it's a debate worth having, and I don't think it actually breaks down into one simple "this is right" and "this is wrong" conclusion. And this debate also directly relates to videogames, which are too often used as the easy scapegoat for real world violence. I remember my rabbi telling us, when I was a kid in 1994 or 1995, "we must reject games that celebrate violence like Doom" and then he went on to describe what sounded like Mortal Kombat. Unless Doom had finishers and I somehow missed that...?

[Nine Inch Heels]

1 hour ago, Captain Keen said:

Well, not exactly. This is a Doomworld forum, so I may have CliffsNotes-d my opinions a bit into simplicity, but I think it's a mix of things. Our basic nature, our leadership, yes... but also our cultural attitudes. What does society value? What does society dislike? That can make a HUGE difference, especially when it comes to feelings of loyalty vs. individualism, and also the way we act out violence or anger or the way we fight our battles or come together for a common cause. And then there's the individual specifically. We're not all the same person, of course, and we don't all act out in the same ways as individual people. We don't all have the same morals, beliefs, personalities, goals, or desires.

The key point you have been skating around, however, is that (in a totalitarian regime) the authorities make it a point to twist, warp, and redirect cultural attitudes in ways that seem favourable for the ones running the show. So, if you look at WWII and the Third Reich, you can see quite clearly how much propaganda has been run, and how much fear has been induced to prevent those who might object from getting too much in the way of traction. There is a stark difference between a government that only "cuts in to make course corrections" every once in a while when it seems absolutely necessary, and totalitarians who want to dictate the tone and content of public discourse as much as possible. A recent day example would be Erdogan in Turkey, who has put more journalists behind bars than anybody could possibly think is justifiable...

 

Culture, regardless of how deeply rooted in society, is malleable at the very least, and de-constructable at worst. If you play the "control the media, control the mind" game properly, you get to dictate what society likes. You don't get results overnight, and not from one week to the next, but you play that game for long enough, and you play it carefully enough, and you get out of society and culture whatever you so desire. At some point all that's left to do is to stir people up sufficiently, and you'll have them cheering at the prospect of a war against "evil"...

 

The argument based on loyalty vs individualism is sketchy in the context of WWII, or wars in general. Because every power in charge ever made it a point to give every part of society as many reasons as possible to be supportive of the war that was soon to happen. The difference merely lies in how good of a job they did at that.

 

At the bottom line, if anyone of us was born around the time Nazi-Germany started taking shape, the vast majority of us would have been masquerading as supporters of Hitler's cause at the very least, or played along happily while believing in whichever kind of fucked up idea Hitler or Goebbels presented. The important part there, though, is that long before people commit acts of violence against anyone, in this particular case jews, they would have to be subjected to any and all relevant propaganda to a sufficient degree. And propaganda is not a 19th century invention either - town criers for example were one of mankind's first dedicated "propaganda machines".

 

Once you stirred the kind of resentment within the population that you need, you then proceed to push boundaries - one at a time. You normalize hating a minority, you normalize dehumanizing them, your normalize demonizing them, you then normalize imprisoning them, then you proceed to normalize killing them. This process is often called "encroaching" - you push people along a long path one tiny step at a time. Then, you also need to consider things like "emotional numbing". The more often you see something happen, the less susceptible to that stimulus you will become with regards to how impactful (or wrong) it feels.

 

Your values, and your cultural heritage... They're way less solid and unshakable than you might think.

 

1 hour ago, Captain Keen said:

I forgot where I read it, but in the mid-2000s I read a book that (again CliffsNotes-ing this) basically said people break into three categories. About 15% are "evil" for lack of a better word. They enjoy inflicting harm on others. They have no empathy. They are completely selfish. They enjoy real violence. Then about 15% are "good" for lack of a better word. No one is perfect, but these people have a set of internal morals which they follow, a code of sorts, and part of that code is genuinely trying to help the people around them and make the rest of the world better. They reject violence as much as possible. Shifting cultural attitudes do not change their outlook. (Again, I'm simplifying all of this down for the clarity of an internet post). And then there's the rest of us... the 70%. And that large chunk of the population could go either way. If societal attitudes and the people around us and our leaders say "love one another", then we try to do that and try to live peacefully. If they say, "go find x/y/z group and ostracize them or beat them or kill them", then they do that, and will quickly flip the way they behave almost seemingly out of nowhere. If societal attitudes and the people around us and our leaders say "love one another", then we try to do that and try to live peacefully. If they say, "go find x/y/z group and ostracize them or beat them or kill them", then they do that, and will quickly flip the way they behave almost seemingly out of nowhere. This book had all sorts of historical examples, and it's something that I believe is psychologically correct, considering my own personal experiences in the last 15 years, and also from learning more and more about history. (History really does repeat, or at least rhyme, as it goes in cycles psychologically.)

 

I'll go over this briefly.

 

The vast majority of outlets that cover things such as how many "evil" people are among the population will point towards the numbers I have already presented (multiple times). 1% psychopaths, 4 -5% sociopaths. Not 15%. Those are the psychologically correct numbers that you will find almost everywhere. It's the scientific consensus of experts on the subject of human psychology, which is the consensus that matters the most here, because, yes, we are talking about how humans tick. And it's both psychopaths and sociopaths who are known to be lacking in - or incapable of - empathy while nearly everything they do is ultimately self-serving, even if it comes at the expense of others...

 

Even if we were to cast the widest possible net, and look for the percentage of people among the population with just any personality disorder (not just antisocial personality disorders), your maximum estimate is 13%. Not 15%. And that's accounting for personality disorders like borderline as well, for example. At most I will grant you that borderliners have a higher propensity to snap than a healthy human being, but that does not make them "evil" by any stretch of the imagination, most certainly not in the way your cliffnotes seem to define the term "evil".

 

There is no way whatsoever that this 15% estimate, which seems to come from a historian (who is neither a psychologist nor a psychiatrist), survives contact with reality. The numbers you provide defy scientific consensus, and it does not matter that you believe they're psychologically correct, since those numbers are demonstrably false. Anybody can do a quick search on the internet to confirm this, and the confirmation won't come just from wikipedia, but from all sorts of outlets, including but not limited to clinics...

 

...Which brings me back to what annoys me so much about the way you construct your arguments, which, again boils down to employing surface level observations as a means by which to connect dots arbitrarily and making conclusions you then proceed to present as facts - which then turn out false. You have no idea whatsoever how humans tick. Your anecdotes are irrelevant in the eyes of any scientist ever, and nobody cares if anything written in any history book ever lines up with your own experiences, because that's what called confirmation bias. Your beliefs don't have even remotely the same merit as large-scale studies conducted by professionals.

[Captain Keen]

3 hours ago, Nine Inch Heels said:

...Which brings me back to what annoys me so much about the way you construct your arguments, which, again boils down to employing surface level observations as a means by which to connect dots arbitrarily and making conclusions you then proceed to present as facts - which then turn out false. You have no idea whatsoever how humans tick. Your anecdotes are irrelevant in the eyes of any scientist ever, and nobody cares if anything written in any history book ever lines up with your own experiences, because that's what called confirmation bias. Your beliefs don't have even remotely the same merit as large-scale studies conducted by professionals.

 

Unfortunately, that's not what I've been saying. You're not actually reading what I am writing, so we're now stuck in a loop. You've simply resorted to personal insults and talking down to others (not just me, too). I never said "1% psychopaths, 4 -5% sociopaths" are the only people who cause harm for the planet or for others. It's also why I said I was wayyyyy CliffsNotes-ing my points, as that ≈15% isn't in reality just people who like to kill but also those who desire power/money/control/etc. It's a combination of a bunch of different groups of "bad" people (for lack of a better word) into one single entity for the sake of brevity. Obviously your run-of-the-mill Jeffrey Dahmer isn't the same as your run-of-the-mill Jordan Belfort who isn't the same as your run-of-the-mill Ratko Mladić, even though they all cause incredible harm to others. However, those are three very different types of human beings. They all harmed others in very different ways, too.

 

You have responded in an incredibly bizarre manner, as far as I can tell, as if this was some personal battle. Obviously there is something going on here that is far beyond anything that anyone could ever write on a Doomworld forum, and I can only hope you get the peace of mind that you desire. From my POV, you have not argued in good faith, and I don't like to respond to personal attacks. Debates don't have to be personal. They don't have to be about declaring yourself as better than someone else. You can just argue the ideas without using such angry language or talking down to others as if they are beneath you. You also said you were 'done' with me and yet have continued to respond, which always amuses me. The internet really doesn't have to be such a hostile place.

 

Anyway, since I can tell you will just keep responding until the very end of time, I think I'm gonna leave it here. We're just going in circles at this point, and I don't see anything positive that can come from further conversation. I really don't take any of this personally, and I hold no ill will against you or anyone else.

[Nine Inch Heels]

1 hour ago, Captain Keen said:

Unfortunately, that's not what I've been saying. You're not actually reading what I am writing, so we're now stuck in a loop. You've simply resorted to personal insults and talking down to others (not just me, too).

The only "resorting to anything" I see right here is you resorting to waving around the victim flag, but for the sake of doing this "discussion thing" properly I'll entertain you once more:

 

1 hour ago, Captain Keen said:

I never said "1% psychopaths, 4 -5% sociopaths" are the only people who cause harm for the planet or for others.

So, I have been reading what you wrote carefully, and I'll quote it again for clarity's sake:

 

6 hours ago, Captain Keen said:

I forgot where I read it, but in the mid-2000s I read a book that (again CliffsNotes-ing this) basically said people break into three categories. About 15% are "evil" for lack of a better word. They enjoy inflicting harm on others. They have no empathy. They are completely selfish. They enjoy real violence.

The highlighted part right there describes antisocial personality disorders pretty damn well, albeit in layman's terms. If you wanted to also include things such as money-grabbing capitalists with no regards for our ecosystem, then you should have done that explicitly, because, for practically the entire time, we've been going back and forth on things like war, and what you believe war says about psychology and human nature. So, anything you keep adding to the topic at hand is going to be viewed through that respective lens, unless you clearly specify what it is that those numbers actually mean and where they are coming from. And it's not that hard. I've clarified where my numbers come from and what they mean multiple times over without feeling like I had to bend over backwards. So, how about instead of complaining that I'm  not reading the things you were too lazy to write down, you afford me the courtesy of doing the same legwork that I've been doing so far?

 

1 hour ago, Captain Keen said:

You have responded in an incredibly bizarre manner, as far as I can tell, as if this was some personal battle.

Yes. If I'm being thrown into the same basket as a holocaust denier then I tend to take that personally, you mediocre internet troll. I'm still waiting for an apology, by the way... Not that I'm expecting to get one out of you, because that would require practising what you preach for a change.

 

1 hour ago, Captain Keen said:

From my POV, you have not argued in good faith, and I don't like to respond to personal attacks. Debates don't have to be personal.

Good, then don't make them personal next time, only to cry foul once the door swings the other way.

 

1 hour ago, Captain Keen said:

You also said you were 'done' with me and yet have continued to respond, which always amuses me.

Translation: "Hee hee hee, I got you good right there for engaging with me again. You gave me another chance, look at you, idiot"

Edited January 24, 2022 by Nine Inch Heels

[Rudolph]

Folks, please take this argument to DMs or something. It is not productive to either the original topic or the philosophical tangent you went on. :S

[act]

On 1/21/2022 at 8:54 PM, act said:

Spoiler

 

It's because we are the most violent, bloodhungry apes on the planet. Chimpanzees can be brutally violent, sure, but their violence is mostly secluded to intrasexual combat on a level that isn't particularly as destructive as we are. Not to mention that their hunting efforts are usually against very small monkeys. With us? We literally, for sport, go after bears and wolves and all that jazz.

It is within our blood to engage in violence. Take that as you will. Considering the fact our streets aren't covered in blood, it's quite clear we have the capability to put the fists down and not butcher eachother for sport to accomplish anything else.

 

And if it matters, this is coming from someone who nearly got murdered by a group for the fun of it.

 

 

As a quick addendum to the above, I'd like to turn your attention to the Grizzly Bear. You ever seen one? I can thank God I haven't. Those things are, if you mess up or are just plain old unlucky, will destroy you. Our best technology for doing any sort of damage that an average person could use against a bear for the intent of killing, that being firearms, do pretty much nothing to a bear unless you have a comically powerful cartridge that's considered extreme overkill for any other animal.

Now anyways, you know why there's a bear in the California flag? That's because there were bears in California. But not anymore! Although obviously thanks to us, it wasn't an ambient "that's-how-it-goes" type of thing, where we take away it's food source and shoo it away to another area. No, we killed them all. One guy killed 20 of these indestructible behemoths within the span of a few years, IIRC. The absolute carnage we've enacted on these animals that were on the top of the food chain ended in the last California Grizzly being seen in a national park. He seen us, and basically said "Fuck you guys, you guys are assholes. I'm leaving, you don't get to kill the last bear." and left. Since then, which was about 100 years ago, the specific species is now extinct.

We literally decided to enact genocide on a species that was an apex predator, who was extremely resistant to anything we could throw at it, and won.

[THEBaratusII]

I find that killing monsters is fun because it pretty much conquered my fears from watching horror movies when I was a child, because my mother was a horror movie addict of course. I thank Doom for conquering my fears ever since, and of course changing my life as well.

[Maes]

Well, mostly because you dispatch of your immediate problems rapidly and cleanly, and for the most part without pesky legal and ethical considerations. If only it was that easy in real life, eh? Even if you consider the lightest version where you simply "defeat", rather than "kill" your opponents.

[mrthejoshmon]

I've always preferred to just fix most issues by rolling a grenade in.

 

Works wonders when babysitting.

 

Nah, it's a primal "oooh eee ahh ahh" monkey brain thing, most folks never feel truly alive till they're in danger and ain't nothing more dangerous than violence. It's also very cathartic, when someone or something pisses you off the monkey inside tries to tear out and go ape mode on it, naturally like the well adjusted member of society you are you suppress the monke rage and go back to your mundane life.

 

Video games are a great way of committing violence that your primal self really wants to without actually committing violence, same kinda thing with sex really, some games are great surrogates for sexual gratification too, probably why hentai shovelware is so popular

Spoiler

and we all know that if you're on Doomworld there is a low chance you're an active thug and an even lower chance that you're having sex ;)

 

[Helm]

interesting subject. A lot has been said generally about violence in videogames in this thread and I won't say the same shit. Perhaps aside of saying that there is a big difference in discourse between 'do videogames make us more violent?' to which I think a fairly safe answer is 'no' and the question 'do violent videogames that cast us as the justified party, using violence and death to solve a conflict prepare us to accept that the justified party in a conflict can use violence to solve it in the real world?'. Think about the latter vis-a-vis a life for many kids growing up playing call of duty and stylekilling invariably ethnic, exotic, non-American terrorists for reasons. Would they then growing up be more ready to accept that, say, the military forces of a 'virtuous country' can act as world police? As long as it's justified, there is a moral pretext, that is, then they can drone strike and ground troop inject some democracy anywhere in the world and we have this handy sensory simulacrum experience of us doing the same thing, for the same moral pretext, in videogames, for a long time.

So, not an originator of violence but a propaganda tool, one of many, I think there is a case. I'm more interested in the ideological bent of ALL violent media rather than the visceral details of the violence. Who is getting killed for and why, not 'oh my god, depictions of someone getting killed, avert your gaze!'.

At least in Doom you kill demons. And you've been killing the same demons for decades, it starts to feel like a rote play, less than a realistic event, to shoot yet another pinky in the face.

First of all, after playing Doom since 1994 I see most of the monsters as my friends. Especially the imps, I feel they're just the grunts of the hell invasion and they're doing the best they can. They're working class, I have more in common with them than with UAC. When I spot them in corridors I go 'oh, here's a few more friends' and I promptly glide up to them and try to get 2-3 imps at the same time with the SSG, heh. But the whole cast is pretty funny and full of character, in the end.

When doom really rattles me (map is hard, map too spooky and hard, I am playing like shit, etc) then my demeanor changes and I start to berate the monsters as I dispatch them. Fuck you, fuck that, etc. After the period of stress passes, I default back to loving every doom entity in one way or another.  This is to say that obviously my brain has a way to derive symbolic pleasure out of dispatching these eternal little sprites (the 'cleaning you room' or 'domesticating the wilderness' effect, certainly not innocent) without actually feeling any real animosity towards them, or even a little but buying into the underlying fiction of being a 'space marine' that has to 'save earth from hell'. Perhaps when I was 11, sure. But we've been playing this fucking thing for an eternity, now I am resolutely a 38 year old person that is stiil playing a game they loved in their youth, because they love to see how community members express themselves in the common mapping language of doom.

I posit that for all long-standing players of something like doom, there's an element of love for the symbols of the game, entities, etc and love for the concept on the whole, otherwise why would you keep coming back? The desire to keep playing the game is not driven by some psychotic animosity against demons, right? That's very interesting to me.

At the same time definitely 100% the default violent boyish fantasy of doom (that some very young adults in Texas definitely were into) about killing demons overcoming overwhelming odds as a cool space marine with 8 guns etc shapes the culture around this game. The kind of people that were attracted to this as kids or are attracted to it now are definitely responding to the visceral violence and quick paced action of the game. If we went to a, say, an adventure game forum we'd notice a lot of culture differences.


 

[Marisa the Magician]

I can't feel good about killing in videogames if it's represented in an excessively graphical and accurate way. However if it's done in an over-the-top cartoony way that's just as clean and quick as possible it's easier to dissociate from the act of killing someone in cold blood, seeing the light in their eyes fade away as they bleed out, as they struggle and cling to the last sliver of life left in them before it all ultimately can't go on and they die... and realize it's all just a game. Kinda like how a more accurate and realistic depiction of the act of choking out someone in a stealth game would be horribly off-putting from how long and gruelling it can be compared to just "cover someone's mouth and they'll pass out in a couple seconds".

 

With that said, yeah, the complete detachment from reality does play a huge factor in why people like killing in games. As it's been reiterated several times, it's just a game, it's all make-believe, real living beings aren't being harmed. You aim your weapon at a thing, click the mouse, and it plays a stock sound of someone squishing mincemeat while it bursts into chunks that bounce around and paint the walls. Satisfaction guaranteed.

 

As a last note: Stuff like that is why I can't stand how some games (and mods) add more "depth" to killing enemies by visibly amping up their suffering the more they are wounded.

[Rudolph]

3 hours ago, Marisa Kirisame said:

As a last note: Stuff like that is why I can't stand how some games (and mods) add more "depth" to killing enemies by visibly amping up their suffering the more they are wounded.

Are you talking about games like Soldier of Fortune and their "strategic dismemberment" feature or does that apply to goofier stuff like Borderlands, where enemies can get graphically burned to death, melt by acid or shocked to death?

[Marisa the Magician]

I'm talking about stuff like "shooting an enemy's gut and having their intestines fall out, screaming in pain while panicking and trying to push them back in". You know, things that honestly sound more like snuff film material.

[Rudolph]

I have never seen a snuff film, so I would not know... :S

 

I guess what you are describing is crap like the new Mortal Kombat games' fatalities that are inspired by pictures of real-life gore and gave the developers PTSD?

[roadworx]

3 hours ago, Rudolph said:

I have never seen a snuff film, so I would not know... :S

 

I guess what you are describing is crap like the new Mortal Kombat games' fatalities that are inspired by pictures of real-life gore and gave the developers PTSD?

yeah, that sorta shit honestly goes WAYYY too far. there's a line between obviously fictional violence and incredibly graphic, fucked up violence, and games like that do a somersault over it. it's like an exploitation film, honestly

 

it can, of course, be done a bit more tastefully (see: verdun) but it rarely ever is

[Rudolph]

I admit, I giggled in a "I certainly was not expecting that!" kind of way the first time I witnessed Brutal Doom's fatalities

 

Weirdly enough, I do not mind them, as they do fit Doom's trademark ultraviolence. I might even prefer them to Doom 2016's Glory Kills!

[ZethXM]

Video games evolved from toys to bigger toys through various revolutions in their ability to psychologically stimulate their consumers.  The "killing" itself is incidental.

 

Games rarely accurately simulate killing or even basic violence, either in the small details of the act or the immediate and long-term consequences.  It wasn't advantageous to toy salesmen to try and model those things.  Rather, "killing" is shorthand for the completion of a subtask, and we reward the player with stimulus.  The stimulus is what you enjoy.  Then you do more of it, and hopefully want to experience that so much that you spend money on the next opportunity to do so.

 

When game developers push against games' evolutionary refinement and fail to provide that stimulus, or provide a negative one, it's usually A. Immediately termed an artistic statement, and B. Highly controversial.  Spec Ops: The Line famously went out of its way to call out the player for playing the game, trying to use the medium of video games to make an anti-war statement for its era (MGS was, as always, far ahead of its time).  It got a pretty strong backlash from people who didn't like that their entertainment device was judging them for using it rather than dispensing dopamine.

 

Undertale took this a step further.  It sought to more fully explore the reasons people played video games, and to that end it provided plenty of alternative stimulus that ran much deeper and wider than the satisfaction of a trigger pull or the acquisition of power and resources.  The discovery of how each of your actions changes the way the characters in the world regard you generated a powerful sense of relationship, and an extreme sense of replayability.  It used that to explore the nature of engaging with a world that is fundamentally at your mercy, and how you choose to treat the characters within it, in order to acquire more of its particular brand of stimulation:

• How far you were willing to go to see all there was to see
• If that deep need to replay and wring out all the entertainment you can could override the deep negativity of monotonously slogging through deeply unrewarding combat to literally exhaust the world of all other interaction, all just to see something new
• If those people you eventually chose to kill were ever capable of forming enough of a "real" connection with you to be your friends
• If you'd kill your friends out of boredom if you were God

It, too, was controversial; people don't like being made to feel bad for actions they are free to explore, and for some the complaint was that the game didn't distinguish between just violence and unjust violence.  I personally feel the game covers this with the aforementioned "you are literally God" exploration, but the game doesn't immediately make that diegetically clear.

 

Now, Spec Ops was a financial failure, mostly known for being a brown corridor shooter with an interesting premise of self-awareness that hates you for playing it, but the general sentiment is that people should experience it exactly once. However, Undertale was wildly popular in spite of breaking that convention of murder in video games giving you positive feedback.  You could probably write a book on that premise alone, if it was really providing negative stimulus in the long run in locking its most famous and memorable end sequence behind deliberate drudgery.

 

The final example I have to talk about here is Paper Mario: Sticker Star (really, any of the last three PMs, but Sticker Star has it the worst).  Nintendo'd been on a huge kick of trying to purge their games of extrinsic motivation, with a huge range of results.  Sticker Star is considered an awful game for it.  You acquire nothing for proceeding through the gameplay loop but the opportunity to play more Sticker Star.  You get no graphical splatter, no pleasing recoil, no catharsis in the moment.  No pleasure from solving puzzles, no enjoyable humor or interesting writing of any kind, no experience to look forward to at all. What you get for battling and destroying your enemies is more battling and destroying your enemies.

 

To me, this is the purest refutation of video game killing and death as intrinsically motivating as you'll find.  The toy failed to stimulate its players in any way beyond the creation of memories.  And it did terribly.  Even Spec Ops has something to say.  Playing Sticker Star actually feels like a waste of life.

 

So, in summary, killing in video games doesn't feel like anything but itself.  It doesn't resemble the real thing, and making it more like the real thing creates a profoundly negative experience most people dislike and seek to avoid.  It's a discrete event to hang stimulation on in order to sell more video games, either on raw, visceral conditioning or on the promise of new experiences and relationships, even negative ones, and its primacy comes from convention more than something inherent to consumers themselves.

[Rudolph]

3 hours ago, ZethXM said:

It got a pretty strong backlash from people who didn't like that their entertainment device was judging them for using it rather than dispensing dopamine.

I generally agree with your overall comment, but I feel like the backlash against Spec Ops: The Line might be more complex than that.

 

From what I read about Spec Ops: The Line, it tries to have its cake and eat it too in the sense that it does feature solid dopamine-dispending third-person action gameplay, but at the same time it tries to shame you for playing the game the only way you are allowed to. You play an overpowered three-man squad that can somehow murder its way through dozens after dozens of fairly mindless enemies without problem, only to be thrown into scenarios where you suddenly cannot afford to do that anymore and you have to commit some kind of war crime - as if gunning down so many people in cold blood was not enough to convey the developers' supposedly anti-war message. This strikes me as a bit intellectually insulting.

 

In many ways, this is more or less the same kind of problem that BioShock (incidentally also published by 2K) has: it tries to make a case against the cruelty and absurdity of unrestrained capitalism, but at the same time, it forces you to actively partake in it by having you beat mentally-ill persons to death and loot your way to power and wealth. To me, it feels as if every now and then in Doom, the player would have to stop and reflect on the senseless violence he has been inflicting upon his enemies so far, e.g. finding out that the Pinky you just sawed to death had not just feelings but also a family. It might work for a short, absurd experimental game or even a subversive one like Undertale, but for a full-blown AAA militaristic shooter that takes itself completely seriously, this sounds to me like a recipe for disaster because of all the conflicting messages the game sends you.

 

At the end of the day, I much prefer Undertale - even though the bullet hell mini-games get tiresome fast, especially on subsequent playthroughs, and I wish I could just skip them altogether - because it allows you to simply not engage in the behavior the game considers to be morally wrong. I personally could never bring myself to do a Genocide run anyway, not just because peacefully interacting with the characters is ultimately more rewarding than killing them, but also because I hear the Genocide run ends on an intensely difficult fight that I simply do not have the nerves for.

[ZethXM]

1 hour ago, Rudolph said:

From what I read about Spec Ops: The Line, it tries to have its cake and eat it too in the sense that it does feature solid dopamine-dispending third-person action gameplay, but at the same time it tries to shame you for playing the game the only way you are allowed to. You play an overpowered three-man squad that can somehow murder its way through dozens after dozens of fairly mindless enemies without problem, only to be thrown into scenarios where you suddenly cannot afford to do that anymore and you have to commit some kind of war crime

 

My initial draft of my post went into greater detail on Spec Ops along the lines you outlined, yeah.  The main reasons I invoked it were:

 

A. To contrast it with Undertale, which provided an alternative gameplay loop rather than simply making the same loop provide negative feedback.

 

B. To point out that buying a video game comes with a series of expected conventions that evolved over the history of video gaming, and people understandably didn't react well to one designed to effectively punish them for engaging with it at face value.  In other words, that Spec Ops has murder in it doesn't make it intrinsically entertaining.  The feedback provided for doing the murder (and crucially, as you mentioned, its feedback is all long-term) is more important.

 

1 hour ago, Rudolph said:

as if gunning down so many people in cold blood was not enough to convey the developers' supposedly anti-war message. This strikes me as a bit intellectually insulting. 

 

I disagree with this specifically, though.  I think your example of Bioshock actually explains fairly well why that assumption won't bear out - Bioshock rewards the player for participating in a system of behavior it facially claims is harmful and ultimately fails to judge the player with its stated rubric.  Spec Ops is at least internally consistent in that it thinks the player despicable for showing up to a no-win scenario expecting to be treated like a hero when maybe they're really just in it for the visceral satisfaction, and the way it chooses to explain that is to simply not treat you that way. 

 

I can't disagree that its execution was pretty contrived in practice, but had it simply said War is Bad most people would have just kinda shrugged, or worse, asked it why it rewarded them for engaging with it.  It has the disadvantage of being about war, so unlike Undertale it can't really provide an alternative positive feedback solution since you can't really show up to a war as a soldier without having your agency and motivations determined in advance.

 

I actually think the correct Doom analogue is some of the levels in Mock 2, particularly Tapeworms Suck Anii.  You're doing all the Doom things!  Going through corridors, shooting demons, encountering traps.  Except it's completely soulless and unrewarding.  Shoot your 100th imp, round the next corner, shoot the next imp, pick up the next shotgun shell, repeat, repeat, repeat.  You are a tool, a machine executing tasks.  Are you having fun?  Then, why continue?  You could just Quit.

 

Point and click, until it is done.

[Rudolph]

I have not played Mock 2, but what you describe seems to be just a silly, hollow joke than a real introspection. It reminds me of The Stanley Parable, which I know many people seem to love but strikes me as just insufferably self-indulgent and trying way too hard to be clever.

 

I think I would have been much more sympathetic of what Spec Ops: The Line was trying to do had it treated the murder of a single enemy as a tragedy. Also, I probably would not have started the game in media res with a rail-shooter sequence where your character is manning a freaking minigun.... It is hard for me to take the game very seriously after that! Honestly, if I were to play through the game today, I would probably just shut my brain off and focus on mowing down as many enemies as I can, as the shooting on its own is quite enjoyable; I did that already with quite a few games that featured a story that I did not care much for, so I do not see Spec Ops: The Line being too different in that aspect.

 

3 hours ago, ZethXM said:

you can't really show up to a war as a soldier without having your agency and motivations determined in advance

Eh, I have to disagree there. Not to start a whole new tangent, but while it is true that the military breeds killing machines, many soldiers enlist because they come from an impoverished background and they seek to improve their socioeconomic circumstances or, depending on the time period or country, they find themselves pressured into serving in the military under penalty of jail or even death. As such, there is no shortage of stories of soldiers who once making it to the battlefield ended up refusing to take arms, disobeying orders, deserting or even downright mutinying.

Edited February 8, 2022 by Rudolph

[ZethXM]

4 minutes ago, Rudolph said:

Eh, I have to disagree there. Not to start a whole new tangent, but while it is true that the military breeds killing machines, many soldiers enlist because they come from an impoverished background and they seek to improve their socioeconomic circumstances or, depending on the time period or country, they find themselves pressured into serving in the military under penalty of jail or even death. There is also no shortage of stories of soldiers who once making it to the battlefield ended up refusing to take arms, disobeying orders, deserting or even downright mutinying. 

 

I'm from a dead small town in Kansas, I can assure you I'm acutely aware of the poverty draft.  In high school circa 2007 (when the game began development) there was still plenty of "defend the country" sentiment supplementing that, and still a lot of surface reverence for veterans, despite the roughly three-year decline since the Iraq War began.  There was definitely a market for the message, though Spec Ops was pretty late to the party in terms of speaking truth to power when it finally came out.

 

Anyhow, the point I was trying to get at was that those acts of disobedience you mention imply a story about being a deserter or a mutineer or a prisoner rather than a soldier, which ceases to be the discussion Spec Ops wants to have: that atrocities are an inevitability in war no matter why you picked up the gun, or in this case, the game, and the only way to prevent that is to quit.  Your act of desertion or mutiny is to stop playing the game, which is ironically considerably less costly than actual desertion.  Providing an alternative incentive structure the way Undertale did would defeat its own point.

 

And just to address the unsaid, you could theoretically be a soldier in a war and not see action, but nobody made a raft of video games about that for Spec Ops to comment on.

 

45 minutes ago, Rudolph said:

I think I would have been much more sympathetic of what Spec Ops: The Line was trying to do had it treated the murder of a single enemy as a tragedy. Also, I probably would not have started the game in media res with a rail-shooter sequence where your character is manning a freaking minigun.... It is hard for me to take the game very seriously after that! Honestly, if I were to play through the game today, I would probably just shut my brain off and focus on mowing down as many enemies as I can, as the shooting on its own is quite enjoyable; I did that already with quite a few games that featured a story that I did not care much for, so I do not see Spec Ops: The Line being too different in that aspect.

 

I agree that it ultimately didn't achieve its goal, and I don't wanna be mistaken for making a committed defense of Spec Ops of all games.  It made a point of otherwise resembling the type of thing it was criticizing, probably on the theory that if it wore its message on its sleeve, only people who already agreed with that message would bother to check it out.  But it makes for a pretty good case study in taking a beaten-to-death formula and simply ripping out the gratification part, which is what I was originally citing.

 

Perhaps I should have cited Penn and Teller's Smoke and Mirrors instead, that game's all about not having fun.

 

50 minutes ago, Rudolph said:

I have not played Mock 2, but what you describe seems to be just a silly, hollow joke than a real introspection. It reminds me of The Stanley Parable, which I know many people seem to love but strikes me as just insufferably self-indulgent and trying way too hard to be clever.

 

Oh, Mock 2 is nothing but silly, hollow jokes, for sure.  It just happens that one of those jokes takes Doom's premise as a video game and completely obliterates its appeal while leaving the trappings of Doom's gameplay intact, that's all.