Dialogue

Edge readers share their opinions; one wins a year’s PlayStation Plus

I deliver a lecture as part of a public health module each year on the relationship between violence and videogames. One of the exercises I give the students involves splitting the group in half, giving one half Flappy Bird to play, the other survival horror Dead Trigger 2, and then seeing which group subsequently feels het up enough to want to strangle the person sitting next to them (spoiler alert: it’s not the group who’ve just gorged a zombie’s eyes out in their game). So I’m basically an advocate of the wealth of evidence which now exists that videogames in themselves don’t cause players to have a predilection for violence any more than having to endure Piers Morgan first thing in the morning.

Personally I’ve veered towards slower narrativedriven or Nintendo games over the years and have avoided explicitly violent games just as a matter of taste, but the avalanche of praise heaped on God Of War persuaded me that I’d be doing the limited time I have to spend with them these days a disservice if I were to discount it on the basis of one element. I do think it’s an incredible game, but after what felt like a particularly gruesome scene (which probably went on longer than intended since my fortysomething reflexes are slowing) I thought, “Christ, this is so violent. Other people must have noticed it” – before typing the words “god of war violence” into Google and finding the main complaint is that it’s not violent enough.

And then reading the list of games in Hype ( E321) it made me think. There is a kind of depressing tendency that the industry still has to steer towards violent content for their triple-A big hitters – sure, there were lovely examples of games like Semblance which evoke the best of indie creativity, but you know the ones which will sell by the shedload will be the Battlefields, the Call Of Dutys, the Hitmans. Not that there’s anything wrong with any of those titles, but it’s difficult to think of another medium whose output so consistently involves causing imaginary physical harm to others. It was refreshing later on in E321 to see Charlie Cleveland muse on how Sandy Hook changed his attitude to games and identifying the more general problem with the culture of violence in the States; it’s good to see at least some people in the industry reflecting on the issue. I realise the more ‘thoughtful’ violence that games consider now is better than so-called mindless violence, and hey, shooting things will always be fun, but it’d still be nice to wake up in a world where more gamers knew Edith Finch’s story than the NRA’s handbook off by heart. Mark Whitfield

“After what felt like a particularly gruesome scene I thought, ‘Christ, this is so violent’”