Steelcreed said:
ReiverCorrupter said:
Well, you should make a distinction between mere violence and sadism. I take the latter to be far more problematic than the former. Killing in a war game generally isn't that big of a deal. In games like CoD or Battlefield it is much more of a competition than anything else. Especially when you're playing online and realize that your enemies are just other players who re-spawn just like you and are concerned with getting points.
What you seem to be focused on is depictions of violence that seem to be intentionally designed to display pain or suffering that the player is encouraged to enjoy. But even in God of War the enemies are hardly innocent. As I said above, if you want to compare a violent game to a rape game you should compare it to the school shooter games. But when you do that you'll see that people have an almost equal aversion as they do to the rape simulator.
Actually, think about those "realistic, military shooters" for a moment. Whether they display the violence up close or not - and they provide convenient killcams for you to do that anyway - it's still glorifying it via the metric tonnes of military hardware provided to accomplish your bloody goal, especially when you're allowed to unleash mass destruction through missiles, helicopters or nukes. That's not any the less impersonal, just further away. Would argue footage of bombing runs in the Middle East is any the less gruesome or triumphal? And are you really saying that because the enemies in God of War are monsters, that justifies the amount of pain you are clearly causing them. That's a slippery slope argument my friend.
I'm making a psychological distinction about different types of motivations behind violence. I'm saying that presenting a particularly brutal scene of violence so that someone can enjoy the suffering of the target character appeals to sadism, and is worse than just using violence as a means to create competitive gameplay like in the online portion of military shooters. In war, people usually don't even think of their enemies as human beings, and so are hardly concerned with what they feel. This is even less the case when one is playing online against other people.
It might be your position that all violence is wrong, regardless of the intentions or motivations behind it. That's fine. However, one can certainly draw distinctions between acts based upon the motivations behind them, and that a person who commits acts of violence for purely sadistic reasons is worse than a person who does it for revenge or self-preservation. And the act of killing for pleasure is probably worse than the act of killing for self-preservation. (Of course, all of this depends upon your ethical system, but I don't feel like engaging in a metaethical debate about whether we should be deontologists or consequentialists.)
I disagree completely about the online multiplayer of realistic military shooters. It's more or less like paintball: you're clearly playing a game against other people and you're only 'killing' their avatars. I didn't say anything about the range at which the violence occurs, I'm not sure where you got that from. The knife kills in Battlefield are pretty brutal, but you don't think to yourself "oh I just killed that guy", you think "ha, ha, I bet that guy is pissed about that! He was about to get a killing spree!" Dead people can't be pissed off about anything.
I also think you're
clearly wrong about distance making violence impersonal: it clearly does. Yes, violence from a distance might still glorify war, and it might be wrong, but that doesn't really have anything to do with the violence being personal. You've clearly confused the concept of 'personal' with the concepts of 'gruesome' or 'wrong'. Impersonal violence can be those things as well.
Also, I was arguing that in God of War, most of the monsters are a direct threat to you, and the Olympians have actually done things to make Kratos want to kill them. If it is more objectionable than games like CoD, it's because much of the violence is meant to stimulate the sadistic tendencies of the player.
And as far as your slippery slope accusation goes, I was saying that killing a monster that is a direct threat to you isn't as bad as shooting up a school. I didn't say that Krato's brutality was permissible just because he was fighting monsters.
