Started off grinning like a maniac and emptying hundreds of delicious bullets into the fleeing man-cattle. Then, when you see the sheer number of dead bodies, hear their screams and so on... it sorta hit me funny.
Construably, these might nearly just have been *people*. Mindless slaughter and violence in games like GTA isn't so bad, because it's so clearly caricatured. I mean, if you've got a pink afro, an eyepatch and do it with a double-ended dildo you found in the police station, it's just somehow not so serious. Especially when the little old lady / lonely fat guy pulls a knife and starts fighting back. It's just slapstick.
In MW2, it was just a bit grim. I wanted to chuckle exuberantly and guffaw at their little fally-over death spasms. To revel in their futile attempts to not die. But the aspect of the whole thing being like some kind of slightly black, comic pantomime was gone. Even in Soldier of Fortune II or other more hyper-violent games, the enemies and the people you were killing with homogeneous, blocky masses of polygons. I could gleefully shoot a man's kneecaps out, his gun from his hand and walk after him with a hunting knife while he tries to desparately stagger away on his ruined, mangled stumps of flesh. The screams were funny, in some horrible, black way. The whole thing was stylised to be ridiculous. The cries of agony, the movements, the aesthetic was all quite ridiculous and detached. Here there was a conscious effort to make not only the death itself realistic, but the atmosphere and the responses of the others. People twitched and fell, as in any other FPS.
But Makarov's cold detachment, the pace of his stroll, the complete *coldness* of all the other terrorists to the affair. They might as well have been going for a leisurely stroll in the park. In games like SOF2, nobody gave a shit when somebody else died. You didn't have any comrades, to speak of, who gave a truly moral dimension to your actions. Same true of most other games where you're the single moral agent. I tried to do that in MW2, like I usually do. But you didn't initiate the act. It wasn't your plan. These people weren't incidental. I couldn't be detached in the way I usually am. Which is really interesting, now that I think about it. Sorry for the wall-of-text. Was trying to pin down what it was that made me actually feel guilty and wrong in playing that section of the game.
