A couple of years ago I was ruminating on this forum how videogame violence hasn't been a big deal in a long time. Gone are the days of Manhunt, GTA or Mortal Kombat grabbing headlines with controversy, now everyone just goes "yeah, whatever" at videogame gore. Which makes sense, there's only so much time and detail you can dedicate to pixel gore after all.
However, the recent reveal of the game Unrecord, combined with this gore montage from Dead Island 2 (warning: very high end gore) that popped up on my algorithm, got me thinking again. Some of that stuff in the Dead Island came quite close to legit making me feel uneasy, because I felt it was treading pretty close to looking like actual, real life gore footage. Now, I don't watch IRL gore videos, never have, but that doesn't mean I haven't been exposed to it. And I don't think I need to explain that the instinctive, visceral reaction you get from that stuff is quite different to when you know it's just a videogame. But with Unrecord legitimately bordering on indistinguishable from real life by imitating shaky-cam POV camera footage, I do wonder if we're about to cross the uncanny valley when it comes to gore. That graphics will become so realistic that they start provoking the instinctive, gut reaction of revulsion in people instead of the "woooah duude, nasty".
What do you think?
However, the recent reveal of the game Unrecord, combined with this gore montage from Dead Island 2 (warning: very high end gore) that popped up on my algorithm, got me thinking again. Some of that stuff in the Dead Island came quite close to legit making me feel uneasy, because I felt it was treading pretty close to looking like actual, real life gore footage. Now, I don't watch IRL gore videos, never have, but that doesn't mean I haven't been exposed to it. And I don't think I need to explain that the instinctive, visceral reaction you get from that stuff is quite different to when you know it's just a videogame. But with Unrecord legitimately bordering on indistinguishable from real life by imitating shaky-cam POV camera footage, I do wonder if we're about to cross the uncanny valley when it comes to gore. That graphics will become so realistic that they start provoking the instinctive, gut reaction of revulsion in people instead of the "woooah duude, nasty".
What do you think?
