Weird differences in tolerance.

[WindKnight]

have you ever noticed medium/context affects how you react to violence?

I mean, I've been gaming for a long time, played a lot of resident evil and gears of war, and not flinched as I chainsawed people or head popped enemies (single and multiplayer).

But I have a very strong negative reaction to that kinda thing in films - I still can't watch the Ark scene from raiders, or the the defining scene from Scanners, and I really don't like slasher films beyond the original Halloween, dale and tucker vs evil, cabin in the wood, and the first two alien movies, and its always felt a bit weird to me I have that kind of reaction.

 

[Lacedaemonius]

have you ever noticed medium/context affects how you react to violence?

I mean, I've been gaming for a long time, played a lot of resident evil and gears of war, and not flinched as I chainsawed people or head popped enemies (single and multiplayer).

But I have a very strong negative reaction to that kinda thing in films - I still can't watch the Ark scene from raiders, or the the defining scene from Scanners, and I really don't like slasher films beyond the original Halloween, dale and tucker vs evil, cabin in the wood, and the first two alien movies, and its always felt a bit weird to me I have that kind of reaction.

I have an unlimited tolerance for the pain and suffering of fictional people, but an incredibly minimal tolerance for the same inflicted on fictional animals. In general, my emotional connection to the suffering of people I don't know is muted, compared to my emotional connection to the suffering of animals I don't know and will never meet. It's always struck me as a little odd, but since it's not, "I feel nothing for people, I love only animals!" I figure it's just part of the normal range of human emotional variation.

Your violence example, sounds to me like a matter of responding to either visual fidelity, or more likely, the power of an actor. In games, it's pretty rare to have anything approaching really good, emotive "acting". In a movie even a casual scene might have some serious attempts to convey the feelings of the character.

 

[Zhukov]

Not quite sure I understand the question.

My reactions to on-screen violence tend to change based on the presentation rather than the medium.

Understated and grounded violence gets a stronger reaction than over-the-top gore. For example, there's a scene in the movie Killing Them Softly where a man gets beaten up. He doesn't get stabbed or his throat slit, there aren't any splattering brains or whatnot. He just gets punched a lot. That made me wince because it looked a lot like an actual beating, just with camera angles and slow motion.

Compare that to the new Daredevil show where the violence just makes me roll my eyes. The part where a guy literally gets his brains beaten out with a car door made me laugh because it was just goofy. Likewise all the overly choreographed spin kicking "action" sequences.

For a video game example the violence in The Last of Us unsettled me more than almost any other game. (At least on the first playthrough. I got used it it.) Watching Joel slam a guy's head against the edge of a table or seeing a bandit tackle him to the ground, knock him unconscious then continue hitting him after he goes limp was more disturbing that any amount of chainsaw bayonets or gaily bouncing Fallout gibs.

Violence left to the imagination can be infinitely more disturbing than violence in clear view. Theres a scene in that recent Evil Dead remake they did where a girl is crouched in the corner of a bathroom with her back to camera making horrible meaty slicing noises. That was creepy as fuck. Except she turns around and you see she's cut her cheek open with a shard for glass, which is gross and all but once you've seen it it loses it's impact.

Oh, and of course footage of actual violence gets the strongest reaction. Once saw a MMA fighter attempt a kick and get leg-checked. (A leg check is a kind of counter kick. You essentially stomp on the leg they're using to kick with as it comes up.) It snapped his shin, causing the lower half to flop about in a most unnatural manner. Then what was almost worse was that he didn't realise what had happened for a few seconds and tried to stand on the newly injured leg and it just bent sideways under his weight. That I still remember that so clearly speaks for its impact over any number of shooty stabby punchy action scenes.

 

[Lacedaemonius]

Not quite sure I understand the question.

My reactions to on-screen violence tend to change based on the presentation rather than the medium.

Understated and grounded violence gets a stronger reaction than over-the-top gore. For example, there's a scene in the movie Killing Them Softly where a man gets beaten up. He doesn't get stabbed or his throat slit, there aren't any splattering brains or whatnot. He just gets punched a lot. That made me wince because it looked a lot like an actual beating, just with camera angles and slow motion.

Compare that to the new Daredevil show where the violence just makes me roll my eyes. The part where a guy literally gets his brains beaten out with a car door made me laugh because it was just goofy. Likewise all the overly choreographed spin kicking "action" sequences.

For a video game example the violence in The Last of Us unsettled me more than almost any other game. (At least on the first playthrough. I got used it it.) Watching Joel slam a guy's head against the edge of a table or seeing a bandit tackle him to the ground, knock him unconscious then continue hitting him after he goes limp was more disturbing that any amount of chainsaw bayonets or gaily bouncing Fallout gibs.

Violence left to the imagination can be infinitely more disturbing than violence in clear view. Theres a scene in that recent Evil Dead remake they did where a girl is crouched in the corner of a bathroom with her back to camera making horrible meaty slicing noises. That was creepy as fuck. Except she turns around and you see she's cut her cheek open with a shard for glass, which is gross and all but once you've seen it it loses it's impact.

Oh, and of course footage of actual violence gets the strongest reaction. Once saw a MMA fighter attempt a kick and get leg-checked. (A leg check is a kind of counter kick. You essentially stomp on the leg they're using to kick with as it comes up.) It snapped his shin, causing the lower half to flop about in a most unnatural manner. Then what was almost worse was that he didn't realise what had happened for a few seconds and tried to stand on the newly injured leg and it just bent sideways under his weight. That I still remember that so clearly speaks for its impact over any number of shooty stabby punchy action scenes.

Even people with experience in blood and guts can find themselves going faint at the site of a disarticulated limb; it is a unique horror for a thinking, empathizing being.

 

[MeatMachine]

Videogame violence doesn't impact me at all, because it very rarely seems believable enough to elicit a physiological reaction.

With movie violence, though, a really clever cinematographer can make it feel like it's happening to you, even if most of it is off-screen or obscured. Remember that scene in 128 Hours where he has to saw through his own nerves and tendons? I felt that sensation more than James Franco did.

 

[Ambient_Malice]

It's also possibly linked to your sense of control.

 

[Casual Shinji]

Remember that scene in 128 Hours where he has to saw through his own nerves and tendons? I felt that sensation more than James Franco did.

There it was really the those high pitched sound effects I think that made it so spine chilling. Him just cutting through the flesh I had no problem with, but once those 'pain' sound cues came up I just curled up into a ball.

 

[Bobular]

I think a lot of it is to do with realism. Games still fall into the uncanny valley, we just don't view these characters as alive on some level, but if we had the technology to make a game that looks 100% real then we would probably see a lot more people feeling uneasy about the violence in games as you describe.

 

[hermes]

Of course, context is a good part of the way you are meant to experience violence. You don't even have to move to a different medium to notice it. If Last of Us has the amount of deaths Uncharted has, it would not be the same game; if Uncharted has the shock and awe with which Last of Us handles most deaths, it would have been a different game.

This reaction is designed, it is the reason why God of War is meant to make you feel empowered after every kill, while Shadow of the Colossus is meant to make you feel ambivalent; or why the first half and second half of Spec Ops feel so different. That is also the reason why Rambo 1 and Rambo 3 feel so different as movies: one is a dramatic story about a soldier suffering PTSD and the other is a gorefest of rampaging violence (for the record, in Rambo 1 the main character kills only 1 person, in Rambo 3 he kills almost 80)

 

[Gorrath]

have you ever noticed medium/context affects how you react to violence?

I mean, I've been gaming for a long time, played a lot of resident evil and gears of war, and not flinched as I chainsawed people or head popped enemies (single and multiplayer).

But I have a very strong negative reaction to that kinda thing in films - I still can't watch the Ark scene from raiders, or the the defining scene from Scanners, and I really don't like slasher films beyond the original Halloween, dale and tucker vs evil, cabin in the wood, and the first two alien movies, and its always felt a bit weird to me I have that kind of reaction.

I have an unlimited tolerance for the pain and suffering of fictional people, but an incredibly minimal tolerance for the same inflicted on fictional animals. In general, my emotional connection to the suffering of people I don't know is muted, compared to my emotional connection to the suffering of animals I don't know and will never meet. It's always struck me as a little odd, but since it's not, "I feel nothing for people, I love only animals!" I figure it's just part of the normal range of human emotional variation.

Your violence example, sounds to me like a matter of responding to either visual fidelity, or more likely, the power of an actor. In games, it's pretty rare to have anything approaching really good, emotive "acting". In a movie even a casual scene might have some serious attempts to convey the feelings of the character.

I've always felt this is probably driven by our view of animals. We see ourselves as the protectors and guardians of animals, so when we see them mistreated, even fictionally, it sets off the same kind of protective instincts we would have regarding an infant or young child. I know some people would say they have a stronger reaction to the mistreatment of animals than they would even for an infant but I"m not sure this is tested much if at all. How often do we see infants get tortured in media? I think we fundamentally think of many animals in the same way, where as adult or near adult humans we see as being mostly responsible for themselves. So while we empathize with their plight, we don't have the same protective instinct that drives our rage meters right up the flagpole.

 

[the December King]

Yeah, I can tolerate some degrees of violence against human characters in film, but often times violence perpetuated against animal characters bothers me, often to the point that it can taint my viewing of the rest of the piece, or even stop me watching the rest entirely. Surprisingly, I love horror movies- a genre famed for violence, and in particular using animal deaths to set the tome of the violence. But the main factor, almost always, is context.

Oh, and of course footage of actual violence gets the strongest reaction. Once saw a MMA fighter attempt a kick and get leg-checked. (A leg check is a kind of counter kick. You essentially stomp on the leg they're using to kick with as it comes up.) It snapped his shin, causing the lower half to flop about in a most unnatural manner. Then what was almost worse was that he didn't realise what had happened for a few seconds and tried to stand on the newly injured leg and it just bent sideways under his weight. That I still remember that so clearly speaks for its impact over any number of shooty stabby punchy action scenes.

I've seen this before as well (though possibly not the same clip- forgive my ignorance if these were indeed the same clips, but the one I saw was a vicious kick to the opponent's shin, which surprisingly snapped the attacker's leg instead), and it can be very disturbing. I'll watch street fight clips occasionally on WorldStarHipHop, and be stunned at how far some people will take a confrontation.

I've always felt this is probably driven by our view of animals. We see ourselves as the protectors and guardians of animals, so when we see them mistreated, even fictionally, it sets off the same kind of protective instincts we would have regarding an infant or young child. I know some people would say they have a stronger reaction to the mistreatment of animals than they would even for an infant but I"m not sure this is tested much if at all. How often do we see infants get tortured in media? I think we fundamentally think of many animals in the same way, where as adult or near adult humans we see as being mostly responsible for themselves. So while we empathize with their plight, we don't have the same protective instinct that drives our rage meters right up the flagpole.

As a tangentially related aside, I'm reminded of the scene in Pet Sematary (1989), that involves the little boy Gage's death and the funeral afterwards. Just a few years ago I could watch that scene, gripped by the importance of the tragedy for sure, but otherwise no problem. I currently have a son who looks a lot like that actor did, and is even roughly the same age as the character was. And I'll bet would look even more like him, if I were to be foolish enough to rewatch those scenes at this stage in my life- I suspect it, and all of the events afterwards, would be devastating to me.

 

[lacktheknack]

I tend to generally have issues with all "realistic" violence, which makes me an outlier. Fallout's ludicrous gibs make me wince sometimes, and I can barely play the new Tomb Raider sequences where she's getting really beaten out.

This also translates over to movies. I can't hack movies like Saw in the slightest.

Obviously, I don't have problems with things like Darkest Dungeons " 6 HP LOST" mechanics, but I feel visceral stuff way more than others.

 

[sonicneedslovetoo]

Context is important, as is justification, every raider in Fallout 3 for example is a monster and most likely a cannibal. Nobody ever bothered to characterize them beyond designing say the school where they holed up in. Nobody particularly cares if you murder them wholesale because not only is nobody attached to them, looking around and looking at their actions you can tell they cannot be redeemed. Its also entirely CGI so you know everything happening on screen isn't real, you can get immersed in it but never to the point where you "feel" like you're there.

However movies(good ones at least) have a tendency to use practical effects, add lots of context, and when they decided to SHOW violence as in actual SHOW SHOW violence they can add all kinds of unpleasant things like close up shots and juicy sound effects. When a movie wants you to see somebody in pain or dying enough you will see somebody in pain or dying it WILL be the focus of at least one of your senses entirely. If they're using good practical effects as well then it also becomes much harder to tell yourself it's not real.

On top of all that no game I've ever seen really has realistic physics and by that I mean that most things are rigid until they stop being rigid. If you've ever played garry's mod you'll know what I mean here. I mean that either something is whole and will remain so forever until it despawns, or something will be whole until it reaches an interm damage state after which it will revert to something else that is rigid and most likely unbreakable. How does all this relate? Well think back to a movie where you saw somebody break a limb in a really unpleasant way and then think about hitting a ragdoll with a crowbar in Half Life 2. I would imagine you would have very very different reactions to both.

 

[Imperioratorex Caprae]

Having been exposed to real world horrors, both accidentally and purposely inflicted, my tolerance level to fictional violence is extremely high. Real world violence always hurts me to see, but I'm also able to deal with it without losing my lunch. Its not something I enjoy, nor prefer to be around.
My idea is the more you've experienced IRL, its equally possible that you could gain tolerance for fictional violence or actually lose tolerance. Thing is about that, its all experientially based. What I mean is the tolerance level is directly related to how you react post-experience to those events, and how you allow the trauma (because no matter what happens, real world violence experienced is always traumatic) to affect your view.
Of course there are people who're more naturally tolerant to fictional and real world violence, I suspect it has to do with how one grows up.
Context is extremely important though, and the things I've already experienced in life done correctly in movies and video games can ring the same bell for me that the real world event did, and evoke near the same horror. But I think having experienced it IRL creates a buffer through which I can move on, without dwelling on the horror and trauma and appreciate the art of recreating the feel.

 

[Scarim Coral]

My tolerance toward anime violence is kinda weird-

Bascially it was thanks to that OVA Genocyber, it traumatised me toward anime violence. I pretty much refuse to watch violent animes like Elfen Lied, Attack on Titan (yes I know the actual violence if off screen and I admit I had watched some violent clip just fine), Angel Cop.


On the other hand I was able to watch that berserk film, Afro Samurai and Ninja Scroll a ok but in saying so the level of violence was kinda different (you don't see the person inside or organ spilling out per say).

Before you mention Helsing Ultimate, I never really watched that properly other than the Abridged version which I know that is kinda censor/ editied.