The first controversial aspect of video games which is the amount of violence found in them. This blog post is to give some reasons why game developers may have violence in their games and their effects. The reasons I am going to discuss are the aspects of realism, the demographics, and to show what life is actually like. To begin this blog, I am going to discuss the aspects of realism in video games.
In real life, if you were to accidentally poke yourself with a needle you would bleed. If one sees a normal person fall off a building, land on the ground, and get up without a scratch in a video game, that would be ridiculous. Game developers try to make a fictional world as real as possible, like how comic book artists try to make a realistic setting even though there are people with superpowers saving the world on a daily schedule. In a video game, depending on the targeted demographic (which I will explain in the next paragraph), a game could have no blood at all and the worst thing that could happen to the characters is to be vaporized by a cartoon-like blaster. Though there may or may not be heavy aspects of realism, it usually depends on who the game is targeted to.
There are multiple demographics in Canada that range from children to adults, so if a game developer was going to make a game about the Second World War, who would they try to sell it to? The obvious solution is to sell it to the young adults who find interest in the War. If one were to sell that game to children, the children would probably not even understand what is going on while they’re playing. As a general rule amongst various medias, the younger the targeted demographic, the less violent the media is. With this rule in mind, young adults are less interested in the “lighter and softer” games and prefer to buy a “darker and edgier” game. As more violent content is put into games targeted to young adults, a rating system has been put into effect in order to protect children from graphic content. From this, we can learn that a more mature demographic has seen the reality of the world more than a child, but developers may try to show a reality to someone who hasn’t experienced it.
For most Americans, D-Day was an important turning point for the Allied victory over Nazi Germany. The D-Day landings have been seen in multiple games about World War Two due to the importance of the events which occurred. Most Americans can say that the lives lost on that day were a hefty price to pay. Some people would say that war is a glorious event in which heroes are made to fight against a menacing foe. When the average person sees a film about the D-Day landings, they often see soldiers getting killed, hear some swearing, and by the end of it, they stand victorious. The movie, Saving Private Ryan, contains the events of the landings, but the extended opening sequence makes two firm statements, "This is as close as we can get to D-Day and maintain our rating," and "Please remove your children." In a game with a similar setting, Call of Duty: World at War, features what the aforementioned movie contains: blood, gore, harsh language, and everything else one may see during war. Using the same reasoning, both game developers and movie producers produce violent works to show how much “war is hell” or to show the ignorant viewer what the reality of a situation was like to one experiencing it.
In conclusion, violent content in video games is not isolated to just games. Violence is found in books, movies, animation, and TV. Shows, it is something that the older generation has experienced with and we try to protect the younger generation from it. Those who only blame video games for acts of violence also have to blame every other type of media in society. For my next blog post, I shall be discussing the demographics of video games.
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