Don't Front. We All Love The Violence.

Violence is the name of the game. Well, not literally. And not for all games. There’s Nintendo and the indie scene and whatever new craze is lying in wait on the App Store.

But the core of gaming right now remains unmistakably violent. As many people have noted, nowhere was this more evident than the showroom floor at this year’s E3. Developers served up a bloodbath with plenty of zombie hacking, arrows to the face, knives to the throat, and bullets. So many, many bullets. In football putting a cash prize on the head of another player is a major scandal. In videogames that’s considered a robust multiplayer mechanic.

And why not? Unlike traditional games which take place in physical spaces, with actual contact between players and the sweat and injuries that result, videogames take place in the fictitious, digitally rendered 2D arenas of our computer and television screens.  True, part of me is disquieted by how much we have begun to fetishize violence through the medium. On the other hand though, it seems completely natural.

The contrived experiences offered by videogame are perfect for dealing with our aggression. Whether slaughtering another player’s avatar or mowing down row after row of AI controlled ones, what a relief to indulge our destructive urges every once in a while!

“These primal parts of us need an outlet, so is it any wonder that they find their place in our movies and games?”

Pornography serves a similar, if more taboo function. Sexual energy can be released, frustrations dissipated, and all without needing to interact with another human being. From money shots to headshots, our media provides a safe escape to an imaginary playground beyond social judgment where almost no desire is too vile explore.

I’m sure I’m not the only person who’s experienced a craving for bullet propelled bloodshed after a long day at work, or even after a breezy weekend afternoon. There’s no satisfaction quite like sinking your roiling chainsaw into the supple flesh of a deathmatch adversary in Gears of War. Or delivering a lethal blow in Arkham City. Or hewing down monsters in the land of Tamriel. The examples are endless, they’re gory, and fuck it feels good.

Even critically acclaimed media like HBO’s adaptation of a Song of Fire and Ice gratify these yearnings, mixing nuanced characters and engaging plots with brutal carnage and gratuitous sex. And we like it. We love it.

These primal parts of us need an outlet, so is it any wonder that they find their place in our movies and games? In his essay Of Cannibals, Michel de Montaigne wrote of the New World’s inhabitants, ” The obstinacy of their battles is wonderful, and they never end without great effusion of blood: for as to running away, they know not what it is.”

Civilization forces us to sublimate our violent energy into more creative endeavors, and capitalism encourages us to be scrupulous cogs in the larger machinery of consumerism. But videogames have combined art with entertainment and given us made up places to reassert our baser instincts. We can inflict heinous acts upon friend or foe, human companion or AI ghost with no strings attached, no shame, no inhibition.

“Our videogames helped us unleash our violence while at the same time subduing it.”

The results can be at once startling and banal. For all their cathartic glory, the M16s, broad swords, and Shoryukens can’t sustain the murderous bliss they initially engender. So we employ them over and over again until they become muted, and their seductive effects fade into the background of daily existence. Our videogames helped us unleash our violence while at the same time subduing it. Between the the destruction of war, the images of death that fill nightly new broadcasts, and the grizzly experiences we now make for and play with one another, we’ve successfully domesticated violence.

But videogames aren’t just another step on the road to violence’s mainstream-ification; they are, in a way, it’s ultimate form.  And as the technology for rendering and immersing ourselves in it becomes ever more exact, it will be interesting to see just how far the evolutionary instincts bred into us by our ancestors can once again come to the surface and thrive in our favorite new kind of make believe.

Of those who lose the battles, Montaigne tells us how they spit and smile at their captors, “And ’tis most certain,” he writes, “that to the very last gasp, they never cease to brave and defy them both in word and gesture. In plain truth, these men are very savage in comparison of us; of necessity, they must either be absolutely so or else we are savages; for there is a vast difference betwixt their manners and ours.”

It’s hard to say exactly what the cultural shift embodied in modern videogames means and whether it’s good or bad, manageable or deeply problematic. It’s new and different though, with no clear analogue in recent history. What’s clear is that the savagery still exists, whether socially latent, or digitally manifest, and going forward we’ll have to confront what exactly that says about us, who we want to be.