1UP COVER STORY | WEEK OF JANUARY 28 | VIOLENCE & PACIFISM
Cover Story: Violence & Pacifism in Video Games
This week, 1UP discusses how our medium and our culture handle physical conflict.
Take a look back at the last five games you played. Chances are that at some point throughout one of those playthroughs, you committed an act that, if done outside the realm of a created world, would've landed you in jail. Of course guiding your avatar to kill another digital creation doesn?t make you a bad person, but it?s worth taking a moment to stop and look at the amount of violence that has been pumping through our medium since its inception. There?s no denying that some of the most iconic moments in games stem from inherently violent experiences --taking a nightmarish trip from Mars to Hell, being forced to beat a man to death using a golf club, and the simple combination of the words, "Finish Him." But there?s more to video games than that, and this week, we're going to highlight some of those experiences that eschew the traditional "kill everything" mold that our medium has used as a crutch for so long.
We're not the first site to dedicate a moment to discuss violence in video games, and we certainly won't be the last. Many of our colleagues in the industry have written fantastic pieces covering the topic from an array of angles, and we'll be creating a compilation of some of the very best reads. Alongside that, we'll be taking a look at how violence can be used in a meaningful way, franchises that have become increasingly more intense throughout the years, and the psychology behind deciding not to kill in a game that gives you all the tools to do just that.
1UP COVER STORY | WEEK OF JANUARY 28 | VIOLENCE & PACIFISM
Making Game Violence Count
EDITORIAL: Violence in games isn't necessarily a bad thing. The trick is in how it's used.
M
y wife, a big believer in better living through psychiatry, recently talked me into seeing a therapist. Not because I'm losing my mind or anything; she just feels I deal with more stress than is healthy and have a tendency (like so many introverts) to bottle it all up. She's not necessarily wrong, so I agreed to give it a try. I suppose it's going well enough, but the unexpected side effect of my sessions has been that I spend a good deal of time on the couch reworking our therapeutic conversations into articles. I suspect this runs counter to the purpose of the entire concept, but whatever -- it's my time and money, right?
My other takeaway from our sessions is that my therapist doesn't seem entirely certain what to make of my profession. Yes, I write about video games, but what does that mean? As with so many people of my parents' generation (though, happily, not my parents themselves), her perception of video games seems to consist of the classic media-defined extremes of primitive arcade games and gorily detailed shooters that consist entirely of exploding other people into showers of steaming entrails.
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