Legal Niches

More Realistic Violence in Videogames?

By John Keefer

A comic book writer has opined that he is interested in seeing more realistic violence in videogames, but he isn't sure if the gaming public is ready for it.

Landry Walker, a writer who writes "Batman: the Brave and the Bold" and has also written for "The Incredibles," was watching a friend play Batman: Arkham Asylum and was a bit incensed that his friend was not phased when Batman got shot. His thought was that because he was Batman, he was not supposed to get shot, despite the body armor.

According to an editorial he posted on Elder-Geek.com, he is concerned that bullets in games don't phase people. If you get shot at in real life, you'd panic:

I've been shot at a couple of times. I don't mean I was sitting at the TV waving a controller around so a little pixel person could dodge cyborg powered armor piercing poison tipped bullets. Nope. These were just bullets from a simple and boring hand gun. In each instance, the bullets missed. Lucky me. Because there were no handy first aid packs or carefully planted green herbs lying around waiting. If I had been shot, I expect it would have been amazingly unlike a video game. Assuming the bullet did not inflict irreparable harm to my body, the experience of actually being shot (let's assume a grazing strike to the shoulder) would have likely done irreparable harm to the cleanliness of my pants. Yes. I realize the imaginary bullet hit my imaginary shoulder. You do the obvious math on how that correlates to the un-cleanliness of my pants.

He goal is to get more of an emotional response as a gamer:

I don't want any of this out of some overbearing concern that we as a society are allowing ourselves to become numb to the grim realities of blah blah blah. Nope. I want a game that recreates that insane rush of endorphins and adrenaline or whatever it is after hearing a simple bullet crack past your ear. That's what games should be. So real that I just have to put down the controller for a minute because some part of my lizard brain is shaking in disbelief over the scenario I somehow managed to survive.

GP: Do you get enough realism in your videogames? Do you get an adrenaline rush when the bullets start to fly? Personally, when I'm going up against a live player, I must admit my heart races faster and my actions get a bit more frantic. I don't get that playing against the AI.

Full post as published by GamePolitics.com on December 28, 2009 (boomark / email).