Why violence in video games is fun, but not in real life

This post is from my blog at blog.robothappy.com.


This post is about giving death the proper respect it deserves in a videogame, and not about violent video game's effect on real world violence.  Which I don't believe there is a link, until someone finds me a soldier who says that playing COD help made shooting that 16 year old kid running at them with a grenade easier, I am not buying there is any correlation because killing someone is hard.  Our brains are not wired to kill to people.  Which is the point of this post.  It has been documented over and over that even in war-time situation, soldiers try to avoid killing an enemy as much as they can.  Grossman's on killing is obviously one of the best book on this topic (he thinks games leds to more violence, but there is a serious logical flaw in his explanation.  I won't get into it here.)  So if we are hard-wired to avoid killing another human being, why is it so damn fun to do it in a video game?  (or watching it in a movie)

Based on my personal experiences with games and violence, I offer 3 possible explanations:  the hero experience, power tripping, and the forbidden fruit effect.  (it is important to note that these are not psychology terms, they are just crap I made up.  It would be great if anyone can reference me to more information on these topics).

The Hero Experience:  We all want to feel like heroes, that we did something epicand great.  There is a certain hero-zalo effect when it comes to killing "bad guys".  You are handing out justice like it is candy, and it feels great.  It is a lot less heroic and epic if all you did to be the hero was safely delivering a bag of food to a starving village.  That is boring.  But if you killed 10000000 bandits and risked your life to delivery this bag of food?  That is heroic and epic.   It feels heroic to be THE guy to end a conflict.  And if you think about it, the most extreme form of conflict is violence.  Everything else is just a less intense form of conflict.   So for you to experience the most epic conflict resolution possible, there has to be violence.

Power Tripping:  We all feel so power-less in today's world.  That our individual actions has little to no effect on the world itself.  Someone in the metro gives you lips, and you just want to pound their face in.  But you know you can't do that without facing the legal consequences.  But in a video game world, I can shoot whoever I want, whenever I want.  Random NPC in GTA says something I don't like, I am putting a cap in his behind.  I am on a quest to get a letter from NPC blah blah in Skyrim? He wants money for it?  No, you get a FUS RO DAH in your face!   Video game gives us a safe place to exert all the aggression that we want to in everyday life, but can't (people claims this is why football is good for kids, hmm, I wonder what is the correlation between liking football and liking violence).

The Forbidden Fruit:  From 19 year old baby sitters to drugs to eating McDonalds, we all want things we know we are not supposed to want.  There is just certain allure to things that are "not allowed".  And violence is one of them.  As a society, we have been obsessed with violence in every consumable medium since the dawn of time.  We are talking about cave drawings of violence and sex, stories of violence in religion,  written stories, poems, pictures, comics, and movies.  Games is just the latest medium of violent entertainment.   I believe a big part of this obsession is because it is forbidden, so therefore it is interesting to our curiosity.

It is undeniable that killing someone in a video game is fun.  The more gruesome and ridiculous it is (look at Max Payne 3), the more fun it seems to be.  Which is the absolute opposite of real life.  Is there a way we can make video game violence have more weight so that we enjoy it in a less trivial way?  I think so.  Two things need to happen:  technology improvement and designer paying more attention to death.  With better technology, game designer can now better mimic human behavior and human reaction to experiencing violence.    The Last of Us had a great demo of this.  At the end of the E3 trailer, the guy is begging and screaming with real "digital" fear on his face as you get ready to shotgun him in the face.  That is a much more realistic reaction to death than any other games I have seen.  In the real world, it would be difficult to find any one would blast someone with a shotgun in the face while they are begging for their life.  People who can do that has grown up with violence in their whole life and has been involved in a cycles of violence that led them to be able to do that.   If a game can make you feel like your violent act has weight, than the player will feel their action matter more and ultimately have a better playing experience.