User blog comment:Traditionalfire/Killing in games/@comment-3492791-20120921011543

Quite simple. We aren't killing people, we are killing pixels. We have no emotional attachment to the enemies, and thus don't consider them to anything more than moving guns. There is no "OMG! I just killed that guy, and now he is bleeding out in horrible agony. He had 3 kids and a hot wife! What will his hot wife and kids do now with out a father?!". You don't feel. You have no reason to feel. He's an example. In ME1, you kill hundreds of Krogan. You know they are a dying species and each death leads them ever closer to total extinction, but you don't really care because it's not real anyway. When you have to kill Wrex, you are hesitant, and if you ultimately are forced to kill him you feel bad about it. You didn't give two shits about every other Krogan you've ever meet, but you cared about Wrex. You had an emotional attachment to the character and you didn't want him to disappear forever. Other main problem with games is we are almost never given a reason to care. Enemies are always painted in a black light, almost never a grey light. The "bad" guys are always, bad guys. They are horrible baby killing, pig rapist, granny punchers. There is no redeemable quality about them that makes you feel sorry for killing them. In fact, the game usually tells you the world is a better place without them. A good game for grey is Spec Ops The Line. That game has so much grey you can't tell one color from the next (but there is also a lot of sandy orange too). You pretty much wander through the game attaching to the group you think is good, and everyone against that group is bad. You end up switching the group you align with like 3-4 times throughout the game is a show of I-have-no-fucking-idea-what-is-going-on-ary. Sure you kill anyone that shoots at you, but afterward you feel uneasy about it because you aren't sure if they were the ones your were supposed to kill, or your are just fucking everything up worse. There were even some times that someone drew a gun on me and I didn't fire because I wasn't sure if they were good or bad. Bottom line is that we don't consider that there is any consequence for killing anyone, because it's all make-believe, none of it matters. That's what all those stupid anti violent video games people are worried about because they think no one can tell the difference between games and reality.