User blog comment:Traditionalfire/Killing in games/@comment-1900300-20120922095054

Im so sorry there arnt more video games where you kiss your enemy into submission or throw magical pixy dust that mays everyone happy. Why dont you go hide in a closet till the bad men with guns go away. and put on a dress while your in there because you are a girl.

I kid, I kid

Firstly lets not get on the case of video games here. Most media and storytelling involves death and killing commited by the protagonist. Some treat it as a heavy thing, so ignore it for the sack of fun, and some are ambivolent. In the end of the day the threat of death to the protangonist is nessicary to build the tension in the story and establish the effectiveness of the villain. And in the case of most stories, it is reasonable to classify not feeling bad when you kill someone in self-defense, in the case of a story at least. Real life such an act may have serious effects, but in a story things have to flow faster, the tension must be maintained and the hero must be likeable. You would be surprised how fast people will turn against a hero if they stop every five mins to mourne the people they have killed. As for why we dont feel bad in video games, well to be honest lets look at all the reasons for this: 1) a video game is not real. People who play video games know this. If fact we may have a better prception of this then most non gamers do. We dont feel the recoil of the gun or feel the pain in our legs as we runn for hours at a time. and we dont feel sorry for killing bad guys.

2) Its usually in self-defense. In the ME series, killing someone unjustifably is given a bit of wieght as a serious Renagade option and you cannot really say no one gets effected by that. Alotherwise its simply an example of point 1), as this murder is not real an without consiquences.

3) We can empithise more with one defined character then an army of undefined enemies. A million is a statstic after all. Still bad, but we are saying that intulectually rather then emotionally.

4) In the ME series, they did a pretty good job making the villains ok to kill. The geth were just machines we saw killing hundreds and feel nothing for till Legion came by. The Collectors are outright stated as mindless drones. Husks and Cerberus troopers have lost all humanity and killing them is probably a good thing. All the living, sentient enemies are killed in self-defense for the most part.