The Most Violent Video Games of All Time

adeelarshad82 writes "Switzerland and Australia already feel that violent video games are an issue, and in June the US Supreme Court will also take matters in its own hands. Revisiting some of the most violent video games made over the last couple of decades shows exactly why this is such a huge concern." Warning: this slideshow contains imaginary violence.

Comments

Re:Religion makes ME uncomfortable

[commodore6502]

Sometimes violence can be a learning experience.

When I watched the videos of Russian soldiers having their heads cut off, Jews being burned in furnaces, cats being set on fire "for fun", and a Ukranian man having his face bashed in by two teen boys, it taught me the world is a violent and disgusting place filled with dark, deranged people.

Had these videos been censored, I'd still naively think everyone is good.

Video game violence has been declining for years

[Angst Badger]

My favorite video game back in the day was Galaga, which came out in 1981. I still play it via MAME and whenever I run across the original game or the anniversary re-release. Every level is a fucking massacre. You kill at least 40 aliens and potentially more: if you're really good at killing aliens especially quickly, the game slips in some extras to satisfy your lust for xenocide. Every fourth level, in fact, is a "challenging stage" in which the aliens are completely defenseless and you get bonus points for killing them to the last man. I'm not an especially good player, but I can reliably get to at least the 25th level, which takes about fifteen minutes and during which I must kill at least 1,000 aliens. Nor is Galaga an extreme case. By the late 80's and early 90's, there was a whole slew of Japanese shoot-em-up scrollers where the screen was positively jammed with enemies that could only be overcome by acquiring more and more powerful weapons, next to which Galaga is like the most boring of UN peacekeeping missions.

The body count in hours of gameplay with the current first-person shooters doesn't even merit comparison with three minutes of gameplay in any number of arcade classics from twenty or thirty years ago. What has changed is that the mayhem is more realistic -- and then only if you accept a rather loose reading of "realistic" that actually means "resembling the comic-book violence of action movies".

To make matters worse, the violent crime rate has been mostly declining during all this time, during which ownership of computers and game consoles has gone from a relatively small market to being nearly universal, especially in the age groups that are most likely to be involved in violent crime. If one was compelled to draw a causal connection between violent video games and real-world violence, one would have to conclude that they are actually reducing the level of real-world violence. There is actually some evidence to that effect -- but the balance of the actual scientific data, as opposed to the hyperventilation of people like Jack Thompson, strongly suggests that if there is any connection between video games and real violence, it is too insignificant to be measured even with relatively large samples.

At the end of the day, we'd probably hear less of this hysterical crap if y'all would just stay of those nice people's lawns. Now, if you'll pardon me, I have a sudden urge to fire up MAME and take another pass at getting to the 30th level in Galaga.