Meanwhile, in Seth's Brain...

OK, so I'm having trouble (again) deciding on what I want to write about this week. I've been gaming a lot lately (thanks to BioShock Infinite) so I feel inspired to write something that deals with gaming, in particular either violence in video games or objectification of women in games.

I love gaming and (for the most part) I love the direction games are headed in. The immersion in games becomes more vast with each passing year and with new technology comes more capability for stunning works of art (such as BioShock Infinite).

But there are some legitimate concerns with games that the media loves to blow out of proportion and talk about, based on absolutely zero experience with playing games. The two issues I listed above, violence and women, headline the media's blind, headlong plunge into debating gaming's effect on society.

Violence in games is getting overblown, especially with the increasing realism and interactivity of games. Recently released was God of War: Ascension, a prequel to blockbuster trilogy that's well known for its gratuitous, over-the-top, almost sadistic violence and gore. Indeed I could create a whole blog post discussing God of War alone and its ethics but I will just say that this newest game, Ascension, seems to put violence in just for the sake of having violence (and making money), without any moral or thematic undertones (which the previous installments of the game certainly did).

Maybe Kratos has some remorse for all his killing? Doubtful.

Same goes for sex: I'm perfectly fine with having sex in a video game--it's a great way to enrich the emotional bond formed between the protagonist and a secondary character--but when developers throw in sex scenes just for the sake of showing gamers (a predominantly male community) "tits" and "ass" without any real justification other than "this will sell games", that's problematic and incredibly disrespectful to women.

This is already going longer than I expected but I guess what I'm trying to say is that I have an idea to get all these topics down in a series of  two/three posts, starting tomorrow. I might use a similar structure for other topics that have a lot of depth to them. But I think for tomorrow/Saturday, expect a blog about video game violence, the first one in a series. I'll try to do my homework and lay both side of the argument on the table, but I think most of you will see my point and agree that video games are not inherently evil.

Check back tomorrow!