[Itse]

I've recently ran into several articles, mostly in game media but in other places too, where people talk about their discomfort towards some of the things that goes on in video games.

Since I know there are gamers on this forum (I consider myself one), I'm curious as to other people feel about this. Personally I don't play these modern warfare games, although I haven't really thought much about why. I have picked up quite a few games where I'm a lone supersoldier destroying hordes of hideous monsters. I've started to think that maybe this is not a coincidence, that for me it matters what the enemy is.

How about you? Violence or otherwise, does it matter to you what happens in games, or are they just games for you?

Here's some of the stuff I've read on this. Note that all of the people talking here are gamers, most of them you could propably call hard-core gamers.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/arti...eld-3-Is-Scary

And then there's that sequence that seems to be a prerequisite for every modern warfare game now where you're in a bomber supporting infantry units by firing ludicrously big shells at ground targets who have absolutely no possibility of hitting you. Watching blips on your radar representing someone's son or husband disappear with a plop as someone in your earpiece congratulates you and laughingly points out the remaining ones who are running for their lives. I mean, ####ing hell. Once you discount the possibility that this is supposed to be dramatic or challenging then we are left with the conclusion that this only exists for the masturbatory power fantasy. It just creeps me out is all.

http://penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/propaganda-games

We love to talk about the exciting possibilities that games offer us. We talk about is an emerging art form, a new way to explore the human condition. A leisure activity that is soon going to be more common than watching TV, but unfortunately, the very things that make this media powerful can also make it dangerous.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisf...dern-warfare-3

I don't particularly mind the level of violence in computer games, partly because it's absurd, and partly because I'm hopelessly desensitised. What I do object to is the dick-swinging machismo that infests games like this. If I had a penny for every time I've spent the opening moments of a game sitting in the back of a transport vehicle listening to a soldier called Vasquez repeatedly use the word "mother####er", I'd have enough money to buy the Sesame Street game instead. And even that probably starts with Sergeant Grover warning Private Elmo that "#### is about to get real".

http://kotaku.com/5857878/the-proble...ar-video-games

Our attitudes and actions about war, conflict, death and the use of weapons certainly matter. We cannot afford to be seduced by the technologies of war, hypnotized by the glow of explosions on our screens and silenced by this claim that "it's only a game."