Toward more disturbing videogame violence

Much has been made of, in the slew of modern violent anti-violence games, how dirty and bare all the horror is laid. Naughty Dog’s latest, The Last of Us: Part 2, animates, with great faux-consternation, all the chunky and crunchy bits of each named NPC in loving detail as they rip apart in the carnage you cause. It’s vicious work that aims to discomfit. In a sopping wet arcade, midway through the game, protagonist Ellie comes across a recent crime scene. A body lays, splayed across a pool table, with its jaw torn agape and a blood trail mere feet behind the table leads to a second body just behind an adjacent wall. It’s a horrendous bit of gore, pre-fabricated to tell a story and foreshadow an enemy to come. But, it’s also emblematic of the game’s central problem with violence: it wants you to be horrified by the inhumanity of it all, but it also wants to feel good to play — responsive, tactile, clicky, and mechanical. This results in a conflict that is made all the more trite by how sublimely Naughty Dog succeeds at these two clashing pillars of design. Admonishing players for engaging with systems that are inherently engaging creates a dissonance between systems and themes that the game never quite rectifies. (To be fair, I largely accepted the game, faults and all, since its journey to acceptance and its examination of PTSD was so moving: https://talkfilmsociety.com/articles/looking-for-the-light-trauma-and-loss-in-the-last-of-us-part-ii).