I have worked on ultra-violent games but never did research on what actual killings looked like as referenced in the article. As the one quote said, context is important as well as how close something gets to realistic looking. That embedded Mortal Kombat trailer was pretty unrealistic looking IMO, the physics was cartoon like and several what would be real life death blows were not death blows until the fight was over. I was pretty disgusted by these sorts of things when Mortal Kombat came out when I was a child and didn't get the appeal of it so maybe I got inured to cartoon violence by exposure. OTOH, Breaking Bad had a few death scenes similar to one of those, and aired on prime time basic cable.
For one game I worked on, I was instructed to get blood splatters for cuts and slicing off of body parts (in a cartoon character world) like the movie 300 which were over the top and very obviously particle effects (the producer loved referencing current popular culture...). It never occurred to me to go looking for what blood spurts look like in real life, as I was given an order for a style.
Most of the games I have worked on were not realistic looking, though I remember doing internal tiger team testing for Warcraft 3 and there was one mission where you have to kill villagers. These characters are tiny and cartoon like but the voices of them suffering in this made me feel so bad and similar to stuff happening the real world I thought we should take the mission out of the game - I think they toned it down a bit but it was in the final version.
This is kind of similar to the mission in Call of Duty series where one has to participate in the slaughter of civilians in an airport - I didn't like that one either.
I still have trouble watching some of the fight scenes in TV/film/wrestling when they look too real or wince especially with blades, even though it's obviously stunts with props and probably CGI for the most gruesome bits - I have retained sensitivity to realistic violence.
> These characters are tiny and cartoon like but the voices of them suffering in this made me feel so bad and similar to stuff happening the real world I thought we should take the mission out of the game - I think they toned it down a bit but it was in the final version.
I definitely see your point. Though, I also think that mission was extremely memorable and effective in illustrating Arthas's "win at all costs" mentality, probably in part because of how brutal and potentially similar to real events it was.
That mission was definitely the turning point where I (and likely many other players) realized "oh, maybe Arthas isn't really a good person" and the whole descent into madness made a lot more sense.
I found many movies (war, horror) unwatchable after having been in combat. People do die in some of the worst ways. Their last moments will make you shudder to think about. I don’t find pleasure in, and I look down upon those who enjoy, terrible death/torture scenes.
Some scenes in games are too much for sure, but there are far more horror scenes that I think never should have been made and have no place as entertainment in civil society.
I think those who enjoy that kind of scenes are very distanced to it (not making a connection to reality).
I totally understand you since you've been in combat and relates entertainment violence to real violence.
I've gotten changed after having kids. Watching kids suffer hurts my heart and seeing adults suffer can cause me to see them as someones grown up kids. There is (most often) a view you can have on violence that causes empathy.
I’ve gone through a similar transformation just by getting older, I think.
As a kid I’d play violent video games and my mother would get upset, claiming that I was becoming desensitized to violence. But I think it might actually be the other way around: kids lack sensitivity to begin with because they don’t have any context for the violence they’re enacting. As you get older and death starts to feel more real, the idea of a WW2 combat simulator, for example, begins to feel a bit tasteless.
Completely agree. As an EMT I've seen some grisly stuff IRL. In the moment it doesn't bother me -- probably because I'm there to try to fix the problem rather than to inflict it. But I have absolutely no interest in violent video games and cannot fathom why they're popular.
I've never been in combat and have had very little exposure to physical violence, but I stopped being able to watch war movies and even many action moves without feeling terrible at some point in college[1]. Most violent war/action movies and shows do their best to dehumanize the anonymous men that the "good guys" slaughter, but for whatever reason it stopped working on me, and I can't/don't want to turn back on the part of me that, when I was younger, was so casually capable of such dehumanization. (I'm aware that the characters are often fictional, but unless you think you'd be a fan of watching someone depict a torture or rape, it doesn't much affect the logic I'm using).
(There are also plenty of exceptions, where the violence isn't trivialized and the horror is central to the point; Watching a movie like _The Act of Killing_ is far from escapism)
> I do not understand how people watch that stuff.
Frankly, most people have a grossly stunted sense of empathy, with exceptions only for those things that they have firsthand life experience with. An instructive contrast is media depictions of sexual violence against women: for a couple of decades, there has been a concerted effort to decry media depictions of violence against women (sexual or otherwise) that are perceived as unnecessary or trivializing. The success of these campaigns is to be lauded, but what they reveal about how empathy-bankrupt monsters most people are is sort of chilling: people en masse can be taught to play-act empathy by rote if it's drilled into their head that a particular case is no longer socially acceptable, but they don't seem to be capable (en masse) of practicing the skill of empathy itself.
For anyone who watches Game of Thrones: Compare the huge outcry against the depiction of Sansa's marital rape to _an entire season_ of infinitely more gruesome torture porn by the same perpetrator against a male victim, which included genital mutilation. Despite being a far more egregious and lengthy display of gratuitous and stomach-turning violence, the latter caused no backlash whatsoever, and is in fact still fodder for jokes about Game of Thrones-themed foods ("Theon's Flayed Sausage"), including from publications like Huffington Post which were some of the loudest complainants about how unforgivable the former scene was.
TL;DR: It's not a particularly popular opinion, but most people are far more depraved and far less capable of basic human empathy than even their own ostensible moral standards would imply. Like you, I can't _relate_ to how people watch that stuff, but I can definitely _understand_ it.
One point of view is that it's important for people who have not been in combat to see these things. It makes war less abstract and educates people on what the reality of combat is like.
I have heard this argument before. I think there are some works of art that do "make war real" -- Saving Private Ryan viscerally portrayed how chaotic and horrible fighting is, in a way that made any kind of heroism seem oddly small in comparison.
But I think most violent art instead aims for that apparently very popular mixture of disgust and titillation. For example, there are various scenes (for which I've read descriptions, not watched) in Game of Thrones that make me seriously question the state of a culture where this is extremely popular entertainment. And I do not buy the idea that these scenes force people into sober contemplation of the way mortality yokes us all together.
But I strongly dislike violence more realistic than, say, the Avengers, so I'm biased here.
It can also be just mindless entertainment. Media is going to range the spectrum from quality to schlock. Meaningful to mindless. Not everything has to be appropriate or entertaining to all audiences.
> For example, there are various scenes (for which I've read descriptions, not watched) in Game of Thrones that make me seriously question the state of a culture where this is extremely popular entertainment
> But I strongly dislike violence more realistic than, say, the Avengers, so I'm biased here.
Yes, I would say you have a much stronger than average aversion to violence, and that's ok! Just so long as you recognize that same freedom of choice in others.
A counter-argument is that it romanticizes / glorifies it. They don't get the reality because that's about impossible (or makes for a depressing movie).
I think both are true. In a parallel comment, 'majos mentions Saving Private Ryan. Watching it as a kid, the Normandy landing scene shook me deeply, and it was the turning moment for me, when things I was learning in history classes at school suddenly stopped being abstract stories.
Since then, I've seen countless on-screen deaths, many of them successfully pulling off romanticizing & glorification of killing. Both the "Private Ryan" scenes and the "romanticizing combat" scenes look superficially similar in terms of gore, but the context matters a lot. Upthread, 'stevenwoo mentions the "killing villagers" Warcraft 3 mission. I played that mission back in the days, and reading about it now reminded me of the feelings of disgust I had. The details of this mission cleanly communicated the killing as an immoral act - as opposed to the exact same animations being shown when you play the game against a computer or human player, outside campaign mode, and happen to attack your enemy's base (AFAIR those villagers in campaign used the same, or similar, model as Human Peon unit in the game).
IMO it's clear that it's the context which frames acts of violence that can make them a lesson in empathy or a glorification of brutality. It's not about the violent acts themselves.
(ETA: I also played the Modern Warfare's airport massacre mission. Didn't fire a single shot towards the civilians. Ended up being thoroughly shaken, disgusted, and wishing I didn't play it at all.)
Violent crime statistics are at historic lows. I don't think it's possible to attribute 100% of that to violent video games giving people a chance to vent, but I suspect it plays some role.
Yeah, but that would require different filmaking. War and horror movies made for entertainment pretend to criticize violence, but mostly glorify war presence and makes you wanna be soldier or hero.
It is possible to make war movie that feels bad, but generally they tend to be obscure (as you wont watch it for fun).
Its mostly people who have self-worth problems, and as in combat the ultimate wager is ones own life, they love to see a situation where everything is crystall-clear for once- where there actions have meaning and the outcome is a purposefull life, even when it ends. Of course this is naive- and deep down they know. So they strife to replicate "realism" like moths longing for the real fire to fly towards.
Oh, meaningless new world, which holds such braves.
>That embedded Mortal Kombat trailer was pretty unrealistic looking IMO, the physics was cartoon like and several what would be real life death blows were not death blows until the fight was over.
Damn. The game engine physics might be "cartoon like," but that didn't prepare me for the sheer volume of over-the-top, intricately detailed blood and gore for its own sake. That's the entire point of MK fatalities I guess, and I'm definitely not in the target audience.
That's true, I rationalize Diablo like stuff as total fantasy unless one gets into PvP without magic items/skills tree and I was trying to emphasize context by showing a very low pixel and stylized animation and some vocals can make me feel very bad about the ethics of what actions we were portraying.
It’s kind of a relief to see so many other people say that the violence is too much for them.
I was 8 when the original MK came out. It was gross and extreme, but it all felt like a cartoon, it didn’t seem threatening. When it showed up on Genesis, I found the blood code and learned every fatality, knew the game inside and out. When MK II arrived on SNES, it was even better!
By comparison, my impression of modern MK games is that they aim to creat the experience of actual human suffering. I guess it’s unavoidable that the detail of the violence would have to grow with the technology, but it makes me uncomfortable, I find it too unpleasant. Watching it is the difference between the heart removal scene in Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom and a recent Saw movie.
I've always felt that the Mortal Kombat games were sick. I remember when I played my first violent video game as a kid and saw over-the-top gore, and feeling cold, like not just at what I had seen, but that it was deliberately placed for me to see it. And I remember feeling like I had to hide my disgust from my peers who would think I was weak for not being thrilled by it.
Maybe I'm just getting older now, but when you start having life experiences of people you care about being involved in accidents and having their bodies destroyed, and all tolls that takes on someones life, it makes seeing senseless violence so much more pointless. There's really nothing to celebrate by glorifying the different ways a human body can be destroyed.
At the same time, I'm against legislating against this kind of expression, and I don't hide behind "think of the children." If we just made wiser decisions about the end results of our life's work, we wouldn't have to be having these kinds of conversations.
I believe people process violence in media differently. I'm not necessarily drawn to it, so MK11 isn't on my list of games to play. But it also doesn't affect me beyond the knee jerk.
Even though these deaths are "photo realistic", the context is not. The clean limp bodies of the pets I've owned have haunted me a million times more than anything I've seen in MK. That's how I know death. Just a lifeless body. The spectacle of gory violence doesn't really connect with my experiences of death.
Sorry if your own experiences have been different.
> There's really nothing to celebrate by glorifying the different ways a human body can be destroyed.
I'll reiterate a part of my comment I left in a different subthread:
If you have a problem with violence, Mortal Kombat should be near the bottom of the list because it's just pixels, without anyone getting killed or disabled in real life.
Just look at how popular UFC, MMA, WWE, boxing and other contact sports are. Billions of people watch them. Floyd Mayweather was paid hundreds of Millions of dollars for beating his opponents, imagine just how many people paid to watch that? And they really enjoyed it. This is infinitely more worrisome to me than people not handling gamedev well.
People have been maimed and killed in the (boxing) ring. Ali was diagnosed with Parkinson's syndrome as the result of all the head trauma he went through.
For those that don't know, Australia has censorship practices that America would consider absolutely absurd. Kotaku are similarly inclined in encouraging a kind of puritanical sensibility of their own variety.
I would find this article much more interesting if I didn't get the impression that its author would happily legislate away developer and consumer freedoms to make and/or play whatever games they'd like.
If your employer has you working on something that really bothers you, and they're not able or willing to place you on something else, then that doesn't sound like a good fit for employment. There are all kinds of things that make people not want to work in certain positions at certain places.
> I would find this article much more interesting if I didn't get the impression that its author would happily legislate away developer and consumer freedoms to make and/or play whatever games they'd like.
Why did you get that impression? I've seen nothing that would make me think of that. Is there something I don't know about the author? For example that they called for this kind of censorship in the past? That would put the article under another light, maybe.
ETA: I just remembered that the article even concedes that probably people who play the games could not have the same effects as those who worked on it, so I'm even more confused by the impression you got.
You're making way too many assumptions. There's no reason to think Midway is either unwilling or unable to make accommodations. There's also no reason to think that if someone experiences trauma working on this stuff that they're forever unable to do the work.
I think your mindset, that someone who is having an issue completing their work should just not do that job, is a really toxic mindset. Workers can adapt to their work, but companies also can adapt the workplace to the workforce. Your attitude, that hiring a more resilient worker is the solution to every breakdown, is not only inhumane it's probably inefficient. I hope you don't have any direct reports.
> If your employer has you working on something that really bothers you, and they're not able or willing to place you on something else, then that doesn't sound like a good fit for employment
You say:
> Workers can adapt to their work, but companies also can adapt the workplace to the workforce. Your attitude, that hiring a more resilient worker is the solution to every breakdown...
My initial statement suggested that the appropriate action was to seek an alternative employer, given that they are unwilling or unable to accommodate. If they're able and willing to accommodate, then there is no problem. You've completely mischaracterized my position.
If you wanted to be a surgeon, and you couldn't handle the inevitable blood (real blood mind you, not pixels on a monitor/TV) how on Earth should hospitals have adapted to your special needs as a worker?
As sibling commenters have pointed out, your worldview seems to be very naive. It's not that long ago on a historic scale that people routinely killed each other in wars/conquests every single day.
And they used very twisted, elaborate techniques to maximize suffering and the effect on other people in public executions.
If you have a problem with violence, Mortal Kombat should be near the bottom of the list because it's just pixels, without anyone getting killed or disabled in real life.
Just look at how popular UFC, MMA, WWE, boxing and other contact sports are. Billions of people watch them. Floyd Mayweather was paid hundreds of Millions of dollars for beating his opponents, imagine just how many people paid to watch that? And they really enjoyed it. This is infinitely more worrisome to me than people not handling gamedev well.
People have been maimed and killed in the (boxing) ring. Ali was diagnosed with Parkinson's syndrome as the result of all the head trauma he went through.
If you get on a visual team for MK you'd better damn well be able to tolerate working with gore. If you can't then why the hell are you at this company in this role? If you're unable to do the job you were specifically hired for then like anyone else - you're looking at being let go.
They did know. They didn't know how it would affect them long term. They mention feeling ashamed for reacting the way they did BECAUSE they knew it would be gorey.
I grew up on 90s video game violence. Doom, Mortal Kombat, Duke Nukem, etc.
I've found that over time, the type of violence that disturbs me is the one that is the most realistic. I had friends growing up who joined the military because they _loved_ games like Call of Duty and Counter-Strike. Many of those friends came back with severe cases of PTSD.
Mortal Kombat 11, Doom (the reboot), are not for everyone. But It's much harder for me to associate that kind of violence with reality.
I think I was more disturbed by the news on TV when I was a kid, which was long before even remotely realistic games started appearing. There are so many depictions of violence in everyday life be it video games, the news, movies, music, and even art. I wonder if they had the same conversations back in the day, e.g. battle of 1066 etc, etc.
Same, I played a fair amount of Goldeneye as a kid with no problem, but around the same age I saw a news clip of the execution of Nguyen Van Lem and remember being seriously disturbed by it.
I'm wondering what would happen long term if art and other mediums banned violent material. I know it is censorship. I'm just wondering if we would become a more peaceful society or if this would not have much effects.
I’m pretty sure we’re inundated with violent entertainment because powerful people want us to kill each other. Ever wonder why this stuff is considered ok, but a glimpse of a woman’s nipple is not?
>I’m pretty sure we’re inundated with violent entertainment because powerful people want us to kill each other.
If there were any evidence of a correlation between violent entertainment and actual violence, or that all "violent entertainment" was somehow being created by "powerful people" with some organized agenda, you might at least have a rational premise upon which to base this conspiracy theory.
Human societies have been violent, and their entertainment has been violent, since the dawn of language. If anything, there's far less violence in modern entertainment... there just happens to also be more of everything as well.
>Ever wonder why this stuff is considered ok, but a glimpse of a woman’s nipple is not?
It's because violence is much easier to explain then sex.
In western civilisation most people can get through life and never even come close to having to make decisions about directly committing violence.
The answer of: just don't is in fact entirely adequate - not necessarily complete but almost always the right answer.
Whereas almost everyone "does" sex at some point. But in depicting it the exact same act takes on a huge number of implications depending on context - including violence.
Ergo it's not actually so surprising it's rated the way it is - conversely I still agree the blanket R or whatever is not really helping overall.
Female nipples exist outside of sex scenes too. Movies from countries where nipples are not censored have them in non-sex scenes occasionally.
But also, I am not sure how much your explanation makes sense. Germany has more censorship on violence and less on sex or naked things and their experience with sex is pretty much similar.
That's the whole point of the article - the final output might not be realistic enough to be actually disturbing, but the process to get there has required many people to absorb a lot of very, very disturbing content.
I worked on Mortal Kombat X as a programmer late in the game. While I did not suffer from PTSD, I did find the game's graphic violence initially shocking and then later mundane. I work in a different industry now so it's sort of funny to think back to eating lunch at my desk while the game was doing a soak test and heads and limbs were flying. But watching video game violence daily made me desensitized to it. I had to keep that in mind when showing the game to family and friends.
I do agree with the points that there should be policies around working with violent material and having the chance to step back or work on other projects. That was not something I saw at the time, and while Mortal Kombat stands out in terms of violence, I think it would be a useful consideration with most video games.
I wish these articles would include a little more beyond anecdotal evidence.
There was an article on here not long ago about a guy who was in charge of one of the Civilization franchise releases and he drove himself nearly nuts doing it. There'll always be people who are at the wrong place, at the wrong time - that's hardly newsworthy.
Some of it is environment, some of it is their own make-up and circumstance.
Thankfully, we live in a free market - if people find violence and gore unattractive, they can work on and/or play many other games with similar budgets poured into them! Let the free market decide what people want - it's very good at it.
This idea of moralizing/categorizing things into right and wrong for society is a dead end. Alcohol prohibition in the USA being the go-to example for anyone who has any doubt. People want to do things that are on some level self destructive. It is not anyone's place to tell them otherwise - simply because it doesn't work. You prohibit one thing, they find a way around it or find a different outlet, resulting in consequences that are difficult to predict.
Personally I didn't read this article as "this is outrageous and should be censored". I think it's more on the line of "we never thought about this kind of stuff, but this happens to people who have to watch gore on a day-to-day basis". Much like the articles on Facebook's content reviewers.
Edit: I previously wrote something here that was meant for another comment, sorry.
How did the Civ guy drive himself nuts? That game seems pretty tame in comparison. If it's "I got PTSD because the violence was too real!" that would fit the article, but seems a little unlikely. If it's "I worked 80 hours a week every week until I ended up in the hospital", then that makes sense, and is all too common in the industry.
I've worked on a few bloody moments in film VFX and we certainly looked at some horrible reference of wounds, including headshots from pathology reports. I don't think I suffered much beyond the odd sigh but it was only for a couple weeks at a time. Someone went and talked to a trauma nurse about how much blood would be expected for various rounds and whatnot, and I did imagine them not being terribly impressed at why we wanted to know. Even though it was for a rather non-violence-glorifying film in that case.
At some point someone did tell me something that helped though: think of and describe what you're looking at using food terms instead of anatomy ones - talk about a blood fluid sim as being "too much like tomato juice not enough like gravy", textures in terms of mince/steak etc rather than human tissue types. I also labelled render passes like that, made conversations sound a lot less gross and more removed from reality, particularly to passers-by working on other shots...
Seems 90s christian soccer-mom puritanism is making a comeback. I wonder how ultra violent gore action is somewhat passable but showing a bit of female skin is a no-no, US morals are funny.
Europe/AUSNZL has the yang to America’s yin as most people know - showing skin is ok, but any violence is a big no-no. It’s a nice quick way to paint a broad stroke of cultural differences between America and rest of western world
While not related to the violence in MK, I also tend to think that if you get triggered by everything, you stop accepting other perspectives that don't openly concur with your way of thinking.
This article is about the game developers. Are you suggesting that they are largely composed of 90s christian soccer-mom puritans? Or are you posting without knowing what's going on?
I knew the term, but holy hell, I didn't realize it was created and used as a positive description. I've always thought of the term and the image it conveyed as being strictly derogatory / insulting.
Given how much hostility homemakers get in the US, it may not have been as positive as you imagine. I didn't find the article as shockingly positive as your remark led me to expect it to be.
I think of soccer mom in relatively neutral terms, but my feeling tends to be that it means "she's merely someone with no life for well-meaning but misguided ideas and not because she's outright depraved." Like it's an attempt to say "full time moms: not as bad as we usually think they are."
Anti-women groups use it in a derogatory way, so if you're in those communities that's how you'd see it used. Similar to how many people use feminism as an epithet.
I'm not in any anti-women groups, though I've known or read some people with anti-suburban bent (or rather, against American-style suburbia and suburban life), which is where I guess I must've picked up these connotations.
As for feminism, yes, I know a lot of people who use "feminism" as epithet and justifiably so, though one usually tries to attach some word to distinguish the crazies from those actually helping women; people I know in meatspace usually call it "belligerent feminism". A lot of those people are women! They prefer someone advocating for their rights instead of the people who use it as a pretext to destroy others or win spotlight for themselves; since the latter kind essentially appropriated the word "feminism" in public consciousness, these women decided to disassociate themselves from the movement.
If they have a category for "belligerent feminism" it sounds like they're still feminists and therefore they're not just "associating" with the movement, they ARE the movement!
Personally I don't let cranks define words for me. That includes feminist cranks and conservative cranks alike.
"Public consciousness" is worth paying attention to, but I'm not rewriting my dictionary based on it.
>I wonder how ultra violent gore action is somewhat passable
Well it’s because that slippery slope that everyone says doesn’t exist actually does. Recall that the original Mortal Kombat caused all sorts of controversy when it was first released (Doom as well). Compare the relatively tame violence in MK1 to what we have now in MK11, it’s what happens when society collectively shrugs their shoulders and says “it’s just a [game|movie]”.
That nudity is still taboo in games and other media is more a reflection of no one bothering to push the envelope like they did with violence.
Well unless this MK takes a way different direction than all the ones before, there are going to be some gigantic physics defying titties in this game...
Having experts come in and help artists seems much more sensible than artists study real life ultra-violence references in the studio. That's going to mess anyone up.
I think it's rather subjective. MK X was a great game in my opinion. Personally I'm hooked on DBFZ at the moment and think it's the best fighting game around. Certainly, at least to me, the most entertaining to watch at high levels.
I worked on the completely pacifist MMO Meadow, you can't even write something offensive to each other in that game, instead of chat it has an emote system.
One day when I was logging in to test something a player used the only sound that could be interpreted as hostile (the lynx hissing sound) and was backing away from me repeating it for as long as I stayed, I was hypnotized by the time this poor soul was going through to try and make others feel uncomfortable.
To me that was enlightening, there must be some story about something positive with working with the most violent game ever, I wish Kotaku would try and dig that story out instead.
You get that sort of thing all the time. Games in the genre of DayZ and Rust, where the default is trust no-body, shoot people on sight and loot the tins of beans off their corpses- every now and again, someone takes a newbie under their wing, or shows someone mercy when they didn't need to, or helps someone get revenge against someone that wronged them, and you get a great little story of kindness in a harsh world.
Once upon a time I worked as a postman. It involved sorting all the letters for the day into their slots for the tour. I had dreams of that.
Work has a habit of sneaking into dreams. I have dreamed of shifting computer commands around, too.
From the trailer, MK is absolutely not appealing to me. I also don't like horror movies. So I wouldn't be keen to work on such games or on horror movies. Other people might feel differently.
I think people who don't enjoy the work should just quit and look for another job. That goes not just for MK, but for any kind of job.
I was once part of a project where we were porting "MK:Deadly Alliance" to mobile platform. Every time when I saw heads being ripped-off or likes during unit and integration testing I use to think "People(lot of young people) will be playing this?" I am not a gamer and have not directly worked in gaming industry, so this could be just me I think.
I played Carmageddon and Mk 3 when I was like 7. In my teens I watched videos of middle-east decapitations, limb mutilation by the narcos, etc. just out of curiosity.
I'm not proud of it, but I don't think it has made me a violent person or anything.
That's interesting. I too played Carmageddon, Quarantine (what a great game), MK3 and MK X - and didn't think anything of it, it doesn't even register as violence. Yet I'm sure I would have trouble sleeping for a couple of days if I watched the real stuff you mentioned.
> This is kind of similar to the mission in Call of Duty series where one has to participate in the slaughter of civilians in an airport - I didn't like that one either.
Oh man that was a tough mission to play through... great game though.. definitely compelling and one of the most memorable. I wonder if something like that could ever pass today.
Ppl in this thread are acting kinda strange. Why is this so traumatizing to everyone? You know EMTs and doctors and whatnot see this kind of stuff irl fairly frequently and still manage to live healthy lives afaik. I can't imagine being someone on a mortal kombat dev team who goes home and has recurring terror from their work. If that's the case like - go work for Kirby or something.
Funny story - I broke my leg in half a while back. Soon after I could walk again I went to a buddies and we got high and played MK10. The cutscenes where it xrayed and showed bones breaking in half shocked the hell out of my senses. But I didn't get stressed or stop playing. The feeling desensitized relatively quickly and it was one of my favorite games.
It's not traumatizing to everyone and everyone reacts to things differently.
I've spent almost two years of my life in combat zones, seen some pretty fucked up shit and can sit down and watch a war movie with no problem. Other people, not so much.
Though I did watch the trailer in TFA and do think it is surprisingly violent for no real reason.
We're talking about it, that's pretty much the reason. MK have never been good fighting games and have relied totally on the "edge"/shock factor to market themselves. There are probably people who read this thread and think "wow this game is shocking people! I need to check it out".
Had a really hard time watching that trailer. Makes me question if the developers have researched what level of gore their audience finds acceptable in an age of near photo realistic gaming.
To each its own, maybe. But I didn't find the trailer that gory and certainly not realistic. MK has always looked like a silly US fighting game to me.
There are hints of really gruesome things regarding joint dislocation in the trailer but it doesn't come anywhere to the discomfort I have experienced watching certain movies.
I am not talking about over the top, blood everywhere, fake and grossly exaggerated gore movies. Think of scenes involving cutting tendons in one, eye gouging and the eye hanging in another one... That kind of things, which were only glimpsed at in those movies, upping the discomfort level way higher than a 2 minutes brawl between an electric god and a razor man throwing each other 12 feet up in the air.
edit: Now, I am not saying setting up and producing these scenes has no impact on the people working on it for months but spectators experience something different: the end result, not the process.
Meh. I watched the trailer, it seemed desperate for attention.
When the first two or three MK games came out they were indeed a big part of a culture of its time, being both controversial and a kind of (trashy, commercial) statement against the puritanical/hypocritical mores of the time. The limits of videogames as media were being tested. That side of the controversy won.
Nowadays? Meh. They dialed up the stupid gore in an attempt to remain relevant. Nobody cares. I only hear about Mortal Kombat once in a while when someone writes some piece about its violence when a new game comes out. A couple of weeks later they are selling it at some budget price. Nobody cares anymore. Never heard from anyone I know actually playing the new games. Who knows what were the innovations in Mortal Kombat 8? Me neither.
What is photorealistic changes every decade. Doom used to be photorealistic, then Unreal, then Crysis, now modern games are photorealistic. And yet they don't look realistic at all.
It doesn't 'change every decade' since it's a style rather than just a function of technology. Doom was never 'photorealistic'. The original 90s MK is, Smash Bros Ultimate isn't.
I was about to suggest Myst 2 onwards as exceptions, but then I looked at some gameplay videos on YouTube and even those don’t look very realistic any more.
Your comment made me watch the trailer, though I don't like MK games. The gore is so unrealistic (there's like, 1/50th that amount of blood in the whole human body!) that it didn't bother me. The closest thing it reminds me of is Kill Bill.
True I guess. "Acceptable" was probably the wrong word. "Most enjoyable"? Still, do gamers think it's a great game while coping (and would have preferred less gore) or is more gore always preferred?
There's a huge difference between silly gore (e.g. DOOM) and disgusting/frightening gore (e.g. Resident Evil). I, for myself, certainly know that I finished RE5 despite its gore, not because of it, and I realize I will never play certain games (e.g. Alien Isolation); if I could go back I'd probably stop myself from watching the Alien movies and a bunch of other gore / psycho movies, too.
Mortal Kobat's niche is largely people who really like the over the top gore for whatever reason, in the same way some people are horror movie gore fans. MK is also one of the few Western fighting games left which have a different play style to other fighters like Street Fighter, UNIST, or Tekken which probably makes up the most of the playerbase that might fall in the less gore category.
Couldn't disagree more. We should stop worrying about what other people are doing for entertainment. Totally fine if you don't want to play or watch violent media but judging others and calling their enjoyment unacceptable is a pretty far departure from an open and free society.
I disagree with your dismissal as some form of 'free society' bs. Free society is all well and good but we have reasonable laws for a reason. There are some people who find torture amusing and end up serial killers....no offence but their opinion is not equal to every one else's and should be removed from society imo. Just because someone is entertained doesn't not make it acceptable. That's a farce
"There are some people who find torture amusing and end up serial killers..."
You've described maybe what, 100 people in the country at this moment? Vs. the 11 million sales of the previous version of Mortal Kombat, and will likely buy this one. So sure, 100 folks remove from the equation, but you do NOT get to take the 11 million who found it entertaining out of the equation.
Huge crowds watched people kill each other in Colloseums.
Huge crowds cheered as people were executed, as a matter of course. It was entertainment.
So, were all those societies of the past being harmed and corrupted by their entertainment in a broad-sce way? In a way we can see in retrospect, that caused them to become worse than they already were?
Those societies were worse off because they valued human life less and this was reflected in their entertainment. Seems like a reasonably unobjectionable no-brainer.
The whole Mortal Kombat thing has died long time ago. The last good release, IMO, was MK3. (I'm still playing it!) The game was about controlling your own rhythm and predicting your opponent - in the first place. Knowing "secret" moves was secondary. If you had the rhythm you could've defeated somebody with "bare hands." Violent scenes was a bonus. The game was built around the rhythm. After MK3, it's all about violent scenes. With jam pouring out of people and high-contrast renders they don't even look realistic anymore... And that music - indeed, no style at all.
R.I.P.. Mortal Kombat. (We still play you in DOSBox!)
It really did seem to lose something after MK3 and never seemed to get it back. MK9 seemed to get the closest out of all the newer ones to that old feel, at least for me, although the X-ray bone breaking special moves it introduced got too long and annoying after you did them every single match. Seems like they've doubled down on those and they've just gotten worse with MKX and MK11.
Some people (John Romero/Carmack and team) actively like working on stuff like this. Seems like they should be finding volunteers if that wasn't the case. There's enough of demand for video game jobs I'm sure it can't be hard.
Surely there exist perfectly sane and law abiding creative people who aren't disturbed by fictional depictions of gore. Comparing people like Romero to fictional serial killers is just silly.
The violence in Doom, Quake, and such was always quite stylized, even in games like Doom (2016), and usually inflicted against demons, mutants, and other monsters. (It's relevant because the uncanny valley is more forgiving when you're seeing something decidedly not human.) These days, Mortal Kombat is going for a style of violence that looks particularly gruesome and realistic, and is committed against humans or creatures close enough to human as to make little difference. And Netherrealm staff are scrutinizing footage of real murders, executions, and other deaths for reference. The sort of person who enjoys looking at that stuff, over and over, is pretty much constrained to the psychopathic serial killer aspirant type. MK is really raising the bar on how extreme video game violence can be, well beyond what was ever countenanced by Carmack and Romero.
>well beyond what was ever countenanced by Carmack and Romero.
Do you recall the first FPS that id software produced? It's a game ostensibly set during a certain war in which you shoot at decidedly human figures.
Doom benefits from moving away from human figures, because projectile weapons are much more interesting to dodge and make more sense when wide varieties of demons emit them (rather than the hitscan and more or less single enemy type in Wolfenstein 3D). Heck, the remade Wolfenstein games are significantly more detailed in their violence, and their scenarios much less out of the realm of disbelief than Doom is, even though it occurs less often.
I'm not convinced that more realistic violence wouldn't have been added to such games had the technology been available to do so early on. Of course, games that are solely about inflicting highly graphic violence without an explicit purpose are few and generally not as well-received as (for example) the remade id games are; and it isn't a moral panic that the ability to portray violence in that way exists.
For one game I worked on, I was instructed to get blood splatters for cuts and slicing off of body parts (in a cartoon character world) like the movie 300 which were over the top and very obviously particle effects (the producer loved referencing current popular culture...). It never occurred to me to go looking for what blood spurts look like in real life, as I was given an order for a style.
Most of the games I have worked on were not realistic looking, though I remember doing internal tiger team testing for Warcraft 3 and there was one mission where you have to kill villagers. These characters are tiny and cartoon like but the voices of them suffering in this made me feel so bad and similar to stuff happening the real world I thought we should take the mission out of the game - I think they toned it down a bit but it was in the final version. This is kind of similar to the mission in Call of Duty series where one has to participate in the slaughter of civilians in an airport - I didn't like that one either.
I still have trouble watching some of the fight scenes in TV/film/wrestling when they look too real or wince especially with blades, even though it's obviously stunts with props and probably CGI for the most gruesome bits - I have retained sensitivity to realistic violence.