It feels like the moral panic about video games and violence is a little outdated now. Games are more deeply embedded in pop culture, and the biggest phenomenons are more cartoonish in their depictions of combat, likeFortnite,Minecraft, andRoblox. Video games still have the idea of ‘might is right’, but the violence is no longer at the forefront. WatchingThe Game Awards, I realised how much I missed it.
The trailer responsible for this wasWindblown, the upcoming game from Motion Twin, best known forDead Cells. It begins with a lizard, an axolotl, and a bat being given instructions on combat before being handed some weapons. With its colourful tones and cartoon aesthetics, it looks pretty par for the course. Then the bat gets its head blown off. Then the lizard is unseamed by a laser sword. Then the axolotl stands there, covered in blood and frozen in fear, as it is sliced straight down from the top of the head to its hips, body collapsing as its innards spill. This is old school video game violence.
The gameplay itself seems a little more tame thus far, with typical colourful explosions and bouncy mechanics, so Windblown might not be the game to bring it home. But it reminds me of what we lack - there are so few games these days that swing for the fences with violence, that celebrate it and get creative with all the possibilities it affords. Modern games are so often so polished into something without edges that the uncompromising buckets of blood in Windblown felt so fresh.
Of course, video games are still highly violent in their own way.The Last of Us Part 2has you repeatedly tap a button to cave in a skull with a pipe. But as games attempt to establish themselves as more mature forms of art, that violence becomes more grounded and meaningful - The Last of Us Part 2 is a highly violent story with several dozen deaths, and its core point is that violence doesn’t solve anything.
Meanwhile, the games that are less purposeful in their use of violent ends tend to be more santised in order to appeal to the widest possible demographic. Many exceptions to this rule still exist -Call of Dutylooks more realistic than ever, andgo harder on the military connectionthan the series did previously - but it feels like shockingly violent video games are a thing of the past, while parents nowadays grew up with video games or possibly are gamers themselves, so they’re less scared by red pixels. A game like Bully being banned these days would be unheard of.
Horror games still bring this kind of violence - look at the kills inDead SpaceorResident Evil- but a) we expect horror games to have blood and gore, so they’re their own category, and b) they’reso over the topthese days that it swings back around to not feeling real. Obviously so is Windblown, but the murky colours of modern horror games and the genre itself make the violence far less shocking.
It’s possible that Grand Theft Auto 6 could reignite this debate - it’s far more over-the-top and seems less mature than its cousinRed Dead Redemption, while being equally relentless in its blood-spilling. It’s also a more popular name, known for pushing extremes, and tends to have its satire mistaken for sexism; whether Lucia changes that remains to be seen. But GTA 6, and Lucia especially, highlight a new area of moral panic: wokeness.
There is already a swirling debate about howGTA 6 is going woke, and why, which again seems to miss the point thatGTA 6 is a satireand the joke has always been on those who took its mockery of American extravagance at face value. It will only get worse with each trailer, then explode with the game’s launch in an avalanche of clicks, and then be debated about endlessly until the end of time. There is a lot of intrigue to how The Last of Us uses violence, the view it has of humanity, and what the core characters represent about its message. But instead, we get to talk about how wokeness ruined it forever.
In the face of this, I yearn for the days when all the grifted talked about was if a game was too violent and if that would mess you up in life. Maybe that’s why seeing those cartoon characters slayed so viciously spoke to me. Come back, video game violence moral panic. All is forgiven.
