The Virtual Killing Fields

Every now and again an article will appear in a video game magazine, website or blog lamenting the number of people each of us has virtually killed in our tenure as pixelated psychopaths and the increasing violence in today's games. It's an effort, I think, to bring some sort of justification to this hobby. To make it look like the vast majority of gaming fans aren't all socially retarded morons with a fixation on killing, which has been brought about by how new gaming still is and its common use as a scapegoat. Which seems odd to to me, considering every other fan base contains as high a number of these socially retarded morons. They rarely feel the need to justify them. In fact, certain hobbies often celebrate it. Not mentioning any names *cough* Football *cough*.

I, on the other hand, just like to look at these as a chance to take stock of how many people I have personally killed in the video game world. It's literally in the millions. Now a large part of that figure was through a nuclear war game called Defcon, which racked up the kill count like the score on a pinball machine (New York 11.2 million dead. Take THAT America!), so that's cheating really, and in all honesty, fairly abstract. The more telling figure is the blood on my hands through more personal means- bullet wounds, grenade blasts and the odd decapitation. It's still in the tens of thousands, distressingly. To you, I mean, not to me. I'd like to round it off to a nice even 100, 000 and then retire, a nice golden AK47 hanging on the wall as a reminder of all those I've mercilessly slaughtered. Also in case they come back as zombies, which is a real and vital occupational hazard these days.

But get this- I'm as normal as an person has the right to call themselves these days. I don't see opportunities for killing sprees when I'm out in the street. In fact, the only real way video games have effected me like that is when I was playing Tony Hawk's Pro Skateboarding too much and could see nothing but amazing grind spots everywhere. Video game violence is cathartic. It helps me relieve my stresses at the end of the day, not make me want to go out and add to them. In fact, I'd say that video games have stopped as many killing sprees as they've started (0). Not that you'd see that as a headline though.

Argh, I feel like I'm banging a drum that's been beaten many times before, when all I wanted to talk about is how much I like shooting people. I like it a lot. I'm in no hurry to stop. Worlds need to be saved and princesses have to be rescued and I'll always need to dump my stresses somewhere. So I'll continue to get my hands bloody and not give it a second thought. Care to join me?