It's not so much the violence. The violence is a symptom. It's the blatant fear of ideas in the face of financial risk.
--a perfectly-stated point from the post's comments section
My old barbarian - a warrior king, after all; and a historical one, yet - fits in the category of a mindless sociopath, but his perspective on the requirement of violence is unfamiliar to my mind, my context, my ability to personally justify. It was easy enough to see the reasons the *character* would and could do as he did; yet to spool it out, to produce the words describing it (in first-person, no less), to get all the scenes of murder and battle out, was a trial for me nonetheless. I put off writing certain of my battle scenes literally for YEARS, out of dread of having to do them.
I hate battle scenes, as we know; as I chide myself for committing to in the way I have and did. The ones I've created were more than a necessary evil; they were a story actually important to tell.
This really makes me wonder, then, how they read. I invested myself in the character - and in the first-person - with honesty. I have re-read these scenes perhaps more than others, because I'm aware I need the most editing and scrutiny in these things I have such a hard time writing in the first place. I put a lot of work into ... I don't know what the word is to use here. Verissimilitude seems best, though it dissatisfies me. Satisfaction, in its way, is better actually. The violence is "satisfactory" in the sense that it doesn't read as if a forty-two year old wimp of a hausfrau in modern Virginia was filtering through all the shock, yuck, and goo to produce them.
I produced them, let it be said, in a fairly workmanlike way - and, once I'd had useful feedback on a false start early on in the going, with pretty decent first-go results on the products themselves. I tucked my head down, took deep breaths, plunged in, and got the job(s) done.
Reading my own violence, as I've said, I have little visceral response, though emotionally I do follow pretty well, and I think the "read" works authentically in terms of what it is meant to evoke in a reader. But even with the control one has over reading, as opposed to other art forms - the way we can slow down (or perhaps rush) through certain passages, and manage our experience of them - they pack the punch they need to.
Video games can't be as easily modulated as books, slowing down or speeding up the pace of our reading; lingering or skimming, even physically holding the body - or the book - in some particular way. Sure, there are pause buttons, but play determines its speed, and immersive experience is the best way to do best, so "backing off" mentally is less of an option for the gamer ... or, at least, so I believe from my experience of gamers. My experience of actual play is nonexistent. But I know how much willing suspension of disbeief it takes just to watch a movie. And I know that it takes even more than WSD to participate in a game. A lot more.
So I segue from thinking of the effect my own violence has, on those whose responses to it I can guess, on those I can identify in one way or another, to the universal and popular question of "what media does to us" - and of course the answers always seem to make me queasy.
I justify my own contributions. I justify my own consumption. But I still find the whole a less enjoyable part of the culture than real storytelling, real human interaction, real *entertainment* (by, admittedly, my own definition of the term), real enjoyment of life. I question whether what I've done is art, or merely creativity designed to sell to a sick(-ish ... ?) society.
I tuck my head. And write the next scene of sudden gore.
As Vonnegut says. So it goes.
*Sigh*
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