Inflicting Pain To Others, The Gamer Way.

In most video games the main goal may not be to hurt people, in fact some times the main goal is to save someone. But in the vast majority of circumstances I find my self in I am the one causing all the pain and despair. Truth of the matter is, it's fun to kill people. That sounds horrible, doesn't it? Even if you are not killing human beings, most of the time you will be killing some manner of beast to progress through the story line. 

There aren't many games where you become a total badass by being a diplomat with your enemies now are there? Most badasses I know of wear seven foot tall suits of armor and run around throwing sticky blue balls on everything they see. And if you're not into the suit of armor look you can always be the guy from a foreign country that's just trying to make it in America but always seems to commit multiple counts of senseless murder on a daily basis, you know instead of getting a real job.

Why don't we as gamers think about what we are doing to people in video games? I mean, say we're playing Grand Theft Auto, any of them in the series take your pick. So, now here we are walking down the street and we see someone who rubs us the wrong way, let's say they're wearing yellow and we totally think that doesn't go along with their complexion at all! So we cycle through our weapons which somehow all fit in our pants (including a full size RPG and varied assault rifles) Now, we decide to kick it old school with the baseball bat, while simultaneously busting out our matching leather jacket with bandanna, mind you. And we wait until there are no cops around and maybe a convenient alley way in case we need to book it. After the coast is clear we casually walk up to our victim (who clearly has no fashion sense) with bat in hand, and promptly smack them in the face like it's nobody's business. While they lay there screaming and receiving, yet even more beatings until they're dead and motionless, can we think of what we just did, you horrible excuse for a human being? 

That man might have been going to a family gathering of some sort, but guess what? thanks to you that family is now completely dysfunctional, what if he had five children to support all by himself? Now they're homeless you European asshole.

So, why is GTA fun to play? All you do is kill people right? Well it all depends on what type of experience you are trying to take away from the game itself. Most games where you can kill massive amounts of people, you really don't have to, at least the innocent ones. We just do it because it appeases us, and gives us a good laugh as we see the corpses of the innocent ragdolling all over the streets. All it comes down to is: these are games we're playing and 99.9% of gamers know the difference and can tell reality from the game world. Because, honestly if these games where as bad as the media so enjoys to make them, we would have literally millions of sociopathic maniacs running through our streets shooting anything that moves, followed up by abrupt T-baggings.