Tuesday, March 07, 2006
Violence and Gore
The 'survival horror' range relies quite heavile on using violence, or more particularly gore, to accentuate the atmosphere and evnironment encountered. Resident Evil has never been afraid to delve deep into the gruesome and garish, with exploding heads, decomposing enemies and sickening sound effects.
This could be looked at as being gratuitous to an extent, it isn't quite necessary to the games playability afterall.
However the horror genre in general uses violence, gore and scare tactics frequently across all forms of media. Books, films and TV programmes associated with horror all use these conventions to frighten the viewer, hence it would seem obvious and therefore acceptable to use violence and gore in computer games.
The game that brought graphic violence to the fore is un-doubtedly Midway/Akklaims merciless beat-em-up Mortal Kombat. Released across all major platforms in 1993 and in the Arcades in 1991, it not only contained the first realistic depiction of blood and guts, but revelled in it further with the creation of the 'fatality' - a move encouraging players to actually murder their opponent upon victory, to add further shame on their foe.
(ABOVE) A particularly 'colourful' fatality from Mortal Kombat II (arcade)
Also to add to this blood'n'guts foray is the fact that this was the first game to use actual actors as the sprites, rather than just using sprites drawn up by computer. This created a never-before-seen element of realism to a beat-em-up genre that at the time was dominated by Manga-style cartoons.
The press tore the game to pieces and resulted in the Super NES version containing no blood whatsoever, however 1994 saw the release of Mortal Kombat II - probably the most over-the-top, gruesome and gratuitously violent game i've played (until Manhunt - see later post). This time the risk of poor sales and bad press couldn't stop the Midway team from splattering all major consoles with the fuly un-censored game, with several fatalities per character and an even wackier cast of monsters and super-humans.
As Mortal Kombat became the success story of the early 90's, more and more violent games added gorey details to their credentials, and by the late 90's blood was almost a pre-requeisite to realism in most games that had any depiction of violence at all!
Graphic depiction of violence was now a well-established convention in video games, but peoples moral values were to be tested even further........
This could be looked at as being gratuitous to an extent, it isn't quite necessary to the games playability afterall.
However the horror genre in general uses violence, gore and scare tactics frequently across all forms of media. Books, films and TV programmes associated with horror all use these conventions to frighten the viewer, hence it would seem obvious and therefore acceptable to use violence and gore in computer games.
The game that brought graphic violence to the fore is un-doubtedly Midway/Akklaims merciless beat-em-up Mortal Kombat. Released across all major platforms in 1993 and in the Arcades in 1991, it not only contained the first realistic depiction of blood and guts, but revelled in it further with the creation of the 'fatality' - a move encouraging players to actually murder their opponent upon victory, to add further shame on their foe.
(ABOVE) A particularly 'colourful' fatality from Mortal Kombat II (arcade)Also to add to this blood'n'guts foray is the fact that this was the first game to use actual actors as the sprites, rather than just using sprites drawn up by computer. This created a never-before-seen element of realism to a beat-em-up genre that at the time was dominated by Manga-style cartoons.
The press tore the game to pieces and resulted in the Super NES version containing no blood whatsoever, however 1994 saw the release of Mortal Kombat II - probably the most over-the-top, gruesome and gratuitously violent game i've played (until Manhunt - see later post). This time the risk of poor sales and bad press couldn't stop the Midway team from splattering all major consoles with the fuly un-censored game, with several fatalities per character and an even wackier cast of monsters and super-humans.
As Mortal Kombat became the success story of the early 90's, more and more violent games added gorey details to their credentials, and by the late 90's blood was almost a pre-requeisite to realism in most games that had any depiction of violence at all!
Graphic depiction of violence was now a well-established convention in video games, but peoples moral values were to be tested even further........
// posted by PashionConscious @ 6:16 AM 
