It’s an argument that has plagued gaming since the first time a player was able to pull out a weapon and attack someone else. No one ever worried about Mario jumping on the heads of turtles or Donkey Kong kidnapping a woman and defending himself with barrels. But by the time characters began looking like real people and players had the ability to whip out a gun and shoot Nazis in Wolfenstein or possessed marines in Doom, violence in video games has be criticized by those outside the industry. Now, the argument against it comes from within by an incredibly respected member of the community.
Warren Spector was recently quoted saying, “The ultraviolence has to stop.” This doesn’t come as a huge surprise that he would be an opponent of violence in gaming as Spector left Eidos in the mid-2000’s because of the level of violence he saw in certain games being created by his studio.
Spector continued, “We have to stop loving it…I just don’t believe in the effects argument at all, but I do believe that we are fetishizing violence, and now in some cases actually combining it with an adolescent approach to sexuality. I just think it’s in bad taste. Ultimately, I think it will cause us trouble.”
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