I CAN'T JUST KILL FOR FUN ANYMORE,

or,

'To kill for yourself is murder. To kill for your government is heroic. To kill for entertainment is harmless.'

How many games not designed for children can you think of in the next ten seconds, off the top of your head, that do not in some way involve some degree of violence? I don't mean it as a gotcha. "Ha, this loser doesn't only play indie art games!" According to my Steam library, 14 of the 25 games I've played this month (its the 12th of October, I know 25 games is a lot for only the second week of the month, but I've been hella sick, lemme alone) are primarily designed around shooting people to death.

When I can no longer let the stress of college work pile up in the background, I close these games, boot firefox, various project files, open tumblr. Ten asks from Palestinians, desperate to leave Gaza, but lacking the funds. My stomach was already churning with sick, and now, inescapable, is the horror of genocide in a place I have never seen. We, people conscious of the goings on of the world around us, cannot escape the language and imagery of violence that impacts, almost exclusively, bodies most unlike those who have the power to control media depictions of the world. I want to talk about how we see this violence, but to do so without the context of our reality, would be to ignore who is really impacted by how the global north acts. I do face intersections of violence, but I am not crushed by the boot of colonizing soldiers. I will never know what its like to be hurt like this, I live due to the benefits produced through systems that produce this. So I want to take a second here.

The most probable possibility is that no one is reading this. I don't care. Ahmed R. Al-Louh. Asmaa Abed. Doaa Jadalhaq. If you can, help them. Please.

Do you feel like a hero yet?

We cannot escape violence in its depiction. It seeps into everything. The world is infected with it. I can't stop thinking about it. We watch movies where some people do good violence to people who've done bad violence to a third party who is rarely critical to the central plot. We build our morals around this, that punitive measures, redemption, are how we make things right. That those who enforce these measures are pure and righteous and to be looked up to, aspired to be. The civilians killed by Bad Guy du jour are gone in a blink, so that we might ogle our main character's M4A1 Carbine and Beretta M9 Pistol and Specialized, Middle-Eastern Flavoured camouflage, so that we might watch them make things right.

This good violence is good because it punishes. This good violence is good because the people who do it match "Your" Values. In 2019, famously, an Infinity Ward dev claimed that Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019) was not political. It was not considered political because they do not understand, or do not want to state, that everything is political, and that this can be decidedly not called political in the eyes of those who see the actions in these games as inherently justified, and without moral question - why would they question it? The actions of the player were more than likely to defend the country of that same player. It's a game from the West, made for western audiences. This game involves the torture of a terrorist, his wife, and their child. You threaten the kid with a revolver. The player does a no-knock raid. It is a reboot of one of the most gamer-beloved sub-series in the COD franchise. Why can we be sold this massacre, this torture? Why was this series something the kids in my elementary school were talking about? What the fuck are we doing, indoctrinating people into this needlessly cruel war machine and its churn like this?

I've spent a lot of time considering myself an other. I'm a tranny who's into weird art, it's what we do. Part of that was embracing art that was visceral, that was violent. Now it's hard to see where the line is. I remember being 13 and playing DOOM 2016 for the first time, thinking about how cool the gore was, ripping out imps' jaws with my bare hands. It was the peak, to me, the epitome of violence, killing creatures in ways that broke them apart. But these weren't people.

Recently I've been playing Spec Ops: The Line - No! Wait! Please! I promise I have something new to say! - a game that has a similar finishing-off mechanic. A lot of games have them now, but they weren't all that common back then. Early on I realized it existed, and thought, sure, I should probably stop their suffering. Five hours in, as everything falls apart for our 'hero,' Captain Martin Walker, these executions - previously a punch to the face, or something similar - now regularly involve jamming a shotgun deep into the back of his enemy's throat, in my mind, panicked and struggling to fit the barrel and tube mag into their mouth, before blowing their brains out through the back of their skull. At the time, I thought it was horrible and sudden. Now I think of Red Dead Redemption 2, a game released a year before Modern Warfare and two years after DOOM, where, my version of Arthur Morgan, an honourable cowboy who wanted to do right by people before he died, unthinkingly did the same thing with a random thug, blowing their head to chunks with his sawn off.

The US military does not condone the killing of unarmed combatants. But this isn't real, so why should you care?

My favourite game ever is Disco Elysium. Nothing has ever hit me as hard as it did. Every time I leave our character's hotel room, I get a far off look in my eye, listening to Whirling-In-Rags, 8 AM. It gets it; you're not really a cop by our world's standard definition, but you're a cop in any way that matters, and it gets how that skews interactions with people. So much of the game is just talking, getting to know people, breathing in a world that is so hopeful for how rotted out it is.

In Disco Elysium, three people can die because of your actions. Your partner always kills one person, one of the shooters at the "Military Tribunal" - functionally no different than a mass shooting - but he can kill one more in self defense, if you get ahold of your gun. Another of the shooters can be shot dead or burned alive by the player, also to defend those at the attack. A woman, one of the only dykes who is sexually active that I can think of in a game that isn't expressly designed around a gay relationship, can kill herself if you try to arrest her. All of these deaths reverberate. You see how they affect the people around them, how it changes the community. We need more games that look at violence like this - something that impacts communities, and that is a last resort in situations without another answer. There is no good violence, there is only violence enacted to harm and violence enacted because all other measures to stop that harm have failed.

Because if we don't change how we look at violence, we're just going to keep trivializing and decontextualizing and numbing ourselves to it, when real people are being killed in real streets and no one talks about them, depicts them, contextualizes them in communities. Media doesn't cause violence, but it impacts how we look at it. It impacts how we see others' bodies. If we don't interrogate that, we idealize violence. We glorify it. We lose sight of its consequence. We get the IDF posting on social media with the personal affects of dead Palestinians, real people with lives and families and careers and emotions. They felt comfortable doing that for a reason.

Next time you watch the news and they talk about deaths in Palestine, or Sudan, or Armenia, or anywhere where the civilian population is being killed, ask why they are being portrayed as they are - or how they're not being brought up. Next time you play something with enemies dying in vast numbers, ask why those people are labeled as expendable. Next time you see something being glorified, or made into spectacle, think about who that benefits.

Stay safe. Back soon, if I get the urge.