DarthFennec said:
Most of the things I do in games, I wouldn't think of doing irl. It's just a game, the girl you just sliced open is just a mesh with a blood texture that just experienced a slay event, you didn't actually kill a real person though. You know how sometimes it's fun to play paintball against your friends, but you would never go out and shoot at each other with real guns? That's a lot like what this is. There is an infinite difference between playing a game and doing any of that in real life, and I think that's something that a lot of the anti-gaming community doesn't understand. Games, like movies, are built to be an escape from reality, and doing morally questionable things in a game is always going to lower your chances of doing it in reality, if you had any chances of that in the first place. That's what I think.
^Pretty much this. If you think about the stuff in the game like real people, yeah it can feel a little fucked up (and I have felt this at times, though rarely), but it's just a game. It's no different than when I was 7-8 years old, playing with my Legos and envisioning a battle between crusaders and pirates. In my mind, they were also dying, the blade stabbed underneath their armpits. But it's not a real death and it doesn't carry the same consequences or the morality.
I do apply morality in games where necessary though. I usually go for the good guy route in RPGs though I sometimes enjoy the bad guy route as well, even more at times (but those are roleplaying, while most of the stuff "I'd do" is the goody two shoes approach). It's not because I wanna go around killing people, it's because I wanna go around killing computer characters.
Try to apply the same morality to other things in life and you'll find a lot of controversy as well. Let's take the easiest/most popular route - eating meat. Do you think about the way the animal was slaughtered, force-fed and similar stuff every time you take a bite of something?
Let's apply it to insects. You know when you've got that annoying mosquito flying around and you smash it with your hands? Do you realise how violent that is if you apply the same morality you would for killing humans, or if you're heavily into animal protection, non-insect animals? I mean it's the equivalent of throwing a car onto someone from the third floor and watching their brains and organs splash across the pavement, yet we feel nothing (most of us anyway) just because something is small and therefore somehow 'insignificant'.
Simulation of violence is not like violence. It's not even like thinking about violence. Look at martial arts practitioners. Most of them are actually famous for their aversion to violence, even though they practice 'violent acts' all the time - and this is practicing that stuff in reality. They're not living out perverted imaginations of kicking/punching the life out of someone every time they train, they do it for entirely different reasons.
Problem with people who think games (and a lot of other things for that matter) are disgusting/all about violence/etc. is that their view on the matter is VERY shallow. Mind you, you can almost always go deeper into it and yes, on some level, there is a part that's about violence. But that part is not at all greater than a lot of other activities which are perfectly socially acceptable and not commonly linked to any violent activities.
