Editor’s note: When it comes to blood and gore, I’m a wimp. My wife used to be in forensics, and she loves watching true-crime programs and surgery shows. The thought of some of the acts in the Saw films nearly makes me retch. Yet I have no trouble with blood and gore in games — I typically play with all of the gore settings at max. Have games desensitized you to blood and gore? -Jason
The other night I was watching some random TV show with my parents. My mother decided she wanted to watch one of those documentary shows about plastic surgery. I don’t know why, because she hates the idea of plastic surgery, but she just settled on it this particular time.
I don’t believe she understood exactly what was going to be showed during the course of the program, but we quickly found out it was going to be about the actual operations themselves, with closeups of the surgeries.
The first operation was a breast enhancement. (Who else saw that coming?) It focused in as the surgeon made the first incision and began to widen the hole; blood poured out, and you could clearly see the surrounding fatty tissue. It was quite disgusting, and my mom nearly got sick.
But I was completely unaffected. I watched calmly as the surgeon went about the job. I didn’t feel the slightest twinge or need to look away. I wasn’t shocked by any of what I saw.
Afterward, I asked myself why I wasn’t affected. I quickly realized it was because I’d seen far worse in video games.
I’ve seen heads ripped off, guts splattered over walls, and limbs cut off — all in digital form. This kind of gore’s common in games. There’re always enemies to defeat, and some games let you do it in incredibly violent ways.
I think this has led to me being desensitized to real gore and violence, too. It occurred to me that maybe I’m the only person that’s been desensitized by games; maybe something in me just doesn’t work as well as it should.
So I conducted a little experiment at school. After a bit of research the night before, I found some particularly gory pictures and videos on the Internet. I shrugged them off and decided to see if others had a similar reaction.
So at lunchtime I gathered a bunch of friends — three gamers and three nongamers. I didn’t tell them what they’d be viewing; I just wanted to see their reactions. So we gathered around one of the computers in the library, and mindful of teachers, I brought up the selection of pictures and videos that I’d found the night before.
Two of my friends turned white and looked away. Another dry-heaved a bit. They talked about how disgusting these images were and why I was showing them. These were the nongamers.
The gamers looked at the pictures calmly, asked what the point was, and laughed at how the others reacted. None of the gamers were affected in the same manner as the nongamers. They just took it in stride.
While not a scientific exploration of the issue, this at lease proved my point to myself — that games can desensitize people to gore and violence. But then I thought that maybe it’s just a trait of my generation of gamers, the generation that’s grown up with 3D gaming. Games have always been realistic to us.
So how about you? The majority of you are older and remember games when they were simpler. Do you think that you’ve been somewhat desensitized to blood and gore, too? Or is the mixture of pop culture and gaming a bigger factor?