The rise of interconnecting violence within virtual reality to real acts of violence continues to perpetuate that games like the Doom Series provide a hyperbolic space for engaging in brutality.
***WARNING GORE VIDEO BELOW***
Often times, games like Doom 3 make it difficult to justify that their mere purpose isn't beyond causing violence. The assumption that this carries is that, they are purposefully created by designers for gamers to act in violence but, what do these consequences have beyond virtual spaces?
This perspective is engaged within Satanic Panic, which states, "Many Americans still believe in criminal Satanic cults, and fan-tasy role-playing games are still part of a tableau of “occult crime.” (Satanic Panic 103). Though seems like an outrageous perspective to have, it does leave room for thought-provoking questions of does games like Doom serve larger purposes? The adrenaline of running around shooting aliens from Mars seems like a purposeful enough escape and immersion for most, and has been from the original Doom game as well. A perspective that needs to be contributed to this discussion is the design and narrative that goes beyond the violence such as: music, characterization and development of space and setting and how these aspects contribute to the larger rhetoric of these violent games. The digital change in the game series speaks for itself, that if violence was the only purpose behind the game, other factors wouldn't be enhanced. As we can see from the visual above, the brutal gore is a part of the experience.
To demonstrate the evolvement of the series, below is a walk-through game play of the original gameplay of DOOM from Exposed.Files
It seems that games like Doom had definitely been put out in the public eye for its negative effects, and Paul Tassi from Forbes emphasizes, "What I mean is that a lot of times, these worlds and characters created are so real and plausible, that killing actually seems….wrong, a very non-video game-y notion indeed" (Forbes). It seems that with the advancement of graphics, the violence seems too real to engage with, and that the original game doesn't seem as bad as it was perpetuated to be during its time to cause such satanic panic.
This raises questions of how interactive violent VR games may be in a position to tone down, or continue their specialized focus with violence, and the repercussions of panic that may continue.
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I think the problem is people don't look at the imagination that takes part of video games, just like television and movies and books video games should also have the same space to pertain to their genre's!