guilt from video games

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is it sane to feel guilt from playing violent video games? almost every conflict-based video game is some level of a power fantasy, attempts to instill a sense accomplishment for violence/fighting/killing/immoral decisions/etc, and often the enemies are purposefully underpowered and unable to stop the player, seeings how the player has the advantage of being able to try again. it feels wrong, usually the amount of enemies it takes to stop the player is in a dozens or hundreds to one ratio. I feel wrong for being entertained by video games and other conflict based fictions/movies/etc, even though i enjoy the hobby for some reason.

The first time I held a guy up when I was out of tranq darts on Metal Gear Solid 2 I couldn't shoot him in the head. He eventually attacked me, so that changed the situation for the future. Those damn facials! But you shouldn't let it stop you enjoying the games. Enjoy the emotional investment, and remember even if you or someone else goes on the most depraved "power fantasy" imagineable, they're just pixels on a screen. Or actors in a movie being well paid. As long as you wouldn't do the thing in real life, you have nothing to feel guilty about.

I don't know about that amount of guilt, but I know I've played the demo of Postal 2 before, and after a short while, it stopped being funny and just started feeling really, really gross.

I have felt a little guilty playing GTA:SA. The previous games, nothing you did really mattered, but in this one, characters felt a little more lifelike (though ultimately, I'm sure your choices still don't matter). For example, some missions required you to drive your friend's car for him, and whenever he yelled at you for driving crazy, I actually kind of felt bad and tried to drive more carefully.

Oh yeah, I get this sometimes depending on the game.

Like, I remember a game called Jet Force Gemini, right? Back on the N64. It was you VS armies of insect-like aliens, with these big walking ants with guns being one of the most common enemies. They had all sorts of tricks and traps to take you down.

There was a type of ant enemy though, a yellow one, that wouldnt put up much of a fight. They might shoot at you a bit, but as soon as you'd do anything they'd drop their guns and surrender, and just stand there with their... uh... hands? in the air. And on very rare occaisions the normal violent blue ones would do that too. And me being the way I am, I could never make myself attack them at that point. I always just left them alone, every time, and moved on. I really doubt I'm the only one that did that, too. It's like, yeah... it's just a video game. But it's just a natural part of my personality. IRL, I cant even bring myself to hurt even an insect, and I mean that literally. Bugs in the house, I must always pick them up and take them outside. Except for house centipedes; I just ignore those and let them do whatever. They're WAY too fast to catch and they're harmless anyway.

Now, that being said, for the enemies in games that WERE utterly bent on destroying me, I didnt have any problems taking them out. It was war, and they were clearly the bad guys, and they were clearly in for a fight to the death. Genuine villains that dont give up and dont stop, I have no trouble fighting even if they're kinda weak (as they make up for that by there being LOTS of them).


I also end up not really getting into games like GTA partly for that reason. I'm just not the sort to do the whole murder-rampage thing that makes the game so popular. I grew up with NES games; to me, the sorts of things I should be fighting are genuinely evil/bad villain sorts, not just running around killing bystanders just because. I mean, with the evil mastermind sort and their evil armies of horrible evil, where *everything* is a bad guy out to clobber you, somebody has to stop them, right? That's the whole point.

At the same time though, I tend to gravitate towards games with very high difficulty.... which means that the enemy usually DOES have a decent chance at taking me down. So there's DEFINITELY no reason for sympathy in that case.

I honestly don't feel guilt at all while playing video games. Because I know that they're just games and not real life. So games like GTA V with me wrecking cars and running over and killing innocent people. I laugh and just have a great old time. But if this was real life. I would never do it and if I killed anyone. I would be crying and scared for life. But we have video games to escape from reality.

I don't feel guilty exactly, but sometimes surprise myself when I enjoy visceral violence such as Mortal Kombat or DooM.

To be fair, sometimes I feel slightly horrified and amazed at the same time when getting through an area in DooM with demons gushing blood over my chainsaw.

Ultimately, while enjoying these games, I also feel that for some reason I let off stress from the work week and it's all fantasy.

I think guilt itself is pointless. What prevents me from trying to do those things in real life is fear. Fear, not guilt. I s**t on guilt.

I've felt guilty on Total War before, especially when I hear troops saying things like "I'm scared" The imperialist in me always wins out though xD

Another good example from the past few days.

Playing No Man's Sky (which now is *very* different from the release version). I have a bazillion things I want/need to get done, so I pick up some random guild quests to get money and influence. One of the quests was just to go and kill 28 creatures, with the description saying that the client wanted "trophies" but was too lazy to hunt for themselves.

So I figure, okay... I'll go find some horrible monster to fight. This is an early-game quest, a very low-level one, it shouldnt be too hard.

And indeed, it wasnt too hard... because the planets I was familiar with at the time mostly had peaceful, timid creatures (makes sense, this is all taking part in the 4-5 systems I'd been roaming through at the time, all right next to the starting point; I had not progressed far into the galaxy yet). And it's like... I could have finished the quest super easily by killing things that wouldnt fight back, but... just couldnt do it. The only thing I fired at them was a camera (I love the photography mode in this).

Took quite awhile, but eventually I found a planet with so many animals on it that I couldnt move two feet without tripping on one (and the PS4 wasnt very happy about it either). And then finally, the crabs showed up. I dunno what it is with this game and crabs, but they always try to murder everything, whatever form they take at the time (and they can look really freaking strange). They literally run around and kill *everything*, obviously including the player. Finally, an appropriate target. I got the quest done by fighting them. I got pretty beat up multiple times, and I COULD have done it before with no threat, but.... yeah, me being the way I am, it was either do battle with something that actually wanted to fight (and in this case, was trying to murder every other animal ever), or... well, wait until I found such a thing.

Of course if I'd been playing on survival mode, everything would be crabs. Always with the crabs. That mode hates me. And everyone else.

Now, missions to kill sentinels, on the other hand.... no trouble with the idea of wrecking those. You're meant to hate those robotic jerkwads (and basically every NPC ever also hates them). They're always a thorn in your side. That sometimes throws robotic death wolves at you.