I play a game every day where you kill other players, by the hundreds in a good battleground. Admittedly the deaths are more cartoonish than graphic. But yeah, I’ve never been able to bring myself to watch one of those beheading videos. And the movie Hostel makes me feel pretty oogy, even though it’s just acting and special effects.
Maybe it’d be different if the deaths I saw in games were more graphic, I just play WoW where the corpses fall to the ground and then disappear, leaving behind a skeleton. Not something where you’re actually killing people by cutting off body parts and making them bleed, or whatever.
I’ve been playing Borderlands recently, where if you aim just right you can make enemies’ heads explode in a literal geyser of blood and gore. If you shoot someone with an electrical weapon their head will cartoonishly fry, letting their brain flop out and at least one eye bounces along the ground. I can do that all night.
But when I sat down to watch the season premiere of Castle in which the opening scene was straight out of a medical drama and the camera showed a doctor cutting into flesh and drawing blood, I flinched hard and had to look away until the scene was over.
Sure, you can be desensitized, but only to the thing you’re doing over and over and over again. Killing a mook in a game isn’t the same as hurting someone in reality, and I think most people know that.
I can play “Fallout” and watch heads popping off and bodies exploding and laugh like hell. I always go for the skill where your enemies are likelier to explode. I played “Mortal Kombat” just to pull people’s heads off.
I saw a video of something like that for real, I’d be horrified and would probably be unable to sleep that night.