We’re doing it again, aren’t we?
It dawned on me that video game discourse is one giant Ouroboros, a never-ending, endlessly repeating series of events that recurs like clockwork. Difficulty settings, review scores, the eternal “art of games” debate will all come up again at some point in the future, but for now, we’re back to the topic of violence in video games. A true classic in the field of video game discourse, it has been talked about for decades. Hell, you could even call it “the godfather of video game discourse.”
In fact, it’s quite appropriate to discuss being rebooted again, and this appears to be a Mortal Kombat reboot. The Mortal Kombat 1 trailer was released last week, and to the surprise of absolutely no one, it’s pretty violent. The characters have their throats slit, their eyes turned in with their thumbs, and, in one spectacular sequence at the end of the trailer, are kicked in half by an ancient god while being held up by two elemental dragons. Sounds ridiculous, right? Well, it seems to have struck a special nerve yet again.
The exponentially increasing visual fidelity of video games these days is impressive, but I have a hard time seeing it as “realistic”. severe? Absolutely. nausea? Your mileage may vary, but sure enough, I can see what you mean. But “reality”? It’s meant to be pretty bloody and scary of course, and I think if I were to kick a guy in half, it might look like that, but surely the context here matters? I’ve seen the Mortal Kombat 1 trailer described as “like a snuff movie‘ or like what you’ll ‘see live leak’. Two completely nonsensical statements got me thinking – are we watching the same trailer?
I’m pretty sure I saw a few heads explode like giblet-filled garbage bags — very violent, no doubt — but it’s totally exaggerated to the point of intended humor. In my opinion, a game like The Last of Us 2 is more violent and shocking than any recent Mortal Kombat – Johnny Cage doesn’t call out his friends’ names, for example, you Just disembowelled with a makeshift calf – and far more blunt, matter-of-fact and brutal.
Sure, some people made a fuss about the violence when we first saw footage of the game, but now it’s gone mainstream and even got its own HBO series. However, because it was seen as some sort of high art, rather than a kitschy fighting action game, there was no outcry, or that it would be better off removed. The “No Russians” scene in the original Modern Warfare 2 was a highly controversial sequence that was far more “realistic” in its violence than anything in the Mortal Kombat 1 trailer. For what it’s worth, I don’t want people to complain about the violence in either — I think both are extremely effective uses of violence, but what you see in Mortal Kombat isn’t the same thing.
It is at this point that we need to look at the relationship to the old extreme violence in other media. A fairly common thing to see in horror movies over the years is that they keep raising the stakes, pushing the gore-filled envelope farther and farther, and eventually they reach what I’ll begin to describe here as the “wicked death point.” The extreme violence comes to a point where it crosses the Evil Dead point and becomes deliberately ridiculous. That doesn’t make it any less disgusting, scary, and of course violent, but in tone, it’s quite different.
Both “Martyr” and “The Human Centipede” are horror films that center on “real” medical procedures and create that uncomfortable feeling of horror in the audience, but no one can tell me they come from the same place – a real One is disturbing, and the other is clearly playing ridiculously ill. Also take the Saw movie as an example. Once it became clear that people were completely caught up in the vicious deaths at the hands of the increasingly complex trap of the puzzle, the series doubled down on how horrific they could make them. I can’t imagine someone walking into a movie theater watching Saw 4 thinking “Gee, I hope everyone comes out of this movie safe and sound!” or thinking they won’t see Jason Voorhees stabbing a bunch of people with a machete Watched the Friday the 13th movie under the impression.
Sounds less like a psychopath and should have a grim appeal to the violence on display. It’s not the same as watching that lad walk up and down the beach in Normandy with his fucking arms linked in Saving Private Ryan.
Now, crucially, Mortal Kombat isn’t just about gore. From a mechanical standpoint, it’s a consistently great fighting game series, with truly iconic characters and rich lore and backstories to keep you hooked, and often more than others in its genre. Serving single-player players. However, it’s totally synonymous with violence. From day one, back in ’92, people have been saying that the realistic violence in Mortal Kombat has been corrupting society. Of course, after a particularly meaty uppercut and Sub Zero ripping off your opponent’s head, with the spine intact, the big red blob that flies off your character looks a little wacky now. But at the time, it was the scariest, sickest, most realistic depiction of gore ever written. Will someone, anyonethink children?
Now, NeverRealm isn’t doing itself any favors in this regard, with reports on the release of Mortal Kombat 11 that its crew is looking at pictures of actual car crash victims or some pretty pathetic shit, but poor workplace practice Not the focus of this article – obviously, it’s a bad and very stupid thing to do. It’s totally okay to think Mortal Kombat is too violent! There’s a discussion there, even if it’s not one I agree with.
I just think it’s a pretty disingenuous statement to say that this isn’t just intentionally dumb gore that’s been the selling point of an entire genre in a variety of different media for years. It’s also inaccurate to say that the older games were more “funny”, as the original Mortal Kombat was meant to be as violent as the technology of the time allowed, and even more recent games have the more sillier sides of the series, like “Friendship”, Still a big part of it.
Maybe I’m desensitized, maybe I’m part of some deep-rooted problem with the complete normalization of violence in video games, but some of the footage I’ve seen of MK1 gore in the past few days does make me feel like I’ve lived too long , saw too many discourse loops.
