What It's Like to Work on Ultra-Violent Games Like Mortal Kombat

Same here.

Started with Duke Nukem 3D, Doom, Quake and Mortal Kombat 2/3.

I think I'm a bit more messed up than I would be without it, but nothing too serious.

I have worked on ultra-violent games but never did research on what actual killings looked like as referenced in the article. As the one quote said, context is important as well as how close something gets to realistic looking. That embedded Mortal Kombat trailer was pretty unrealistic looking IMO, the physics was cartoon like and several what would be real life death blows were not death blows until the fight was over. I was pretty disgusted by these sorts of things when Mortal Kombat came out when I was a child and didn't get the appeal of it so maybe I got inured to cartoon violence by exposure. OTOH, Breaking Bad had a few death scenes similar to one of those, and aired on prime time basic cable.

For one game I worked on, I was instructed to get blood splatters for cuts and slicing off of body parts (in a cartoon character world) like the movie 300 which were over the top and very obviously particle effects (the producer loved referencing current popular culture...). It never occurred to me to go looking for what blood spurts look like in real life, as I was given an order for a style.

Most of the games I have worked on were not realistic looking, though I remember doing internal tiger team testing for Warcraft 3 and there was one mission where you have to kill villagers. These characters are tiny and cartoon like but the voices of them suffering in this made me feel so bad and similar to stuff happening the real world I thought we should take the mission out of the game - I think they toned it down a bit but it was in the final version. This is kind of similar to the mission in Call of Duty series where one has to participate in the slaughter of civilians in an airport - I didn't like that one either.

I still have trouble watching some of the fight scenes in TV/film/wrestling when they look too real or wince especially with blades, even though it's obviously stunts with props and probably CGI for the most gruesome bits - I have retained sensitivity to realistic violence.

I've always felt that the Mortal Kombat games were sick. I remember when I played my first violent video game as a kid and saw over-the-top gore, and feeling cold, like not just at what I had seen, but that it was deliberately placed for me to see it. And I remember feeling like I had to hide my disgust from my peers who would think I was weak for not being thrilled by it.

Maybe I'm just getting older now, but when you start having life experiences of people you care about being involved in accidents and having their bodies destroyed, and all tolls that takes on someones life, it makes seeing senseless violence so much more pointless. There's really nothing to celebrate by glorifying the different ways a human body can be destroyed.

At the same time, I'm against legislating against this kind of expression, and I don't hide behind "think of the children." If we just made wiser decisions about the end results of our life's work, we wouldn't have to be having these kinds of conversations.

Kotaku. ".au"

For those that don't know, Australia has censorship practices that America would consider absolutely absurd. Kotaku are similarly inclined in encouraging a kind of puritanical sensibility of their own variety.

I would find this article much more interesting if I didn't get the impression that its author would happily legislate away developer and consumer freedoms to make and/or play whatever games they'd like.

If your employer has you working on something that really bothers you, and they're not able or willing to place you on something else, then that doesn't sound like a good fit for employment. There are all kinds of things that make people not want to work in certain positions at certain places.

I remember from one of your older comments that you worked on Diablo 2 also. Isn't warcraft 3 almost cartoon-ish in comparison?