Life has reached a kind of fever pitch for me. It’s the end of the semester, various deadlines are looming, and changes are afoot at my kid’s school. All of this leads to me being forever in a bad friggin’ mood. Perhaps not outwardly, but inwardly I often think about how nice it would be to pop in to Fallout 4 and kill a lot of stuff or don my Lara Croft skin and shoot hundreds if not thousands of bad guys (and complain about how I hate killing the entire time), but now I wonder if I have reached critical mass.
We are 336 days into 2015 and there have been more mass shootings than days in the year thus far. And that doesn’t even count the number of people of color shot or killed by police so far this year. The media is saturated with news of shootings. Unarmed Black and brown men, women, and children, people in Planned Parenthood offices, schools, churches, and social service offices. Literally everywhere. It’s like a fucking nightmare. Scratch that, it is a fucking nightmare. It just seems to continuously get worse (even when you think that it couldn’t possibly).
So what the hell does this have to do with games? Rainbow Six Siege dropped this week and I’ve been waiting for it for a good long time. I have been waiting to do some hardcore counter-terrorism shit at the request of Angela Bassett since I saw her and Aisha Tyler on stage at E3 talking up the game (even though I disagree with Tyler’s take on diversity in games). But right now it is just sitting on the sofa in my game room. I haven’t even had the psychic energy to put it into my console. I haven’t killed any mutants, raiders, or weird guys with stigmata in days. I just haven’t been able to bring myself to do it. And now I am forcing myself to start thinking about why. Why, after all of these years, have I finally reached a point when I don’t want to kill more?
Has killing in games ceased to be cathartic for me? Can it be that I have reached the point that the real world has come so far into my mind space that it is now effecting the media that I can/will/may choose to engage with on a regular basis? Have the shootings taking place in the US and around the world finally had some real effect on my gaming habits or is it just that I have reached a point where I don’t want to engage with games media at all? We’ve had discussions before about whether or not games desensitize us to issues of violence in the real world, but the question that I find myself asking myself this week is whether or not violence in the real world is making me increasingly sensitive to violence in video games?
While I am pretty sure that my little break is a temporary one, I am really beginning to wonder if the day might come (as violence in the real world continues to escalate) when violence in video games will become unbearable to me and for me in the same way that violence in the real world has done. At this point I say, I hope not, because fighting and shooting games have long been effective stress relievers for me. But for the time being maybe I’ll spend a few days catching up on some bad tv after (parenting) hours and see what the future brings.
