Warren Spector - Ultra-Violence in games has to stop

[Kantor]

VicViper said:

Kantor said:
I don't think the criticism of God of War (the elephant man) on this basis is fair.

God of War is designed to shock the player with extreme violence. Greek mythology is not a pleasant setting full of rainbows and ponies. It's horrible. It's full of murders and genocides and sexual assault. Trying to sugarcoat it would diminish the setting enormously.

The brain is bordering on obnoxious levels of gore, but again, that's just what the setting is.

Oh, I'm a huge fan of greek mythology - at least as much as you can get from reading The Odyssey. Even though it is super violent, it's written in a way to sound heroic, evil, epic - it was not a way to get people say "wow, brain!" And most important, it was written. The shock value is diminished 95%. Not saying that writing can not be gruesome and butal, but that was not the case.

Notice how you don't see from that age violent drawings and sculptures depicting violence are rare too - most about Medusa. This makes a huge difference.It's much more brutal to depict visually a scene like that. Even more when you're in control!

And people at that time were a lot more condescending with killing and death too.

Unfortunately, the medium of video gaming was not around in Ancient Greece. Their ability to create visual works of art was pretty limited; you can't really show somebody cutting the brain out of an elephant with a carving on a pot. You could do it with a sculpture, but that would look weird (and sculpture wasn't that advanced).

The point is that God of War is meant to be an extremely dark game, and once Kratos has sold his soul to Ares, he has no remorse or pity left. He is a mindless killing machine.