Some scenes in games are too much for sure, but there are far more horror scenes that I think never should have been made and have no place as entertainment in civil society.
I do not understand how people watch that stuff.
As a kid I’d play violent video games and my mother would get upset, claiming that I was becoming desensitized to violence. But I think it might actually be the other way around: kids lack sensitivity to begin with because they don’t have any context for the violence they’re enacting. As you get older and death starts to feel more real, the idea of a WW2 combat simulator, for example, begins to feel a bit tasteless.
(There are also plenty of exceptions, where the violence isn't trivialized and the horror is central to the point; Watching a movie like _The Act of Killing_ is far from escapism)
> I do not understand how people watch that stuff.
Frankly, most people have a grossly stunted sense of empathy, with exceptions only for those things that they have firsthand life experience with. An instructive contrast is media depictions of sexual violence against women: for a couple of decades, there has been a concerted effort to decry media depictions of violence against women (sexual or otherwise) that are perceived as unnecessary or trivializing. The success of these campaigns is to be lauded, but what they reveal about how empathy-bankrupt monsters most people are is sort of chilling: people en masse can be taught to play-act empathy by rote if it's drilled into their head that a particular case is no longer socially acceptable, but they don't seem to be capable (en masse) of practicing the skill of empathy itself.
For anyone who watches Game of Thrones: Compare the huge outcry against the depiction of Sansa's marital rape to _an entire season_ of infinitely more gruesome torture porn by the same perpetrator against a male victim, which included genital mutilation. Despite being a far more egregious and lengthy display of gratuitous and stomach-turning violence, the latter caused no backlash whatsoever, and is in fact still fodder for jokes about Game of Thrones-themed foods ("Theon's Flayed Sausage"), including from publications like Huffington Post which were some of the loudest complainants about how unforgivable the former scene was.
TL;DR: It's not a particularly popular opinion, but most people are far more depraved and far less capable of basic human empathy than even their own ostensible moral standards would imply. Like you, I can't _relate_ to how people watch that stuff, but I can definitely _understand_ it.
But I think most violent art instead aims for that apparently very popular mixture of disgust and titillation. For example, there are various scenes (for which I've read descriptions, not watched) in Game of Thrones that make me seriously question the state of a culture where this is extremely popular entertainment. And I do not buy the idea that these scenes force people into sober contemplation of the way mortality yokes us all together.
But I strongly dislike violence more realistic than, say, the Avengers, so I'm biased here.
> For example, there are various scenes (for which I've read descriptions, not watched) in Game of Thrones that make me seriously question the state of a culture where this is extremely popular entertainment
> But I strongly dislike violence more realistic than, say, the Avengers, so I'm biased here.
Yes, I would say you have a much stronger than average aversion to violence, and that's ok! Just so long as you recognize that same freedom of choice in others.
Since then, I've seen countless on-screen deaths, many of them successfully pulling off romanticizing & glorification of killing. Both the "Private Ryan" scenes and the "romanticizing combat" scenes look superficially similar in terms of gore, but the context matters a lot. Upthread, 'stevenwoo mentions the "killing villagers" Warcraft 3 mission. I played that mission back in the days, and reading about it now reminded me of the feelings of disgust I had. The details of this mission cleanly communicated the killing as an immoral act - as opposed to the exact same animations being shown when you play the game against a computer or human player, outside campaign mode, and happen to attack your enemy's base (AFAIR those villagers in campaign used the same, or similar, model as Human Peon unit in the game).
IMO it's clear that it's the context which frames acts of violence that can make them a lesson in empathy or a glorification of brutality. It's not about the violent acts themselves.
(ETA: I also played the Modern Warfare's airport massacre mission. Didn't fire a single shot towards the civilians. Ended up being thoroughly shaken, disgusted, and wishing I didn't play it at all.)
It is possible to make war movie that feels bad, but generally they tend to be obscure (as you wont watch it for fun).
It's nothing like any movie.
Oh, meaningless new world, which holds such braves.