A very compelling read if I do say so myself. (CLICK ME)
"... the longer you play a 'twitch' action game, the less you notice the cultural content — the gushing blood, the shrieks of agony. You're too busy focusing on the gameplay. I noticed this with Wolverine. For the first hour, I found the deranged bloodshed both shocking and exciting; it made me feel like I 'was' Logan, the grunting, killing-machine character from Marvel Comics' X-Men universe. But as I became more expert, the cultural shell of the game boiled away. In a sort of staring-into-the-cascading-numbers-of-the-Matrix way, I found myself looking past the visible aspects of the game and savoring the underlying, invisible mechanics of play. ... The game became pure physics and algorithms: Vectors, speed and collision detection. The gore had become mostly irrelevant."
I'd have to agree, that gore does not really affect my choice of games. As playing L4D, I noticed that I did not really care about the graphics and gore in the end, just about the mechanics and gameplay. I think that's how most games end up, play it for sometime in awe of all the awesome graphics then turn away from the graphics to engine mechanics and gameplay (in the eyes of a programmer//gamer).
For me especially, I have a history of disliking games for their overdone violence. It doesn't so much bother me anymore, but seeing my enemies arm fly off doesn't really excite me either. The look of a game can mean a lot, but it's not the entire game. Look at Crysis. It looks AMAZING! But the gameplay, from what I've heard and experienced, is meh (and the compatibility problems get in the way of the fun).
http://www.paradisesgarage.com/mcweb2/photos/troop/images/2372/original.aspx[/IMG]
Troop:and the compatibility problems get in the way of the fun
Did you mean Performance?
I only played the demo and not even to the end. I just enjoyed the look and feel of the game. I was impressed by the engine's looks but not by it's performance.
Any game that is based on a war setting is going to be gory if you want to have any realism. Even a written story about war will usually be gory in its details, granted seeing the guts and reading a detailed description of them isn't quite the same. My point is when they use it to tell a story as they do in the Call of Duty games and other well done games like the Half-Life series, I feel it's necessary for the story line. It's part of the immersion. Games that promote gratuitous random violence like the GTA series don't appeal to me as much... That's just me. (Disclaimer: I have not actually played the GTA series, this is hearsay based on what I have heard from others)
Remember... Where ever you go, there you are...
The Half-Life series and Call of Duty games don't have excessive gore like some games do, if you read the link it already points those games out, that's why they were very successful, because of their mild use of gore. Half-Life 2 didn't really have as much gore as Half-Life 1 because the bodies just disintegrated. But there are some games that have WAY too much gore, blood and guts flying all over the place left and right.
I don't really know about the GTA series, the engine doesn't really look like it has a lot of gore just ragdolls flying all over the place and minor blood splatter. Then again I haven't played any of the recent GTA games in a long time.
ParaDOX: Did you mean Performance?
Yes.
I don't think GTA has a lot of gore compared to other games, but I'm pretty sure you can hack off a guys arm with a chain saw, and that seems a lot worse than killing some monster with a chain saw because of the atmosphere of the game. You're doing bad things just to be bad, you're not defending the human race from a pack of blood thirsty aliens or trying to disarm a huge terrorist threat; you're the terrorist, you're the threat.
Anyways, that's kind of off topic. Call of Duty games have hardly any gore compared to some others. Years ago, when I was younger, I rented a game that I thought looked pretty cool. In the beginning of the game your wife and baby are murdered, and you start off playing in the room they were murdered in. There are blood smears everywhere, puddles of blood in the crib, hand pritns clinging to the walls, the only thing missing was the bodies. Not long after this, you're in a subway literally knee deep in blood. Human blood. You're walking in the stuff! and there's still hand smearing on the wall as if they were trying to cling to a surface. I couldn't handle that game. Gore was the main feature, and it was sickening. It wasn't fun. I played it for half an hour to a full hour if it was lucky.
Look at all of the really popular games. None of them have excessive gore (although some, like GTA [which is kind of an exception], certainly push the boundaries on "excessive").