Who hearkens to the monster’s scream? Death, violence and the veil of the monstrous in video games

AbstractAlternative blood is a practice in video games in which on-screen characters bleed green or other off-coloured blood when killed. The practice, intended to minimise in-game violence and reduce the depiction of gore, has become common since the release of Carmageddon (1997) and can be deployed as a means of either placating ratings boards and censors or offering players greater in-game choice, as in the case of Serious Sam 3 (2011). This article suggests that alternative blood and the more general depiction of on-screen targets as 'monstrous' as currently deployed in video games often serves to dehumanise the familiar and limit the presentation of death. Instances from video games in the horror, Western and war genres are examined and placed in a context that considers the history of these genres and of thematically related propaganda. This analysis suggests that the justification of deaths through alternative blood and monstrousness may not dampen the impact of violence in the way that developers and moral guardians might assume. Ultimately, this article argues that the desire to minimise the impact of in-game deaths by rendering victims as 'monsters' enacts a type of cultural violence by dehumanising them. This aesthetic dehumanisation of in-game victims echoes propaganda strategies used to justify historical violence and may have negative social consequences and should be further studied. Additional informationNotes on contributorsCarly A. KocurekCarly A. Kocurek is Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities and Media Studies at the Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago. Her research focuses on the culture and history of video gaming. Her book, a cultural history of the video game arcade in the United States, is forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press. Previous work has appeared in Game Studies, The Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds, Flow, In Media Res and The New Everyday and the anthologies Before the Crash: An Anthology of Early Video Game History (Wayne State University Press, 2012), Gaming Globally: Production, Play, and Practice (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) and Computer Games and Technical Communication: Critical Methods and Applications at the Intersection (Ashgate, 2013).