Contents page 1 — Where the fun stops-page 2 — the Suffering of Others On a page
read “I would have liked to go fishing with my son”, whispers Leonidas, king of Sparta, and quite muscular man in metal armor. It is the year 480 before Christ, it is the night before the great battle, a last Moment for sentimental thoughts. At Thermopylae the Persians to land straight, the Spartans, and with them, the other troops of the bright Federal government are outnumbered. But the soil with the blood of the enemy soak: The Spartans want to.
According to this prologue to the video game Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, and first of all, it is, like its ten predecessors, is an action game As a player, you see the figure that draws, an angle from above. The fight is up, we skewer a couple of Persians with our spear. It makes a squelching noise. An opponent rushes screaming down a hillside. A man from our ranks, however, he wears no armor, should have to the enemy to betray. He wants to say something, but we encounter him, the spear in the mouth until that comes out from the back of the skull of the only alleged traitor. Blood squirts. Assassin’s Creed Odyssey is released from the age of 16.
The game is tell you, quite successful. It is transformed later into a real Open-World Game, you can do as a player, and players in ancient Greece, legislation is largely what you want. The world is pretty and convincing. But we need to talk about the violence in it.
violence in the movie and in the game
The battle at Thermopylae was twelve years ago, the theme of the film 300, Zack Synder, after a Frank-Miller-Comic has turned. At the time, a rule was accompanied by right-wing Outcry from the cinema start: From the Aesthetization of violence, from uncritical celebration [Macho-masculinity. The lexicon of international film attested to an “unreflected attitude towards faschistoidem ideas”. These objections were entirely justified. About the movie It was-is-but-probably-still-say-group features and the blood feast, the überzivilisierten Persians had to do.
The video game is now exactly the same way. Consuming some of his warriors ready, and then slaughter as many enemies as possible. There is a public Outcry, therefore, is not yet heard. This is due to the fact that the video game industry has acquired a certain degree of freedom with regard to depictions of violence.
I ask for your understanding that a personal insertion as follows: As a Journalist who writes for more than a decade about games, I even defended the possibility of the representation of violence in Games. For me, it had, like many other colleagues that video games would finally be taken as a cultural heritage seriously. A decade ago, namely, there was a veritable media Front against Games per se.
It was at the time, regularly and with reference to often-questionable studies claiming to Play verrohe young people and sink them, possibly the threshold, to apply in real life violence. The criminologist Christian Pfeiffer about travelled with this Thesis for a while on talk shows. In 2009, for the first time, awarded the German computer game prize, in turn, behind the competition is a joint Initiative of the economy and of the Federal Parliament, was driven on the political side of people who sometimes had touches never a Controller. Games in which the shot was fired, were not considered in the price a long time. Alone, the routine use of the term “killer games” in the discussion of Games made it clear that these were regarded as a Problem, not as an art.
How great about the Ego-Shooter Half Life 2 as a game was, therefore, hardly a debate: Was this the best Game of all time? But almost at the same time GTA San Andreas came out, you had to constantly think about this superlative. Brutal both Games. How much of a Doom 3 or Dead Space games in a cosmos of fear and Horror were able to catapult, a good variety Of all the those who didn’t know, the video games only in terms of their supposed effect (Adolescents especially) considered, but not as a work of art. Bernd Neumann, state Minister for cultural Affairs from 2005 to 2013, tens of thousands quite the film Director Quentin Tarantino, is not inconsistent with the view that Ego-Shooter “is difficult to be culturally and pedagogically could be valuable”. The statement appeared in a press release from the house, as then a first-person Shooter at the German computer game award was awarded, Crysis 2 in 2012.
The predecessor of the Odyssey, which is also not unbrutale Assassin’s Creed Origins, was in this year the German computer prize in the category of Action-Adventure game awards. The times have changed. But perhaps the times are also wrong again, only different than assumed: Where is the violence now? How especially does it look like?
