Ultraviolence

written on Thursday, May 28, 2009

Killing Floor is violence against monsters, but it's still super gory. Limbs detach. Bodies are covered with burns. Monsters blow into tiny pieces. I've come to refer to the first wave of any game, which consists mostly of using a knife to separate heads from shoulders, as The Melon Harvest. And the sharpshooter class only levels up by turning various heads into showers of blood and skull bits.

The Wikipedia page on aestheticization of violence says the issue goes at least as far back as Plato and Aristotle arguing over the place of the arts in an ideal society. Plato thought they were dangerous and should be banned. Aristotle thought catharsis was valuable and necessary. I think they were both twits for even proposing an ideal society. The greatest philosopher, Douglas Adams, summed it up best. "People are a problem."

If you want to be like Plato and ban all possible sources of bad feelings, you're just going to drive the arts underground and make it even more dark and upsetting because the artists are being persecuted.

If you want to be like Aristotle and offer catharsis, there's always going to be someone in a messed up mental state who's going to fixate their illness on it and do something bad. And there's always going to be someone willing to blame the art instead of the person who committed the act because they don't like the art and want it banned.

Enough social commentary. For me, there was a twinge when I posted the Killing Floor Slo-Mo video. It was the thought that some people would find it horrifying and that they were right. And while there's a whole industry around horror as entertainment, a part of me feels that maybe we shouldn't enjoy this stuff so much. We can't excise this part of our makeup, but would it be better if we could?

It's a ridiculous impulse. Violence and transgression is part of our nature. It keeps us strong. Fear is a part of our nature. It keeps us safe. Wanting to see and experience things that trigger emotional responses is part of our nature. It keeps us engaged.

But the twinge keeps us moral, lets us curb our violence and fear to let us trust and be trusted. It's the foundation of our ability to cooperate and be social.

I guess the thing I needed to remind myself of was that there's nothing wrong with that discomfort. It's a system of checks and balances and the conflict between them is just the signal that they're working.