Gaming hits the mainstream news once again, with an article in The Patriot Ledger detailing how a company in its own vicinity is “testing the limits of the ultraviolent gaming genre with a strategy that enables players to kill characters resembling young girls.”

Stating that the choice between “harvesting,” the Little Sisters for the maximum amount of serum, or saving them for a mere half, is ultimately taboo-breaking, it’s the latest in a lengthy line of recent gaming violence related articles to hit the mainstream news.

2K Boston President Kenneth Levine commented that: “As a piece of art, we want to deal with challenging moral issues and if you want to do that, you have to go to some dark places, and BioShock certainly does go to some dark places.”

Though the article is opinion light, the latter half details numerous studies and cases that damn video game violence. Taking quotes from unnamed video game forums, one forum member unhelpfully states that: “Maybe allowing people to simulate repulsive things is keeping some folks from doing it for real. I say, long live video games that push the envelope.”

The article itself, while certainly not as venomous as most that are published in the UK tabloids, seems to neglect to tell both sides of the story. Though the two small forum quotes from gamers are used as a minor sort of defence for the gaming world, it’s certainly far outweighed by comments from much more recognised sources. None more so that from James Funk, a psychology professor at the University of Toledo who claims that research proves that violence in video games desensitises young people to violence.

Certainly not the most blatant attack on gaming I’ve ever witnessed, it certainly needed a definitive voice from the gaming world outside a few anonymous random forum quotes to defend our hobby.

Personally, I can’t bring myself to kill any of the Little Sisters. Any of you gone down that route?

Source: The Patriot Ledger

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