Entertaining Violence

Ellie can’t change. She can’t change because AAA games can’t change. Let’s say Ellie learns her lesson, that violence begets violence. That to save the world and herself, she must put down the gun. What would she even do? Literally, what would a AAA game even allow for her to do? AAA game design is built and marketed around killing.

Extra Large Blood

— but the team does have limits to what they’ll include. “We wouldn’t show really gory stuff,” Heaton says. “But we might pull the camera away at the last minute. The other thing we’d stay away from is anything coercive or things like that.”

“The most provocative thing about the meeting may have been the presentation of an 88-second reel of footage from violent video games. It contains footage from M-rated games such as Wolfenstein, Fallout 4, and Call of Duty, including the notorious No Russian mission that allowed players to witness or participate in a massacre of civilians at an airport. The video is currently hosted on the White House’s YouTube page, unlisted. The clips appear to be ripped from YouTubers’ footage of the game as well as from the gaming outlet Giant Bomb.”

A Brief History of Gore [in Video Games]

Based on my time playing Borderlands 2, and Tales from the Borderlands, I would say that this is not an "R-rated take", but just a direct translation.

And before

This is just the beginning of awkward things VR will bring us as entertainment experiences.

Vote on a (fictional) murder.

Who doesn’t love watching scantily clad women having their body parts sawed off? Lots of people, really: In its simplest form, horror is grotesque emotional allegory, taking the usual beats of drama (Going through a breakup feels like having your heart ripped out!) and cutting right to the icky stuff (Oh God, someone’s heart is literally being ripped out!). What’s commonly referred to as “exploitation” horror does one better: Dispensing with anything not essential to the primal concepts of sex and violence, it gleefully leads the viewer straight into the Manichean world of murderers and nymphos, where you’re either killing or being killed—or getting naked, in which case you’re probably halfway to the second option already. The appeal, as with anything, lies in the execution (or executions, really), and in the world of crazy, bloody mayhem, 1982’s Pieces remains an under-seen treasure.