I don’t necessarily find body parts flying off in every direction to be particularly violent. The number of red pixels on the screen is not a direct measure of violence.
While it is true that I find 98% of all video games violent to one degree or another, it is also true that most folks find my designation of non-violent games to be a bit odd.
For example, I don’t find Diablo Lord of Destruction or TF2 (Team Fortress 2) to be violent games. In both cases body parts being cast about the landscape is a definite part of the game. In fact, in TF2 the programmers are kind enough to point out my various body parts (such as foot and head) when I’m dead with arrows — “Your head here –>”. This bespeaks an underlying sense of humor in the game. This along with the larger than life characters and slightly cartoonish graphics keeps the game fun, not violent.
Old school games such are Zelda 1, Zelda 3, Soloman’s Key, Solstice, Faxanadu, and their ilk are definitely not violent in my book. Zelda 2 on the other hand had some serious problems. Myself and other Spiritual Gaming testers found it to be abusive of the player. The grinding necessary to do anything was a real joy killer. Hear this Blizzard? You might want to rethink the constant grinding necessary in World of Warcraft.
My idea of violence: the ankle breaking scene in Misery, or the scene in Spawn when the hell clown licks Wanda’s face.
I found Grand Theft Auto to be violent, but had no problem with the original Going Postal — go figure.
As an experiment, take a sheet of paper and draw a line down the middle of the page. On the left write in a column header “Violent”. On the right write in a column header “Not-Violent”. Consider the games that you have actually experienced and place them on either the left or the right. Do this with games you have played. Don’t go all silent majority and list games that you have only seen advertised on television, looked at the game packaging, or just heard about in the media. Do this with games you have experience.
When I did this experiment I ended up with about 100 games on the left and a couple dozen on the right. Looking at these games it became clear to me that it would be impossible to apply a predictive formula to games in order to sort them. I could not find any of the obvious attributes in the violent games that did not also exist in some of the non-violent games. Nor could I find any of the obvious attributes in the non-violent games that did not also exist in some of the violent games.
However, when it came to the less obvious, and less used criteria, I could easily find attributes in the violent games which did not exist in the non-violent games. Racism, sexism, demeaning of spirit, brutality and brutish behavior in general could be found in some of the violent games and none of the non-violent games. But these are qualities that are not easy to subject to quantification. Unless certain words are used it is hard to label racism and sexism — even though they are unmistakably present. There is a reason it is hard for schools to enforce statues related to bullying, racism and sexism — it it hard to define these things in statues.
Bottom line, there is such as thing as violence. To this I agree whole-heartedly. But, to those that suggest squirting blood, explosions and flying body parts are a measure of violence I say: “too simplified, it won’t work.”