An Eye-watering View to a Kill

‘Have you let your breakfast settle? Because the third-person tactical shooter is back with more scenes showing bullets slicing through brain matter and kidneys.’
A computer game review promoted in a national newspaper encourages users to play at killing: to enjoy the ‘grisly scenes of bullets piercing vital organs’, to find pleasure in a fantasy of combat in which they are cast hero. The virtual world glorifies the power of weaponry and violence, and pitches the self as godlike; ‘I’ first in a world purpose built to sate players desire. Desire within the threshold of the game is to destroy and to conquer. We should recoil from such inhumanity, but we don’t – is this why we allow these games to exist?