J T wrote:You have a strange way of arguing. I said nothing about Rome, though I did talk about Mortal Kombat. And video games are kind of a modern thing, so certainly this is a modern-centric stance and I never made claims about some universal truth across the ages. And to call an opinion subjective is like calling an apple "appley".
Anyway, I assume you're trying to make some stretch to talking about Romans feeding Christians to the lions for entertainment, or something like that, to which I would say that, yes, that is disgusting, violent, and sadistic. Do you have other terms to describe it?
Entertaining, just, and pious, although I suppose by the time the Christians were being fed to lions (centuries after arena spectacles were instituted), perhaps it had degraded to pure sadistic violence, which does seem disgusting. But that
People get so defensive whenever you say something appeals to our darker sensibilities because they don't want to own their dark sides.
The problem is in representation. You call it "dark side", but that's a very modern way of looking at it. Violence is a universal, and is actually crucial to our survival. Whenever a criminal kills, we technically commit violence against that person in order to apprehend them, and its violence which restrains that person while in jail. Violence is necessary, and so is what you call our "dark side", but I wouldn't call it dark it all. In fact, it's quite healthy to get out emotions. You call it disgusting and sadistic, but how is it sadistic? Sadism rests on the premise of the person getting gratification from harming others. There is something at play in seeing others get harmed. The world is so depressing! Right now, in Syria a brutal regime is obliterating their people; a universally despised people millions of whose members were murdered by a deranged populist is now in the process of fighting a never-ending war with neighbors; anti-science and (especially) bigotry is rampant not just in America but in nearly every country in the whole world. If we couldn't laugh at this, we'd be overwhelmed and our bodies would shut down. There's a reason that slipping on a banana peel was funny decades before violent video games. There's a reason that the British Empire invaded more countries than any other nation in or empire ever. There's a reason Genghis Khan slaughtered everyone in every city which resisted Mongol rule. There's a reason that the Romans were particularly fond of gladiatorial combat. There's a reason we've been fighting wars since the dawn of time. We're a violent people, and we laugh at it because empathy would kill us all. But it has nothing to do with American culture of violence, or any culture of violence. It has to do with the human need for survival.
I just think we should be able to call it what it is: violence, sadism, gruesome. I know there are negative connotations to those words, but that doesn't mean we should doggedly pretend they are not there.
From my perspective, I can freely say that laughing at a Mortal Kombat fatality is sadistic (or technically schadenfreude, but there's no appropriate English word for a non-sexualized pleasure in other people's pain), yet still happily enjoy Mortal Kombat and not feel bad about it because I know I'm not going to hurt anyone and I'm a very pro-social individual in real life. The whole problem with sadism is not that we have the capacity to experience pleasure in others' pain- you can't get around the fact. Where sadism becomes something shameful is when your sadistic pleasures negatively affects other people; when you willingly harm someone else for your own amusement. But it doesn't affect others in a videogame. You're free to laugh at death, and hack and slash with glee in a gaming context because nobody's hurt. Some may feel the pangs of their conscience when playing a violent game, but I don't. I always feel just fine because the real measure is whether I have hurt someone else or myself, and I have not.
I don't think it applies. When my friend and I first played MK9, we got all starry eyed at the gruesome deaths whether we were on the giving end or the receiving end. Some people think it's so cool when they receive a particular gruesome (in the neutral sense) wound. It's not a matter of sexual gratification or even Schadenfreude. It's being amazed at the extraordinary, at the marvelous. When Herodotus wrote his
Histories, he was only following human instinct in highlighting
thōma "wonders", because we are a curious people easily fascinating by a shake up in the mundane. That's what's going on with Mortal Kombat. It's fun to watch not because people are getting hurt, but because it's so different from what we are used to.
