Post 2 - Games and Movies - Violence

27 Jul 2025 15postsin30days · media

Early in 2024, I bought a gaming console. This was the first time I was in possession of hardware that was meant primarily to run games. Before this, I had played a few car racing games (using CDs on a Windows desktop). More recently, I played the indie favorite, Papers, Please, on my laptop and thoroughly enjoyed the game’s concept and the implementation. I had never played any other type of game before. So, Last of Us was a pleasant surprise: It really pulled me into the story and the character. Just as the friend who recommended the game to me said, the game was just a medium for telling a touching story, and it should not be treated as anything significantly different from the other mediums for telling a story: novels, poetry, music, movies, podcasts. After completing Last of Us, I played the second game, Last of Us Part 2 as well. The second game was distinctly different from the first one; I believe I had more fun playing the second game: It had more challenging enemies and scenes that were harder to get through. There was quite a bit of violence, because I was role playing as a character in an apocalyptic universe full of monsters and enemies. I abhor violence in movies: It is boring to watch, and very often, movies with violence lack a plot. Why was one form preferable to the other? Is it even different, or am I simply trying to explain away a personal preference? These were some questions that I have been thinking about for the past few months.

There is a dual track in my mind: Violence in games is OK; violence in movies is not OK. Not OK in the sense that it is boring, and intolerable. Did I mention that violence in movies is boring? It really is. Take a look at one or more of these trailers: Trailer 1, Trailer 2, Trailer 3, Trailer 4, Trailer 5. The names of these movies are besides the point. If you watched all five of these¹, you would notice some common themes: a lot of dark, smoky, dusty scenes; many SUVs that always seem to be drifting (effortlessly) on a straight road; a lot of men in soiled clothes; blood, gore, fighting; the quintessential running through traffic without getting hit by an automobile. All of these things are so over the top that whenever I watch something like this, I can not help but laugh at the sheer excess, the irrationality, and the ultimate stupidity of it all; how much can one suspend one’s disbelief? What is the point of it in movies like this that have no ostensible plot? The excess reduces the movie to a carricature of life: It shows us everything that we know to be impossible, and implores us to believe that these things could happen in the real world. No, they don’t happen in the real world. This is not just fiction.

I don’t know who started the oneupmanship of violence in movies. It has been on the rise in the past couple years. Superhero movies in Hollywood have always been like this; I had the misfortune of watching one of the Spiderman movies in the theater in 2017; I could not wait for the movie to be over: Nothing really happens in these movies, they are set in a mindnumbingly predictable sequence: the first 30 minutes or so is setup (i.e. introducing the villain and why they are going to do something bad), the next 30 minutes is some sort of search for the villain, then, the interval; followed by a mindnumbing 60 minute fight sequence, where everyone on screen will engage in wanton destruction. They call it entertainment.

If you find these movies boring too and were wondering why these movies keep getting made, its economics, as it often is. A quick scan of lists of top grossing movies on Wikipedia hints at this.

1. In 2022, 5 of the top 10 movies were “action” movies
2. In 2023, 8 of the top 10 movies were “action” movies (the top 7 movies were all classified in the “action” genre with “thriller / comedy / drama” being the subgenre)
3. In 2024, 6 of the top 10 movies were “action” movies (the trend seems to be fizzling out after a peak, because a few comedies and historical fiction movies made it near the top)

The money that these films make is clearly coming from viewers who like these movies enough to pay to watch them.² And it looks like volume does not lead anyone to getting bored either. Even if someone likes a genre, would they keep watching the same kind of content in that genre forever? I loved stand-up comedy for a while, but then the artists changed, the comedy was not as good anymore, the observations started feeling forced and banal (rather than weird, novel, and interesting), So, I gave up on it and moved on to other things. There is a “captive audience” somewhere.³

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This sort of violence is completely different from the kind of violence that I saw in video games. Yes, video games have fighting scenes in dusty, outdoor settings. Video games also have to be creative: they can not just rehash the same fighting mechanic from before. The average movie director has more-or-less given up on coming up with new ideas, while video games are all about new ideas; new “mechanics”. In video games, you are not a passive consumer of violent content, you are playing a character, and the character is being often stuck in situations where violence is one of the possible means to escape the situation. Another possibility might be to use stealth and avoid confrontation, or to form an alliance to avoid violence completely. The possibilities vary wildly depending on the game that you are playing. As the main character in a game though, even the violence that is unavoidable and must be perpetrated in order to move the story ahead is more meaningful than the meaninglessness of SUVs ramming into walls and heros and villains throwing each other around like rag dolls, and (always) destroying the property of the innocent street-side vendor. In games, the fighting is a mean to get the player to feel one with the character that they are playing, to feel the dread of entering an unknown place, and then the surprise of a jump scare from an unexpected enemy, or to feel the exhileration of getting the strategy right, and completing a scene.

Last of Us Part 2 does this very well: The initial part of the game has a lot of fights, this can feel like a never ending quest to some. (I thoroughly enjoyed finding the “right strategy” to get away from villains without having to engage them in a prolonged fight.) But after this initial sequence, there are a few rewarding scenes where the main character lives a calm life. Tormented by the past though, the main character then chooses to get back into the fight. I really did not think that the main character would choose to leave everything. I was playing the game without any prior knowledge about the story arc. So, I had no idea where the game would end. What I thought was the ending of the game (the calm life on a farm for the main character) ended up being the middle. This is an experience which simply can not be conveyed through a movie. The run time of a movie is clearly displayed on the film certification that is displayed right before the movie begins; worse still, the interval right in the middle of the movie clearly delineates the first and second halves, making it impossible to obscure the passage of real time and confuse the audience into a state of false security.

The portrayal of violence is not going to magically reduce: In order to be a hero, you need a villain; in order for movies to be cathartic, the villain needs to be vanquished. Movies like Aadukalam, Vadachennai, Dark Knight Rises, Pulp Fiction, Fight Club, and Joker; TV shows like True Detective, Homeland, and Ozarks are fine examples in my opinion. These works employ violence as a means to an end. Movies that have been classified in the “action” genre of late have been made by people who have decided that everything (plot, settings, logic) is secondary to the portrayal of blood and gore. The grotesque and exaggerated portrayal of cinematic and fictional violence is the only reason the movie was produced, and in the creators minds, the only reason it will be viewed. This approach needs change.

There is hope: The current trend is reversing itself; there were a few non-action genre movies which made it big last year in the theater. The theater is losing much of its relevance. It is acting as a proxy for the likability of a movie only because the box office numbers are public, while the deals made with streaming services are private.⁴ There may well come a time when streaming services start publishing the audience numbers for their shows, making it easier to recognize the movies and shows that became popular after tanking in the theater.