Bam! Pow! Zap! Other sounds of beeping and blooping digital destruction! From Spacewar! all the way back in 1962 up to the present day, an overwhelming number of videogames are devoted to (or heavily feature) violent combat of some kind. It's something for which modern social critics and game designers often feel a kind of shame. “Surely, this is what's holding us back from true respectability as a grown-up medium,” we whisper in the shadowed booths of hookah lounges and bratwurst bars*, "This must be what makes us not quite as good as movies. Why are we so devoted to violence?” *Or wherever we hipsters nest these days. It’s easy to write this off with a simple "because teenage boys are the primary demographic, and teenage boys are awful." However, I think there’s a little bit more going on under the hood here. A quick aside: What do we mean when we say “game”? For our purposes, I'm go...
…and edits and designs and programs and sometimes lights things on fire.