Violence and bloodshed have long been a part of gaming, but it seems that as the years pass, video games are only getting more and more violent. Rather than emphasize creative problem solving, the gaming industry is increasingly emphasizing that the only way to deal with a problem is through violence. But it doesn’t need to be this way. That’s why I’m calling for video games to stop glorifying violence and instead go back to glorifying whatever in the living fuck was going on in the 1982 arcade game BurgerTime.
We need to return to a better era, one where we celebrated anthropomorphized pickles and all the other incomprehensible nonsense the makers of BurgerTime decided to throw into their game.
Let’s face it: No amount of hyper-realistic graphics and smooth animations change the fact that modern gaming consistently paints violence in a stunning, seductive way. For parents like myself, it’s disgusting. What I’m asking for instead is more games where there’s no blood and no headshots. Just a giant burger patty that makes hot dogs disappear when it crushes them. Or maybe it did kill them? It’s not clear, but either way, it was better than what we have now.
Just take a look at this year’s game releases. Each one seems more violent than the next. But it wasn’t always like this. Games used to be about eggs that were alive for some reason and that also presumably wanted to kill you for making a hamburger. Sure, you might throw some pepper on the hot dogs, and those hot dogs might be chasing you and somehow able to climb ladders, even though they didn’t have any arms—but it was all in good fun. In the new Call Of Duty, you’re forced to fight Middle Eastern rebels. Why couldn’t they just be tomatoes instead?
All I’m saying is we should be seeing fewer levels set in bombed-out cities and more of wherever in God’s name BurgerTime took place. Some kind of munchkin-operated ladder kitchen, we can only assume.
I just want a world where people are less inspired by killing and more inspired by some kind of little chef running away from an egg with legs that was the same size as him. Although, that actually sounds terrifying now that I think of it. So maybe not that part. But enough with the decapitations and gruesome killshot replays. We can and should be better than this. After all, what kind of message is this constant killing sending to the kids who play it? Then again, what kind of message was BurgerTime sending? I don’t know at all. I just know that what is going on now is no good and we need to return to the values of the past.
Whatever the hell those values were.
