So, I was going through an old blog of mine...

...and I stumbled into this. Buckle up, this whole thing is going to be a long one.

"There's no use denying it. Digital violence is a great thing. Really.

There's no other medium that would allow you to express barbaric and homicidal tendencies in a more harmless way. Let's not beat around the bush: I said it and will say it again. "Harmless". Some of you (I'll take a wild guess and say...um...the ones among you who wouldn't touch a videogame with a stick) will argue with that. You will say that entertaining (or, pray say, cultivating) such a thing in a digital way will surely and mathematically lead to the real-life equivalent. You will also say that there are solid clues linking violent videogames to high-school shootings or other horrific crimes. You will surely say that videogames condone an anachronistic, best-killer-survives attitude. You will say the kids who use their computer, PlayStation or X-Box to blast the brains off an alien or a soldier are much more likely to blast the brains off a fellow human.

And I will simply say that you should stop talking out of your arse, you're ruining the ride for everyone else with your pointless whining.

Don't get me wrong; I mean absolutely no disrespect to parents who have lost their sons or daughters in a high-school shooting. I mean no disrespect to kids who've lost their friends in an event like that. And I mean no disrespect to the devastated parents whose kids did it. However, the record needs to be set straight. A videogame will NOT teach you how to operate a real weapon. It will not teach you how to purchase, load and pull the trigger of a live firearm or rifle. Most importantly, a videogame will NOT give you a reason to. Social isolation, continuous mockery that is not treated correctly by the family or school environment, neglect, psychological problems that will slip past notice WILL. It is not a videogame that will cause a crime. Cruel as it may sound, it is the social environment that will. So you can get your stuff and get out. We don't serve your kind here. You can go and preach your baseless propaganda to people who are ignorant enough to give a shit. There's the door. Go.

Interlude: I do seem to keep asking people to quit reading what I wrote half-way there. Maybe it's time I stopped. End interlude.

So, violence. We won't even examine online games now. As far as single-player goes, there are two types of it, the way I see it. It's not about how realistic it is, fundamentaly. It's about who is the recipient. Rather, if the recipient is the model of a human comprised by polygons and textures or the model of a non-human being (alien, mutated animal, you name it). Let's examine the non-human category first, shall we?

Does anyone, ANYONE fell a tiny hint of regret as you fire a hot ball of plasma to a ravenous monster with teeth measured in handspans and claws long as your arm? I thought not. In most games that feature alien foes, the only way to emerge victorious from an encounter with a blood-thirsty, evil alien is to be a better shot and pull the trigger faster than them. Really, such games require less thinking (not that most people think in depth when playing an action game, but whatever). Things are simple. If it's not human, it wants to rip your spine out and overcharge your credit card. So you kill it. No guilt, no remorse, no nothing. It's not human. It doesn't have human rights, right?

Bear with me as we enter the fields of science fiction. Let's assume, for the purposes of this article, that there IS life out there (after all, thinking how mind-shatteringly huge the universe is, I'd say it's a good bet that we can't be the only race of idiots to emerge as a thinking creature). Now let's assume that this other race contacts us. Odds are, they're not hostile a priori. I have the tingling sensation they will be as soon as they see what kind of image people hold for extra-terrestrials. After all, ET is much less likely to spring to one's mind when they hear the word "alien" than, say Aliens. We breed the same kind of racism we did with African-Americans. When still, in 2005, the largest portion of the so-called civilised world is feeling threatened and wary of African-Americans (a world dominated by large by Caucasians which are, in fact, a thousand times more dangerous than any African-American), we ought to realize something went wrong years ago. We were bred to fear the black man, just because the black man was "different", "dangerous" (something that so happens to be total hogwash). We are yet to eliminate this, get it out of our system. Being raised to fear alien life forms is no different. We learn to fear and hate them before we even meet 'em. It is most sad and only shows our failure as a human race.

Of course, this is all hypothetical, albeit unsettling. The original point was that, thanks to our open-minded education to this (be that through films, books or videogames) we feel absolutely no guilt in killing aliens in videogames. Does the same apply in digitised humans, though?

Yep, you guessed it: we're now entering part two.

I don't know about you, but the shoot 'em ups I played first were like this: Catacomb: Abyss -> Doom 2 -> Duke Nukem 3D -> Quake -> Hexen -> Quake 2 -> Unreal -> Kingpin.

You might ask why have I stopped at Kingpin. Allow me to explain. In all of the previous games, the enemies were all fitting a certain mold: they were all zombies, or aliens or demonic creatures. However, Kingpin changed the way I saw first-person shooters forever. Limited, yet innovative for its time, Kingpin allowed interaction. You could exchange insults or friendly words with people who looked pretty real, who squealed in pain when you shot them, who cursed and swore like real people. Set in a realistic for its time (and still today) urban scenery, spewn with bars and pawn shops, dark alleys and hobos, Kingpin was a notch up more realistic than any game before it. Unfortunately for Kingpin, the likes of Half-Life, Unreal Tournament and Quake 3 soon dominated the market, not to mention Kingpin's nemesis, Soldier Of Fortune.

You see, for many, Kingpin was way too much. Contrary to games before it, opponents were real, live city thugs. They talked. They bled. They got angry. They got afraid. This is what differentiated Kingpin not only from its pre-mentioned nemesis (where ultra-realistic gore was, in fact, the gimmick that made the game sell), but to every other game before it. In every other game you were different to the enemies. They were either of an other species, or you were different to them, special. A champion to fight off hordes of aliens, terrorists, soldiers, undead monsters, lawyers, what have you. In Kingpin you were one of them. And here lies the whole point.

I don't know how this will feel to you, but Kingpin was the one game I sympathised with enemies. When I planted a bullet in Thug One's chest and set Thug Two on fire, I couldn't help but think: "These guys have families. Families who'll miss them. Oh God, what have I done? I just killed someone's only son, someone's father, someone's loved one".

Yet the streets of Kingpin allowed no room for spiritual and humanitarian enlightenment. If you didn't kill them, they'd kill you. Sprites and polygons feel no remorse, no pity. Nevertheless, the more I played, the more I hated myself. I was walking down a path of vengeance towards the final boss I knew had to exist because most games have one, and I mutilated dozens (or maybe, hundreds) of digital families in the process. I tried to not shoot those who wouldn't shoot me first, but that didn't leave me much to allow to live. They had orders to kill me, to get their paycheck from the mob to feed the families or just pry the money from my own smelly corpse. They had no choice, I had no choice. I had to commit those murders, to keep going. Games shouldn't create that kind of guilt.

Did this make me want to buy a 9mm gun and pop one on the first person to tell me "Fuck you, you piece of shit"? No.

If anything, it made me realise a small portion of the guilt I'd feel after killing a fellow human. If I'd think and regret so much after shooting virtual bullets to a mish-mash of polygons and textures encoded into a model programmed to speak the same lines over and over and shoot me, how the hell would I feel in the real life? I wouldn't. I'd rather kill myself than kill someone else. This coming from someone who has, over the years, killed twice the population of Earth in videogames.

Think about it. Maybe letting off some steam in harming lines of code is better than officials with bugger-all knowledge attacking games as if games are the ones that have turned our society to shit instead of those same, arrogant, stupid officials. Think of a world were no murder or war would exist, a world were violent tendencies would be vent off somewhere more harmless without being judged and attacked by people too full of themselves to take them seriously.

Think about it."

Written six and a half years ago and re-read today, this spark an internal dialogue that made me think about the current state of gaming. Let's break it down.

First off, in 2012, gaming has evolved in many, many ways. We now have indie developers that actually keep in touch with their end consumers, turning indie game making into an interactive process that benefits both creator and user. We have new, improved and faster ways to distribute games to gamers. In 2005, Steam was taking its very buggy and prone to crashing baby steps, mockingly called by many Steam-ing pile of...well, you know. Now, Steam is a force to be reckoned with, to the point where it's spawned competitors (ie, Origin). We have better graphics, multi-platform games, cross-platform gaming is within reach, new tech, better stories, more and better games.

On the flip side, we have a whole mess of crappy games as well, and instant classics seems to be a thing of the past. There's not going to be a game that will reverberate through the community the way the original Quake did, for example. Major releases are mostly re-inventions of old formulas, and very rarely a completely new formula will appear. And when it does, it will either die an undignified death relatively soon (see Spore) or be milked to death (see Assassin's Creed).

But all this is besides the point, what I'm getting to is this: the influx of independent game making seems to have taken violence in games from stage center and given its spot to puzzles, thinking and riddle solving. Still, major releases still feature violence. Of course they would, let's be honest. Not as a gimmick anymore, as the average gamer is no longer as easily dazzled or engrossed by it, but as commonplace. And, of course, stupid people (six and a half years after, I won't mince words) have evolved their argument to say we're now desensitized to violence.

I won't even dignify that with mockery and jokes. It's a stupid, stupid opinion that has no psychological, sociological or any sort of scientific merit and it is so close in spirit to book burning and witch hunting that it deserves to go in the darkest corners of humanity and die a lonely death. I'm not joking. If you think this, if you think gamers are exposed to digital violence therefore they are prone to commit or be apathetic in the face of actual violence, then you are a stupid person. No ifs or buts. It's the way it is. You make assumptions about us, so now it's our turn, n'est pas?

But you know what's the best thing that's happened to gaming in six and a half years? The icing on the cake? We are now, more than ever, a community. Gamers no longer congregate and play in mockery of their peers. More often than not, those peers will ask if they can play too, provided it's Call of Duty, Guitar Hero, PES (or FIFA) or just some Wii. These four have almost singlehandedly taken gaming from the (relative) dark and taken it to the spotlight. Gaming is no longer something to be ashamed of, just because we now know, thanks to networking sites such as twitter and facebook, just how many of us there actually are. We know that most everyone under 50 is a gamer to one extent or another. We rally against companies who haven't realized this and try to take us for fools. We make our own games and share them with our peers when we've had enough with spending hard-earned money on sub-par games. We share thoughts, projects, opinions, help.

About ten years ago, gamers were looked down on from the majority of people in their age group. Now gamers are the majority, and it's the other way round most of the time. We feel sorry for the thankfuly few people who still think gaming is antisocial and weird because we now acknowledge there's nothing wrong with us. It's just them being more than a decade late in their heads. Pity them, try to help them if you can, but do not for a second let them get to you. If mankind was only as advanced as its less progressive minds, we'd still be curing things with the application of leeches.

Think about that.

Now put your hands up as if you were holding a gamepad and repeat after me:

We're the fucking Gaming Army of Pixeland!

We will not be stopped, defeated or paused!

We shall be heroes and villains!

Conquerors and liberators!

Detectives and generals!

Hard-core raiders or bored angry-birders!

Sunday morning gamers or late night nerf herders

And we will, oh we will pwn you.