Been thinking for a while that there's too much violence in videogames. Not for moralistic reasons, but cuz it's quantity over quality. It's 70% of the time so rote and mechanical, lacking tension, drama, narrative heft. We need to breath more life into to the clockwork.

This is why Shadow of the Colossus is so good. 16 memorable, unique, carefully designed, dramatic encounters, interspersed with long periods of contemplative exploration for contrast. More of games should learn from this, as far as combat and such.

*Notwithstanding certain games are like Doom or Devil May Cry or something that are specifically about maintaining a sublime zen-state of skillful bloodshed.

I just mean that, a lot of games, this goes for warfare in strategy games too, the basic experience is like... Imagine reading a game of thrones type book & the battles descriptions are just a bullet point list of chess moves (knight to E4, bishop to E4 takes knight, pawn to F3

RPG combat too. Like even with just text descriptions you could add so much drama, falls, parries, trick moves, grievous wounds, but it's mostly just like, two guys take turns whacking each other over and over until one's health hits zero then he just falls down.

like a die hard or even john wick, the hero gets the shit beat out of them, by the end they're all blodied and limping and duct-taping wounds. in games it's like, hide behind a rock or drink a potion or find a first aid kit and like POOF good as new. no consequences, no drama.

When people ask for realism, I think often, this is what they really want. A greater sense of consequence and drama. More heft. But instead we got two guys taking turns hitting each other but in SUPER TEXTURE MAPPED RAYTRACED ULTRAHD, which just makes it look even more absurd.