[CW: violence/gore]. As the title suggests, is there a left case to be made against ultra-violence in video games? I'm thinking mostly about MK11 and MK1 fatalities, as opposed to less gratuitous and less hyper-realistic violence--in Dark Souls or something. Whenever this topic is brought up, other factors usually take up the oxygen in the room: People might immediately think of family-values conservatives, such as the Media Research Center, who act like wet-blankets towards entertainment. Or we think of nerdy Joe Lieberman, who showed the 1993 Sub-Zero spine fatality to Congress (lol). There was Hillary Clinton who decried the Grand Theft Auto franchise, and the host of rightwing politicians who blamed Doom for the Columbine shooting (clearly as a way to absolve gun legislation from any culpability). So this is what I mean when I say that the conversation on video-game violence has been ceded entirely to these dudes, as opposed to something left spaces can discuss without sounding like squares or censors. This came to mind after I was reading about the video game designer who developed PTSD after working on Mortal Kombat 11. His dreams became excruciatingly violent, and his day-to-day was interacting with coworkers studying medical anatomy and watching videos of slaughtered animals. That can't be good for anyone. I guess what I'm asking is: should leftists see this as harmless fun, or something problematic? And, will photo-realistic Fatalities exist in the communist future?
I see what you're saying, but ultimately I think it doesn't have to do with the violence itself and more to do with the overall way in which we frame things. For example, no matter how hard a creator might try to make something seem "brutal" or "anticapitalist," there's gonna be people that interpret it completely the other way. Kind of like the "Squid Game is actually pretty cool! Also it's pro capitalist and anti communist!"
Same thing for violence I think. Like past and current indigenous cultures are very close to "violence" when it comes to things like hunting and slaughtering livestock for food, but you didn't see the kind of brutal violence you're talking about until things colonialism/imperialism.
I could see a future communist society that doesn't have issues with real life violence but still has action movies and video games. It doesn't really seem like a contradiction to me.