Killer Queen

Everyone's all worried about how computer games are violent. At least, this is what "Got Game" is pointing out to me. They do, nicely, point out that despite the anxieties of the movie "Mazes and Monsters" (I'm tempted, yet not nearly enough) that there have been no D&D related deaths ever. They think.
But, given I'm meant to be doing a comparison between D&D and video games... I do wonder about the violence thing. Sure, cg violence can be pretty graphic, courtesy of FPS and other such things. I don't think it can really be taken quite seriously, though. At least, I don't think that if you shoot someone they will somehow be reduced to bits of kibble on impact. Unless its a grenade or something. And, maybe I've missed something in some game somewhere, but you don't really get to be all that... inventive with computer game violence. You shoot, you hack, you keep on running to wherever it is you're going. You don't get to think, hey, I really want to kill person x in y fashion. It also usually seems to have some sort of reason for being. You don't shoot the monsters and you die, that sort of thing.
RP, on the other hand - now that can get well and nasty. For the most part, in combat, its the same as in computer games - you have to kill it because you really don't have a choice. What you can do, however, is decide, "let's knock this guy out and take him captive."
Not so bad. Until "taking him captive" becomes "carving his eyes out" + "casting inflict moderate wound" + "cast heal moderate wounds" + "do it all over again". And it's being done, not because you have to, but because you want to. Good roleplayers are inventive, so they'll keep coming up with new ways, and sometimes with a lot of detail.
And this is not to say that violence is restricted to males players. In fact, the most cruel and violent characters I’ve seen were being run by female players, and it ran the spectrum from random, exuberant displays of village-scale destruction, to calculated, cold torture of individuals, all for no reason other than that it could be done, and was deemed well within character. Given that these players view these (female) characters as extension of themselves, “not bound by the laws I am.”

It’s just a thought, really.

You’ll excuse me now. I have an addiction to feed that was only helped by having no less than *six* ff alerts on my email this morning. Sweet hallelujah.