Skip navigation
SuUB logo
DSpace logo

  • Home
  • Institutions
    • University of Bremen
    • City University of Applied Sciences
    • Bremerhaven University of Applied Sciences
  • Sign on to:
    • My Media
    • Receive email
      updates
    • Edit Account details

Citation link: http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:gbv:46-00106980-13
00106980-1.pdf
OpenAccess
 
copyright

No Sympathy for Devils : What Christian Video Games Can Teach Us About Violence in Family-Friendly Entertainment


File Description SizeFormat
00106980-1.pdf3.21 MBAdobe PDFView/Open
Authors: Gonzalez, Vincent 
Abstract: 
Public debates around video games and violence tend to be overwhelmingly focused on realistic attacks on bleeding, screaming, undeniable humans in a small number of blockbuster games. This essay seeks to open new possibilities for ethical reflection on video games by considering, instead, why games full of destroyable enemies of a somewhat less human sort are often engaged as uncontroversial family-friendly entertainment. This study opens with a brief historical analysis of enemies and gamers as conceptual pillars of video game culture. The strange entity I identify as the gamer/enemy dyad is then refracted through George Bataille and Giorgio Agamben to consider how some of its tendencies could become exempt from moral critique. This frame is then used to examine 50 games created for Christian players, a market well identified by a collective desire to enjoy family-friendly games, to discover what sorts of enemies these games include and what can be done to them. The result, finally, is neither a sense that more games should be kept from children, nor that more games should be given to them, but a clarified attention to the dramatic prioritization of the explicitly human over the nearly human and what this says about contemporary popular culture
Keywords: gamevironments; violence; non-violence; children's media; Christianity; game studies; religious games; video games; empathy; ethics; murder
Issue Date: 2018
Journal/Edited collection: gamevironments 
Start page: 53
End page: 106
Band: 9
Type: Artikel/Aufsatz
ISSN: 2364-382X
URN: urn:nbn:de:gbv:46-00106980-13
Institution: Universität Bremen 
Faculty: FB9 Kulturwissenschaften 
Institute: Institut für Religionswissenschaft und Religionspädagogik 
Appears in Collections:Forschungsdokumente

  

Page view(s)

405
checked on Jan 28, 2023

Download(s)

225
checked on Jan 28, 2023

Google ScholarTM

Check


Items in Media are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.

Legal notice -Feedback -Data privacy
Media - Extension maintained and optimized by Logo 4SCIENCE