A bloody ode to video game violence, in honor of Mortal Kombat’s 30th anniversary

Since the first player-controlled pixel first killed another pixel, there have been concerns and debates and legislative action about video game violence. Does it inspire real-world violence? Does it make people less violent by giving them a safe outlet? Does it desensitize players to real violence, or does it make them more aware of it, by creating distinct barriers between what is and is not acceptable?

No one may ever come to a satisfying answer to any of those questions, but since today is the 30th anniversary of the debut of Mortal Kombat in American arcades, we think it’s only appropriate to temporarily put all of the discussion aside and surrender to our basest impulses and most animalistic desires by admitting—if only just for today—that video game violence is fuckin’ cool.

Enemies exploding into gooey piles of guts, photorealistic zombies, swords hacking off limbs with cybernetic precision. Maybe seeing stuff like that isn’t good for you. Maybe it’s actively bad for you. But so are chicken wings, and sometimes it’s just fun to get sauce all over your face as you approximate what it must have been like when our ancient ancestors hunted and devoured some bone-filled, barbecue sauce-covered beast.

Pulling a fake trigger and watching a fake person turn into red mist is the video game version of that. It’s all about simply taking a moment and pretending to be a kind of human we’ve evolved beyond. If anything, it’s really a testament to how far we’ve come as a species, since we used to have to kill to survive, but now we can pretend to do it as a distraction from the pressures of soul-sucking jobs and ever-dwindling bank accounts.

Even before Mortal Kombat articulated the appeal for the first time in 1992 (intentionally or not), video games and violence have been so inexorably connected that even older games often have some violent streak if you look at them the right (wrong) way. Outside of the familiar context, an Italian plumber jumping on turtles is animal cruelty. In a video game, it’s fun for all ages. The benefit of that context has even been actively capitalized on recently, to the point where it’s perfectly fine for Ariana Grande to be pointing a shotgun at Spider-Man if—and only if—it’s happening in Fortnite.

Games make violence fun and accessible for everyone, and for the purposes of this essay, on this day, we’re going to insist that that is a good thing. It’s a form of expression that you can’t really get anywhere else because of the active role that a player is able to play in a video game, as opposed to a movie or a book or a TV show. Games like BioShock use that to add weight to player choice, specifically “kill this child” or “don’t,” in that particular game. And while it seems like a pretty obvious decision, the fact that you have to watch the outcome happen in first-person with the knowledge that you chose it has more weight than it would in another medium.

Even setting aside player involvement, there’s artistic value to video game violence. Movies and television have done stylized brutality before, softening the actual gore onscreen by making it aesthetically interesting in some way (like the Crazy 88 fight in Kill Bill, or the lobby shootout in The Matrix). But where else can you see the well-choreographed mayhem of Grand Theft Auto car carnage? Or the simplistic beauty of a 360 no-scope? Or, more relevant to today’s festivities, a man dressed as a blue ninja rip off the head of a man dressed as a yellow ninja with the spine still attached?

The over-the-top murders of Mortal Kombat’s famous Fatalities (in which you get a chance to destroy your opponent in some absurd fashion after winning a match, provided you know the arcane button combination required) are one of the big selling points of the franchise, with more recent entries embracing the absurdity of them by throwing all decorum and semblance of reality in the trash with graphic bisections and impalements and sending someone to the future to be killed by Terminators.

But the childish appeal of watching somebody get killed real bad isn’t what makes Fatalities good. It’s that they’re the punchline to a joke; the ultimate, explosive escalation of the comically gruesome fighting that happened before—like something out of a slasher flick or Sonny Chiba’s The Street Fighter (an obvious point of inspiration for modern Mortal Kombat, despite the irony of the name).

Video game violence can be funny, like in Mortal Kombat. It can make you think, if only slightly harder than usual, in something like BioShock. It can even force you to recognize (and then promptly ignore) the horrors of war in something like Call Of Duty. Everyone has a different opinion on how much of it is too much, but—again, if only for today—we can admit that it’s pretty cool.