Video games and visions of death

Death is a given, and that's doubly true for video games. And when death comes, it tends to come in force. Who among us can claim we haven't, at some point in our gaming career, meandered through plains sprinkled with corpses, or waded through rivers of blood past bobbing human remains? If video games are to be believed, corpses are more gregarious than the living. They flock to gruesome sites of executions, torture and massacres, hang themselves from nooses, impale, flay, contort or dismember themselves into bloody bouquets for us to gawk and shudder at in passing.

Games have long indulged in an aesthetic of gory excess that is extreme even by the standards of horror films and heavy metal cover art. Whether horror or history, fantasy or sci-fi, larger-than-life death has invaded many of the most popular genres in games. There's the cartoony grim-dark of Doom, with its colourful and gleeful grotesques of bodies torn to shreds by demonic invaders; Bloodborne with its cataclysmic visions of human bodies petrified, dissolved, reconfigured; or Hellblade with its psychologised quasi-historical horror of 'dark age' barbarity.

This is just a tiny sample of games that revel in transgressing taboos around death, suffering and the human body. Despite wildly differing tones and intentions and the vast gulf between, say, the goofy, icky edginess of Doom and the high-minded seriousness of Hellblade, they all share a deep-seated fascination with quasi-apocalyptic vistas deeply marked by pestilence, rot and death.

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