Would You Like Some Blood with that Shooter?

While giving blood today and suffering through one of the most horrendous, bloodiest movies that I've had the displeasure to see, I considered how blood is represented in the world of video games. I mean, the horror of seeing a zombie rip into the neck of your best friend would be ruined if, instead of blood, rainbows came splurting out of the wound. "Now Rachel," you chide, "are you suggesting all games should have blood gushing out of every orifice?" Well, innocent question asker, I can certainly see why Player One is so enamored with your hopelessly objective observations. My point is, blood can be an integral part of relating violence to the audience if used in an appropriate and tasteful manner.

Blood and the Gamer

As gamers, we have all put in our share of sweat and tears into games (some more than others (I'm looking at you, Sly 2!)), but never is the gamer asked to bleed for the sake of getting that one high score. Now, I know that sometimes you can get some pretty bad callouses from rotating the joystick in Mario Party, and sometimes you get cramps when button mashing in Soul Calibur, but these mild pains are not comparable to the flesh wounds, decapitations, and horrible, fiery deaths that we subject our avatars to on a daily basis.

I like gruesome deaths just as much as the next gamer, but there is a certain line of decorum that a developer has to respect. Perhaps one of the only games that I've had to put down because of the sheer amount of gore present in it was No More Heroes. While this game is perfectly respectable in its own right, and I know several people who absolutely adore it, I just can't stomach it. There is just far too much blood flying through the air whenever I cut into someone with the beam katana. I feel as though I'm in some sort of macabre waterpark, where instead of being splashed with refreshing water, I'm instead assuaged by blood, with decapitated body parts raining down on my head instead of pool toys.

Now, I know that there are settings on games where you can turn down the gore setting, but I'm one of those purists that insist on enjoying the game at face value. Seeing someone hurl rainbows and bleed green jello will make me feel as though I'm playing some sort of possessed version of Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg, where they expect you to believe that you can obtain fruit from the mutilated corpses of the foes that you crushed underneath a humongous egg.

Between these two extremes lie the developers that decided to use blood in a tasteful and almost artistic fashion. While the Silent Hill series boasts blood-soaked playing stages with some pretty gruesome motifs, they definitely use it as more of an artistic medium as opposed to a gross-out factor. During the course of the game, there is hardly any blood shown when you're relentlessly clubbing a monster, or when a monster is gnawing on your leg. The blood in these games is used instead as a continuing reminder of the incredible violence that has occurred in the town. What is especially interesting is the transformative effect that blood has when splattered all over a mundane building. You definitely have not lived until you've played through the hospital in Silent Hill 3 and have seen all of the walls turn into skin.

Finally, there are the many games like Dead Space, Red Dead Redemption, Uncharted, and Resident Evil which use blood in context with shooting and killing, but the effect is realistic and lacks the over-the-top gore-for-gore's-sake that No More Heroes flaunted. Instead, the blood presented in these games does not make the gamer walk away in disgust, but is a sobering experience that contributes to making the game world a far more realistic place than Blood: The Waterpark and Billy Hatcher.

So what do you guys think? Do you care how much blood is presented in a game, or are you more focused on other elements, like gameplay? I'd love to hear your opinions!