The moral debate surrounding violence in videogames is an ever-present thorn in gameplayers’ sides. Understandably, FPS fans get defensive when US senators and other guardians of our moral health try to tell them that their pastime is immoral. But one of the unfortunate effects of this defensiveness is that too few gamers will own up to something that is a genuinely potent motivation for playing many games: bloodlust.

Well, I like killing in games. Executing a perfect headshot, and watching the blood fly, is a lot of fun. And it’s not as much fun without the blood. Not just because I can navigate by old bloodstains, but because it’s exciting in itself. I like to shoot men in black suits with shades. Or men in combat fatigues with night-vision goggles. I like to tease them by shooting them in non-fatal areas when they can’t see me. Then I like to spray their brains over the walls. If I only get robots to shoot (C12: Final Resistance), or if the men in shades give way to poorly imagined aliens (Perfect Dark), it’s just not the same. And detonating someone’s flesh into a shower of florid gibs in Quake III Revolution is qualitatively better than merely bouncing them off the ground in TimeSplitters. The lack of blood, in fact, is TimeSplitters’ one serious aesthetic flaw. Bring on the gushing red juice, Mr Designer.

So what’s wrong with admitting this? It certainly doesn’t mean I’m going to tool up with semi-automatic rifles and do it in real life. Quite the contrary: according to the “catharsis hypothesis” widely accepted in the videogame community, playing videogames is a great way to let off steam without actually hurting anyone. That’s why the New York Police Department loved Grand Theft Auto so much - far from being worried about its cop-killing elements, they told Rockstar: “We’d rather kids did it in your game than on the street.” It’s a comically sad fact that many of the critics who reject the catharsis hypothesis are the kind of right-wingers who indulge their violent impulses at the weekend by shooting real deer and real birds, with real guns.

So we should celebrate our bloodlust, that evolutionary relic hard-wired into our reptilian sub-brain, because then we might be able to think more coherently about an aesthetics of violence. Bakhtin and his Situationist gang sloganeered about the aesthetics of destruction in the early 20th century: in the same way, we can imagine an aesthetics of virtual murder. After all, violence is not automatically inimical to art. The famous “Slaughter in the Hall” scene near the end of Homer’s Odyssey, when the hero kills all the men who have been trying to get into bed with his wife while he was away, is one of the most savage and bloodthirsty in all literature. Meanwhile, the slo-mo plasma ballet in the films of Sam Peckinpah, or the joyous frenzy of John Woo’s Hard Boiled, are technical and artistic tours de force precisely because of their violence, not despite it.

As in films, violence in videogames is deliberately stylised: this means artistic choices have been made. And at the moment, it seems there is a rather arbitrary cut-off point in death-dealing imagery. Game designers generally choose to exaggerate the effects of an impacting projectile - a handgun bullet will instantaneously produce showers of blood from the front of the enemy’s chest - but shy away from such gory phenomena as post-collapse arterial spurting, or much in the way of explosive tissue dynamics. In other words, games reward the player with satisfying representations of the immediate effects of their actions, while sweeping the messy aftermath under the carpet. Why?

There is an argument that, as the digital representation of violence becomes ever more graphic and detailed, it will become more morally indefensible to be a party to it. The divertingly gruesome Soldier of Fortune, for example, left a bad taste in some mouths for this reason. But the argument could equally work the opposite way. The first appearance of Reservoir Dogs, for instance, was hailed as a powerful coup because, unusually, Tarantino built his film around the real effects of a shooting: the fact that a character spends nearly the whole screen time bleeding to death from a gut shot. Now of course, gore that aims only to titillate, with no wider aesthetic context (Carmageddon), is cheap and nasty. But if videogames choose to model killing with ever more fine-grained, stylised detail, they too could become artistically more provocative and interesting.

Take the demo of Metal Gear Solid 2, for instance. You tranquillise a guard and drag him into a locker room. Now there’s no one around to hear, and you’re feeling somewhat sadistic, so you pull out your handgun, line up in first-person view, and shoot the snoozing terrorist in the head. The subsequent head-jerking animation and ooze of cranial fluid are done with such dark panache that you are made to feel that you’ve just done something really serious. Your action has been given added substance. On one hand, the killing is rewarded with beautifully worked imagery; on the other, its disturbing pseudo-realism gives it a far stronger psychological effect. With a few frames of lovingly detailed gore, the game experience immediately becomes more exciting and more tense. Which is exactly what Kojima intends.

Developer Ernest Adams recently posted on Gamasutra a challenge to the industry called “Dogma 2001”, with a list of provocative rules for other designers. The seventh reads as follows: “Violence is strictly limited to the disappearance or immobilization of destroyed units. Units which are damaged or destroyed shall be so indicated by symbolic, not representational, means. There shall be no blood, explosions, or injury or death animations.” Let us hope that this rule is roundly ignored. For the representation of violence in videogames is not a concern extraneous to other aspects of design, but a potent artistic tool in itself.

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