I really don't think people who didn't come of age right at the Millenium will ever really be able to understand how overplayed moralizing about video game violence was to our generation, and I think that has definitely created a generational divide on the TLOU2 thing

This includes the devs of TLOU2 in the people who don't get it, incidentally. Because Druckmann would already have been a young adult when all this discourse went down, it's likely no one ever told him the original Tomb Raider would make him a homicidal maniac IRL

But for me, and I suspect I'm not alone in this, the obvious common sense thing about video games is that they are games, what happens in them is fictional, and violence in them is to be judged like we would judge it in a film or comic or whatever.

The idea to "hold a gun [controller representing a gun]" and "kill someone" in a game, on a screen, is somehow different than watching an actor do that, is facile to people whose parents firmly believed that that is why those kids died at Columbine (as mine did)

And the fact that so much frankly offensive discourse blaming real violence specifically on video games circulated at that time is why people of my age are probably always going to take examinations of video game violence even from people who have a nuanced take with many salts

We make fun of that comic strip from Ctrl+Alt+Del where the author breaks character and monologues about how he's never killed anyone IRL bc of being a gamer, but the thing is, people really were saying we were!

GG is really the turning point in the discourse about this, where it turned out a lot of gamers truly were terrible, truly were wedded to very specific ideas of what games should be, and actually were willing to take actions that would lead to death

That was 7 years ago tho

Before that things looked FAR different and video games really were subject to disproportionate censorship and moral panic

If somehow TLOU2 had been made in 2008, the discourse about it being bad would have been entirely from the right

And not right wing gamers either. Remember that the same gamers who formed at least some of Take Back Mass Effect - which was problematic but ultimately about demanding a change to a non-political element of an ending - were some of the gamers who became GG (not saying cause here

Those gamers didn't object to the gay content in Mass Effect - partly because they could avoid by just being mShep and hitting on women, but also because they saw the threat of censorship from outside gaming

I guess my point is that to me and I think quite a few others being super concerned about the meaning of violence in games is... not something that seems at all worthwhile. We know that video games tend to use violence as a method of interaction, not always, but often

It's not a thing that really needs discussion and everything else about a game is more relevant and interesting; further, moral outrage about it, when it's something you grew up with, seems sketch

Again, our parents literally thought games caused school shootings