Interessante prospettiva su un software di grande successo commerciale.

Due punti sono particolarmente interessanti:

- la dissociazione cognitiva che permetta agli sviluppatori di sostenere
  che ciò che danneggia la loro percezione della realtà e i loro sogni
  possa essere ininfluente sulla mente dei giocatori cui, by design,
  causa dipendenza

- la tesi di Hutchinson (ex Ubisoft, Creative Director di Assassin’s
  Creed 3 e Far Cry 4) per la quale coloro che non giocano a questi
  giochi violenti ma li osservano dall'esterno hanno una percezione
  esagerata della violenza rappresentata che diventa "abstract
  in nature"

In altri termini chi non è dipendente dal gioco non è assuefatto alla
violenza che vi viene rappresentato. Ma che scoperta sensazionale!

E la cosa divertente (tragica) è che questi argomenti fanno presa su
chi (NON) vieta la commercializzazione di queste armi. Insieme ad
altri incentivi... suppongo.



https://www.kotaku.com.au/2019/05/id-have-these-extremely-graphic-dreams-what-its-like-to-work-on-ultra-violent-games-like-mortal-kombat-11/

Here’s one such story, about a developer who worked with the
cinematics team for Mortal Kombat 11 and requested anonymity in order
to protect their employment prospects. They told Kotaku that they had
worked on the game throughout 2018, and spent their days reviewing
violent animation work, discussing it with leads, sharing feedback
with animators, and generally being surrounded by the kind of bloody
real-life research material that creators reference in order to
animate video game gore. Within a month, they started feeling the
effects.

“I’d have these extremely graphic dreams, very violent,” they told
Kotaku in a call. “I kinds of just stopped wanting to go to sleep, so
I’d just keep myself awake for days at a time, to avoid sleeping.”

Eventually, the developer says they saw a therapist, who diagnosed
them with PTSD. They attribute this to their work on MK11 - not just
the content of the game and having to process and discuss its violent
cinematics frame by frame, but also being surrounded by the reference
materials artists used for research.

“You’d walk around the office and one guy would be watching hangings
on YouTube, another guy would be looking at pictures of murder
victims, someone else would be watching a video of a cow being
slaughtered,” they said. “The scary part was always the point at which
new people on the project got used to it. And I definitely hit that
point.”
[...]

On the one hand, it’s disconcertingly nonchalant. “We do a lot of
testing of, like, how liquid will land on carpet, how it’ll react on
dirt,” he said. “And we do tests and talk about them like ‘Does that
look how you’d think it would look?’... If I get blood on my shirt,
it’s gonna get dark, so it needs to react appropriately. Our tech
artists dig into that and make it look very real.”

On the other, there’s a level of remove: “I hate to keep saying this,
but I think it’s more just the beats to me,” he said. “It’s not so
much what’s happening. It’s more just the animations.”
[...]

“As a mechanic, it’s basically perfect,” said Alex Hutchinson when
asked about violence in video games. Hutchinson is a game director
whose work spans the entire spectrum of video game violence, from the
potentially pacifistic Spore to the far bloodier Assassin’s Creed 3
and Far Cry 4.

“You have a clear goal. It’s exciting because there’s a risk/reward —
you win, they die. You lose, you die. So you’re afraid, and you can
lose things. It’s usually spectacular because you’re shooting a gun or
swinging swords, you get great feedback. You can even see this in
pseudo-gun combat mechanics, like camera mechanics. Because that has
everything that guns have—that’s why Pokémon Snap is so satisfying.”

Hutchinson said he spends a lot of time thinking about how those who
don’t game might perceive violence, arguing that the sensory feedback
you get from interacting with the game — the thrill of winning, and
fear of losing — does a lot of work to make graphic violence abstract
in nature.

Observers can’t quite understand that in the same way, and might
therefore be more repelled by the bloody images they’re seeing on
screen, Hutchinson said. But he’s not insensitive to the occupational
hazards of having to depict violence.

“I think as realism improves, it’s more of a danger,” Hutchinson said.
“The fidelity of the assets you deal with, and the world you’re
building—it’s more likely. We had some friends out here working on
Outlast. I don’t think he was upset, but the character artist was
joking that he’d spent a lot of time modelling dead babies, and it
wasn’t his favourite moment, you know?”



“Mortal Kombat is....it’s Mortal Kombat,” the anonymous cinematics
developer who had graphic dreams told me. “You start to feel like an
idiot for thinking about what the impact of working on that game has
been on yourself. Other people I’ve talked to have been like, ‘I know
what I’m working on, I know what I’ve gotten myself into here.’ And
you start to blame yourself for being shitty or weak or spineless.”

The developer felt that management’s top-level perspective made it
seem like they were less immersed in the details of the violent
content than the animators that reported to them. Bosses would joke
about and compliment well-done scenes of violence, the developer said
— a desirable outcome in most environments, but when working on
violence is starting to affect you, the dynamic gets complicated.

Meetings with this developer’s boss involved discussing “how this
spine extraction scene is going, and making sure you can feel the pop
when the spine is ripped out from the rest of the body,” they said.
[...]

One coworker, for example, told them that the toll of working on
Mortal Kombat 11 was eliciting horrible images in real life. “When he
looks at his dog, he just sees the guts inside of it, and he couldn’t
look at his dog without imagining all of the viscera.”
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