Dammit! Not again! That's the second time this week!

When we want to play any game nowadays, you better believe that anything above an "Everyone" rating is going to have some kind of blood in it. It's incredibly common to have in a game these days, so much so that some people have gone to such lengths as to lower their opinion of the game because there isn't any at all. Look at any IGN review for any Medal of Honor up until Airborne. Almost every review mentions the "unfortunate lack of blood." How come we have come to a point where we have to empty every ounce of salty red juice from our enemies to fulfill our Vampire-esque bloodlust?

Even only mediocre games have started to lean on their fair share of goregasms to prop up what is only a marginally fun and easily forgettable experience. Though we can only begin to understand the psychological reasons behind this new phenomenon, we can still look back on what might have caused it. It could be caused by a satisfaction of seeing something happen as a result of our actions. It might be a way for the game to "add realism and immersion." But so far it seems to be the cause of just one game that started an entire new gaming clique.


BOOM HEADSHOT!

It seems only last year that games were perfectly fine with an enemy flashing red and doubling over. Anything that had more than one hint of blood got plastered with a nice fat "M" on the cover. But then Halo came along. Sure, it was rated Mature and not Teen, but it still caused a whole new concept of blood and gore. We know that the gamers that we hate now, the chavs who only play shooters with lots of blood and nothing else, are mostly hormonal teenage boys. There's nothing wrong with Halo itself, instead it should be celebrated because of the revolutions in shooter design and the popularity of multiplayer on consoles. But with it came a bunch of 13 - 18 year old boys who saw this testosterone-fueled and hormone-bathed frag fest and decided they would join in with "the nerds" and try it out.

Now to begin with, the ESRB was rating with the idea of teenage boys in mind already, but most of those from that demographic came from middle-class, most-likely white households that didn't approve of the slaughter-fests and epic raging battles that materialized on screen. But when the other group came in, ones from other demographics, lower-class, high-class, Latino, black, etc. etc., and the game designers playing ball with the FPS craze, they loosened it up a little more, allowing more Teen-rated games to put more blood in their games.

It wasn't just the ESRB, either. The game designers started making games with ridiculous amounts of blood and gore stuffed in the enemies. They knew that teenage-boys' hormones flared with this PowerRageSexGasm (Okay, now I'm making up words). They played on this, and started to make FPS after FPS, where you can place a bullet in the enemies skull and be the cause of C-sections gone wrong.


I just needed a little motivation from the Kool-Aid man!

The same goes for sex in video games, too. BioWare has stated before that they would like to include more sex in video games to portray love, because sex is something that is largely ignored. That would be great if that was the kind of thing that happened. But it won't. As soon as sex scenes get approved in video games, everyone is going to use it to appeal to the hormonal teenage boy crowd. Even in Mass Effect, it isn't like the girl you can have sex with suffers a huge loss, and you can choose to comfort her and that leads to sex. At least that's not the impression I got. She just decides to have sex with you right before the epic boss battle. In the sequel, they will even have a character that will dress like a whore and act like one too. Again, I love Mass Effect, I think it is a great game, but we all know that BioWare just wants to get the "horny teenage boy" demographic to play Mass Effect. Really, it's like a nice way of saying that they want to make a Hentai Dating Sim.


Everybody's a hypocrite. Even me.

Wow. I really did not mean to make such a rant out of that. I have no idea why I got so angry. But what do you think? Do you want to have the blood and brains of your enemies on the wall, or are you fine with a red flash?