Video Games have always strived to provide a realistic and cutting-edge experience to gamers since the first home consoles hit the market. The constant push to become the premier title in your genre and provide an experience with the absolute best in visuals, mechanics, and gameplay is a competition we still see being fiercely fought today. That continuous competition over the past 30 years has meant that the boundaries of graphics and realism in gaming has been growing exponentially. With the recent release of NetherRealm’s Mortal Kombat 1 depicting dismemberment, gore, and death in the most realistic ways possible, a question begins to form of whether the realism in games needs to be an ever increasing quality.

I want to preface this by saying that I do not subscribe to the idea that video games cause violence, nor is this a knock against video games where the main draws are the realistic violence within them. In fact, I think games like Doom Eternal, Grand Theft Auto, and Mortal Kombat 1 where over-the-top violence is the main draw hold an incredibly important place in the market that are all extremely popular for good reason. While I believe these experiences should be celebrated, looking into the future to see how these types of games are going to grow in realism to affect the people playing them, is a topic worth examination.

The arguments of realism in video games was an easier discussion to have when graphics weren’t so close to what we see in real life. Going from single pixel blood pools to thousands of polygons being dedicated to animate a single body part means we are closer than ever to games emulating real life. Do we need to see someone’s head explode just as it would in the real world in The Last of Us series? Do the blood, guts, and mutilation from Mortal Kombat fatalities become more painful than pleasurable to watch because the depictions are so detailed?

It is easy to come to an objective assessment of realism when looking at games today. This is simply because it can be easily recognized that what is being presented to you is separate from reality. As time goes on, and the technologies get better, the line of fact and fiction will become increasingly blurred. Recently, a game called “Unrecord” by indie developer DRAMA, was called out for being fake because its appearance was indiscernible from real life. Merging gameplay and graphics of these levels are going to prove to be a difficult obstacle for developers to overcome. Providing a realistic experience that is competitive with similar products on the market, while at the same time maintaining a separation of reality and appealing to a wide audience is going to be challenging to say the least.

Once again, take the example of Unrecord. On its own it isn’t a call for concern. However, combining graphics and realism of that caliber with levels like the notorious “No Russian” from Activision’s, Modern Warfare 2 (2009), a myriad of issues become readily apparent. Even a game like Grand Theft Auto, could potentially be a lot harder to stomach when the people you are firing at are animated with such a high level of fidelity. This can be tossed to the other side of the coin as well when considering what these developers of these highly realistic games have to go through to make these games. Does anatomically correctly animating gore and mutilation negatively impact the people that are hand-crafting these experience for us? It has in fact already been reported on, that the work and research that goes into creating these games can be quite strenuous.

Virtual Reality makes this topic even more difficult to quantify because it adds a further level of immersion and realism to the violence we see on screen. Feeling physically present in an incredibly realistic, yet graphic gameplay sequence means that there is a strong case that many aspects of the realism we put into games may need to get held back as time goes on. Virtual reality is still very much at a stage of infancy. Although, given enough time, the experiences it offers could be on par with what most current-gen consoles are offering, just at a higher level of immersion.

Lastly, I think it is important to view this topic from a completely different perspective. Young gamers and video game realism. While everyone has their own experiences, chances are you have played a game where the recommended rating was higher than your age at some point. Depending on the game and age this can be a non-issue completely. However, that is not the case for everyone.

With games delivering exponentially more detailed realism and death does it call for more restrictions on what young gamers can play? Or even a changing to the rating system of games itself? This can be a difficult topic to understand if you do not have kids of your own. It can be easy to dismiss the issue and fully put the blame on the parent if a child is playing something out of their recommended age rating. The reality is though, that kids are going to play and see things they are not supposed to. The jump from Epic’s Fortnite to Capcom’s Resident Evil franchise is going to be a major shock to someone young seeing anything depicted so realistically for the first time. As games continue to refine their realism do we need to re-examine how we categorize and prevent young gamers from being able to access them?

Ultimately, video games are rooted in violent and over-the-top depictions. Their popularity exploded due to those very concepts with games like the original Doom (1993) and Mortal Kombat (1992). This should not go away anytime soon. Games are built around experiencing things we would not otherwise be able to do with the freedom of consequence and liability. Games are also ever evolving though. Realism may reach a point where it becomes a necessity to maintain a noticeable distinction from games to life, rather than attempting to provide the highest degree of realism possible in a game.