Whilst researching how Vikings used violence in games (next post), I was told by a tutor about the 70's period film Caligula, a film that covered the famously unhinged Roman Emperor Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus (known as Gaius), ruler from 37AD to 41AD. He'd created a Death Machine, especially designed to decapitate neck deep buried prisoners that he wanted dead. Back in that century execution was nothing unusual, but I've never seen anything even close to this scale before. It's frightening! As a further interesting note, this was used for entertainment, both for the unhinged Gaius and an upper class audience. Just look at the video and you'll know what I'm talking about.
If you look at the deleted scene (which says something important in itself about how culture perceives violence as entertainment) from Caligula that shows this Death Machine in motion, there isn't much difference from violence in games nowadays - just it's medium. There are enemies (Prisoners), a means to cause violence (Death Machine), and players entertained by the results (Gaius and audience). Incredibly interesting when the topic is concerned!
I watched the video below and to be honest, it actually scared me. That wall is seriously intimidating!
Obviously, Gaius had psychopathic tendencies (I read somewhere he was cannibalistic), and was the founder of this 'game' of execution, so this Death Machine is the anomaly of the research I've done so far (and probably until the end). However, it still says a lot about how violence was treated back in them days, as this event was still entirely entertainment.
It's weird to think that back then, the officials and the upper class treated violence as an entertaining sport, but now, the upper class criticize it and it's supposed negative influence on society. Is this a sign that cultural morals have overpowered a possible primal instinct? Is it cultural evolution? I'll have to look at the psychological side of violence in an future post.
It's quiet interesting to see how violence was a common and larger part of society than it's frowned upon image nowadays. A pattern I am seeing, considering the year jump from the last post, is how violence in 'games' was used as a method of not only entertainment, but as a means to resolve conflict. Back then, violence was literal as both a solution and as a source of entertainment, now, violence is literal in digital form as a source of entertainment. The only explanation I can see as of yet, is that culture is primary influencer in this difference.
The questionable difference between how violence was once perceived and how we perceive violence now, can only be answered by analysing the stark contrast the two cultures - again, a future post.
So far, the two posts I have written recording past accounts of violence in games, is leading to two incredibly indicative topics - psychology and culture. Maybe these two topics can prove the passive focus of the timeline Are these two directly to blame for how why violence is games and how violence is in games?
NEXT POST: VIOLENCE IN GAMES: VIKINGS: TUG OF WAR (SKIN PULLING) 1000AD
You do realise this was just an invention of the scriptwriter? There was no real-life killing machine.
ReplyDeleteDude literally everything you said is based on fiction. This, children, is why we don't garner factual info from TELEVISION.
ReplyDeleteRoman's frowned on violence just as much as anyone else. Also the world is just as violent today as it was back then. You're trying to pin down the last 2000 years of human "evolution" by using a scene from a movie.