Superhot and the Decoupling of Violence and Gore

Shooting glass humanoids that shatter in harsh angles, choosing an airplane or a graveyard as the setting, and ducking from bullets are only a few of the things you can do in Superhot. Having never played a VR game, I was amazed at how real the experience felt. I almost forgot that I was in discussion with people watching me play. In fact, the game became my world. It felt like being completely blind to reality but the virtual world seemed so real to me that my crouching, crawling, and side movements were actions I had no choice but to perform. However, after taking the goggles off and remembering how others looked while playing, I realized that I must have looked so ridiculous to people watching me.

This jolt into reality helped me to realize just how immersed in the game I had been. What does this immersion mean? For me, it was being able to keep my physical identity because there was no real figure I could see representing me as the game materialized around me. The game catered its movements to accommodate what I could feel as my own physics of movement. Sure, there was an uncanny valley effect when the movements of the game did not match my intentions of movement specifically, but for an amateur player like myself, it was enough for me to feel like the game had become my reality. In fact, one of the players I was watching even accidentally bumped into the wall.

The muted narrative of Superhot allowed me to be more immersed in the game not only because I had a first person view of the game that my body in space could help me navigate, but also because of the relative mutedness of the narrative. For a narrative to be muted means that I do not know who my character is exactly and there is no inundation of information as I play, telling me who I should be; I am myself regardless of the job I have (hacker). As I mentioned earlier, this helps me to be more engrossed in the game. As a result of this, I feel a greater accountability for the actions I take in the game. Because my whole body is involved in the play of the game, there is no blaming the platform for being difficult to play due to my poor hand-eye coordination. Any glass humanoids I kill are my responsibility.

The creators of the game can use this immersive accountability to comment on how it may feel to be a mob boss shooting people in a graveyard, an airplane hijacker, or a mall shooter (even though this does not follow with the narrative story). The parallel between superhot as a game and mass shooters could be rooted in the fact that they do not see people in their way as actual humans. The glass humanoids do not gush blood or make sounds indicating that soft tissue is harmed. For a shooter with a specific goal of doing the most damage, perhaps people are not actually humans for them either. Instead, they are analogous to the glass humanoids that die with no gore because the shooter does not think nor care about the gore caused. Violence without gore is an interesting concept in video games because it separates the real damage that violence can cause from the leisure and catharsis of shooting things.

Alternatively, the creators may be trying to dissociate the gore from the violence in order to keep the fun of first person shooter games but discourage any violent behavior that may manifest as a result of the games. The glass humanoids let the player have fun while shooting but do not let brutality and true evil to be the point. It is almost like moving target practice. The game may even allow people to displace their aggressive or violent emotions by exerting themselves in this game since it meshes closely with the player’s idea of reality.

Do you think VR games can be applied for therapeutic uses of catharsis? What can be some of the dangers of playing a shooter-based game with the whole body as it applies to the psyche?