Mortal Kombat Violence Causes Concern
By: Ryan Childress
Staff Writer
On April 23 after Sonya Blade and Johnny Cage beat each other to the brink of death, the famous words were uttered once more and then a gruesome act would take place.
Finish him. These are the famous words uttered by the announcer of the wildly popular game series Mortal Kombat. These words are usually uttered after you have completely pummeled your opponent into the ground and have left them broken and bloody.
The first Mortal Kombat game was released back in 1992 as an arcade cabinet. This game had the look of Streetfighter and played pretty similarly, however, there was one big difference. Blood. Not just a little bit, but instead a whole lot.
In the Streetfighter arcade cabinets, the most blood ever seen would be a bloody nose and a couple of scrapes. This changed when Mortal Kombat sparred with the Fatality. The most memorable out of these secret moves was Sub Zero’s where he would grab the player’s character by the neck and proceed to rip their spine out.
This game has always been considered controversial for its inclusion of extreme violence and is one of the reasons we now have game rating systems from E for everyone to M for mature audiences.
Since 1992 technology has advanced farther than we could have ever imagined and we have put this technology into our games, making them faster, even for accurate. But to what extent does this accurateness go too far?
In the latest addition to the Mortal Kombat series, the 11th game adds even more detail than the last. While in the past it might have just been a few pixels that are colored red, they have since changed to fully depict what it would look like to have a body sawed in half by a spinning saw blade, including the gory details of what the insides look like. Players can see their individual interests and individual verity all sawed in half and then presented for them to either shame their victim or to be humiliated. Which begs the question, has violence in video games truly gone too far?
“With where we are, it is going to keep getting more visually graphic,” said Hayden Meyer, a student at Green River College. “Children under the age of 13 should probably not be playing games that are super super graphic.”
Students like Peyton Wilson tend to agree that violence in video games is going too far, but they all differ with what age should be allowed to play graphic video games. Games like Mortal Kombat usually are pointed at for being too violent in the fact they are too graphic and it not just the act.
However, there are games that do exist that perform just as violent of acts minus the graphic detail. One game that was brought up in conversation was the game Fortnite. Fortnite’s developer, Epic Games, states that “Fortnite Battle Royale is the free 100-player player versus player mode in Fortnite, one giant map, a battle bus, Fortnite building skills and destructible environments combined with intense player versus player combat. The last one standing wins.”
To achieve this last one standing status, one must find various weapons to “eliminate” opponents around that map.
When parents were asked if they felt comfortable with this kind of gameplay, most of them replied yes. But when asked if they would let their child ages 5-14 play a game like Mortal Kombat they replied with mostly no’s.
The question remains why is the act of shooting a player and eliminating them, which is much more realistic, looked upon as OK while two characters fighting hand to hand combat is not? Is it merely the blood or is it the act itself?
