Odysseus is wreaking revenge. Someone comes and pleads for mercy. The women come and say, 'It wasn't our fault,' and he puts chains around their necks until their heads pop off. Gordon finds it ironic that people are hypersensitive to game violence, yet don't realize how bloody the classics can be. Jenkins points out that with gratuitous violence, there are neither emotional nor narrative consequences.
All stories have violence.
They become literature when blood lust turns into something more meaningful, when the moral dilemmas of violence are explored. Game designer Ernest Adams agrees. To prod colleagues to innovate, he wrote a column in Game Developers Magazine last year proposing game rules based on a set of dogmatic standards put forth by a group of Danish filmmakers in 1995. You are wasting energy that could be more profitably spent on gameplay. Nonetheless, while many of them are addictive, few are emotionally compelling.