”You walk around the office and see how your colleagues are looking at photos of corpses” - how Mortal Kombat influenced the minds of developers
Mortal Kombat is a violent game. It is for him that we go when we launch this game. For many players, rolling guts on a stick looks dynamic and exciting, fatalities are surprising or even shocking. However, gamers have to deal with the game and its bloodiness from the force of 30 hours. Developers who have been in contact with violence in Mortal Kombat for years see it differently. Kotaku spoke with one of the game's developers about how the creation of Mortal Kombat affects the developers. He wished to remain anonymous so as not to harm his career. He spent his days looking at bloody images and violent game scenes, discussing them with the management and sharing feedback with the animators. He was also surrounded by various reference materials, which he studied to make the scenes realistic. After a month of work, there were consequences from the fact that severed limbs flashed before my eyes. He began to have very realistic nightmares, due to which he sometimes did not sleep for days.
“Over time, I just stopped wanting to sleep and spent several days in a row without sleep, just not to see these nightmares,” says the developer. He went to a psychotherapist and he diagnosed him with post-traumatic stress disorder. The doctor connected this not only with the fact that he developed and constantly observed these scenes, but also with the need to constantly discuss them with colleagues, and read about them in detail in reference materials. “You are walking around the office and you see one guy on You Tube watching a video of the hanged, other colleagues are looking at photos of corpses, murder victims, the third is watching a video of a cow being slaughtered. The worst thing is when people who have recently joined the team get used to this. I definitely became one of them. ”
The developer constantly felt like a spineless idiot when he seriously began to think about the impact of development on him. When he talked with colleagues, they said that he was to blame and knew what he was signing up for. He blamed himself for being sissy and weak-willed when one of the other developers said, "Yes, I agree, this is a shitty feeling, but I will continue." He also felt that due to his worries, management felt that he was less involved than the animation department. In meetings, bosses made jokes or comments about the quality of the violent scenes. It was a praise, but over time it got tired and annoying.
For example, the heads of NetherRealm might have said at the meeting: “What should the scene of breaking the spine look like? When you do it, please make sure that you feel it yourself while watching it. There was no procedure or consultation in the studio for those who felt uncomfortable with their work. As well as there were no warnings before hiring other than “the job can be a little brutal”. However, he found other developers who started experiencing similar problems. So, he talked with a guy who began to see scenes of violence before his eyes, which he also created: "This guy looked at his dog and saw its intestines - recalls the author of the fighting game - He cannot look at a dog without imagining its internal organs" .
However, he believes that the game itself cannot cause discomfort to gamers. But about the problem among developers, you need to talk openly in order to get support, and this is really important. NetherRealm Studios and Warner Bros declined to respond to Kotaku's requests for comment for this story. Kotaku contacted Alex Hutchinson, a game director whose work spans the entire spectrum of video game violence, from the rather pacifist Spore to the more violent Assassin's Creed III and Far Cry 4. He believes that violence is an integral part of games as it promotes immersion. .
He thinks about violence and its effect on games quite often, and believes that as you swing your sword and shoot, you get powerful feedback that makes digital violence more abstract. That is why it looks normal to you, and an outside observer may be jerking at what he sees. He comments on the Mortal Kombat situation as follows: “I believe that the higher the realism, the more dangerous it is. I had friends working on Outlast. I don’t think he [one of my friends] was actually upset with his work, but one artist sadly joked that he spent a lot of time drawing and modeling the bodies of dead children and it was not the most pleasant experience for him, you know? p>
By the way, we have material about making Mortal Kombat, it's more fun, so feel free to click here. History of the Mortal Kombat series The Topic of Article: ”You walk around the office and see how your colleagues are looking at photos of corpses” - how Mortal Kombat influenced the minds of developers. |
