I can still remember the first nightmare I ever had. I was three years old and imagined walking into a large entryway in a two-story house and announcing to my parents and older brother, "Grandma is a witch." At that point I woke up to discover it was still dark and I was completely alone in a room whose color and dimensions looked nothing like the space in my dream. It's not much to think about now, but I was so touched by the idea that my laughing, candy-dispensing grandmother was a servant of the supernatural that I couldn't fall asleep again.

Blood+is+the+new+GPS.

I'm thirty years older now and the things I find disturbing are much more varied and grisly than what my three year-old brain could imagine. One of the worst dreams I have now is of winding up in jail after having killed someone. The murder itself is never part of the dream, only the guilt and the hopeless realization that I'm to be confined for the most productive parts of my life. Or else I'm yelling at people with unhinged emotion, behavior I make a point of tightly buckling down in waking life. Occasionally there are still dreams of the supernatural, weird shadow monsters or oozing manimals crawling towards me with unnatural speed.What makes these experiences unhinge my inner doors is not the literal details, but the implications I draw from them. Games excel at describing rules; what happens to Object A when Action B is performed on it. They've become quite skilled at drawing in detail as well, charging a staff of artists with the creation of environmental viscera. Yet, games are still fumbling in the darkness when it comes time for a creator to connect rules and environmental details to some kind of creative implication. One of the root causes of this persistent gap is that games just aren't violent enough.Consider games like GTA IV, Uncharted 2, BioShock, Red Dead Redemption, and Fallout 3, and you might be led to the opposite conclusion. To appreciate the characters and stories in these games you've got to look through a thicket of violence, which often chokes the believability from the polygonal dramas waiting to play out on the other side. But the blood spurts and rag dolls are illusions designed for repeatability and player convenience. They sometimes look and sound like violence, but rarely do they feel violent for more than a few minutes. Games have gotten as far as making killing an interactive option, but few have pushed into what it might actually mean to take a life by force.This has retarded the evolutionary path and left us in a world of creative doublespeak where we subconsciously know games won't be taken too seriously, and that it's wrong to ever expect them to. This warped creative arc has left us in a place where heroes kill 300 other human beings in between emotional close-ups. What's necessary to correct it is a willingness to describe the meaning of killing to help give each rag dolling enemy a little more impact than that of an overcome obstacle. We don't need more moralizing in games; we ought to be braver about admitting how and why we're capable of transgressing our collective standards of wrong and right.Foremost among the ways this could be accomplished is through a more honest attention to point of view. Game designers are adept at telling players they're winning or losing. Blood spurts in a shooter are a kind of reward for good aim, a musical cue lets you know you've killed all the bad guys in an area, and a reddening screen means you're standing in the wrong spot. These are mainly competitive cues and the emotions players connect with them are generally low-level emotions about performance, pressure, and relief. Is this what the emotional experience of killing is really like? If it's these emotions that developers want to invoke, shouldn't there be a more apt gameplay metaphor than killing?Some reports describe killers as emotionless and dissociated from the act--don't think about that too long next time you're trotting through a single-player kill tunnel (what are the odds that you would?). Others describe intense spasms of rage or ecstatic release. Still others discover killing as a horrific trauma that forever weighs on the psyche. All of these experiences could be rendered in games.Killing someone from a dissociative point of view could be done by draining the world of color in the moments you stab, choke, or shoot a victim, turning everything into a blurry black and white in which only basic shapes are visible. Or else a trigger could transform the world into a briefly surreal place where you're hacking your way through a tropical jungle with a machete or shooting at distant birds in a clearing. After the act the normal world would return to show you mangled bodies or a panicked crime scene. Haze used this idea in a wonderful but limited way, showing players a tropical world where enemies wore army uniforms and died without blood when they were high on nectar. Without drugs the world became a stormy place and enemies were simply-dressed peasants whose corpses were smeared with blood.