The demo was very violent, as was the game’s trailer at Paris Games Week late last year. It’s made some critics recoil. I asked Druckmann if he’d heard that feedback and what he made of it.“We’re making a game about the cycle of violence and we’re making a statement about violent actions and the impact they have on the character that’s committing them and on the people close to them,” he said. “And our whole approach is to say, ‘We want to treat this as realistically as possible.’ When you stab someone—if you watch reference videos, which we have, it’s gross and it’s messy and it’s not sanitized like you see in most movies and games. And we wanted to get the player to feel that.”The idea, he underscored, was “for the player to feel repulsed by some of the violence they are committing themselves. It felt like that is the most honest way to tell this story.”One person’s video game violence is another person’s video game fun. For better and at times for worse, the very essence of fun interaction in video games has deep roots in violent interaction, from the primitive days of one batch of pixels causing another to blink out of existence to modern times, when blinking an enemy out of existence often involves a gory finishing move.