Well, a few of us know what I'm talking about when I say "most of us like to keep the memories we made playing a cheap survival-horror game made by rockstar back in 2005 in the depths of our minds."
Manhunt. Yes, I just brought it up. But for the purposes of addressing why there aren't other games like it in the modern day. The cinema world has much to offer in the way of extreme content and it seems to be commercially successful, even if there is no ulterior motive to it, in contrast.
For the purposes of this post, I'll be bringing up a game of my own envisioning as well as comparing manhunt to the one and only srpski film.
There are a lot in common with these two, and I'm not just talking about the fact that both have plots that revolve around a snuff film. You have insane yet weak directors (L. Starkweather and V. Vukmir), disgusting acts of murder that are motivated in large part by vigilante justice ("Strike the bitch!"/Innocentz massacre), family annihilation ("a big happy serbian family/Innocentz) and, of course, a big, fat, almost inhuman "right hand" to the director who is used for some things I'm just flat out not going to talk about here (Rasha and Pigsy).
And, of course, the actual redeeming value for both is hotly debated, with these works often being despised for their content and a frequent argument is made that any form of deeper understanding is mutually exclusive with any form of extreme violence or perversion.
At the same time, you have my redesigned concept of Somnion: Darkest Dreams. While I'm unabashedly going to say that this game does not only contain extreme acts, but has portions that consist exclusively of them, there is a heavy meaning behind most of these deplorable atrocities. The dismemberment and...worse of Chechen immigrants to "deny their passage to paradise" speaks to the offender's disgust of Islam, for example. It's meant to disgust not just the player, but anybody this Islamophobe couldn't kill himself, thus rooting it in a reason to happen. The reverse syncretic imagery and graphic depictions of vigilante hate mobs? All meant for the player to understand, in much the same way one would understand Schindler's list or Night of Fog. Not enjoy, but strictly understand.
A large part of extreme media, meaningful or not, is to get the consumer to be reviled at themselves on some level. Whether it be for simply watching it or a theoretical game example of cruelty punishment, the effect is the same.
That being said, extreme (note: not "exploitation") games don't really seem to exist outside of a pair of old survival-horror games and my conceptual sandbox RPG, so
I'm wondering about whether there is going to be such a thing as an "extreme gaming genre" and whether the current lack of such games might hold negative things in store for the release of my own project.
Care to share your thoughts?
