So, someone alerted me to the fact I could get Half Life 2 for free, and while it is not the kind of game I would ever buy ... it was free! So I played it!

And, I gotta say, it did make me kinda concerned about the psychological state of the developers and target audience. It wasn't so much the shooting, the shooting people (conveniently all zombies or masked aliens) was expected. I usually play games where you kill your opponents with swords (or just insult them while waving a sword at them until they admit defeat, like the Monkey Island series, lol), but, whatever.

It was the killing zombies by cutting them in half with rusty saw blades (I played a version with comments by the developers, otherwise I probably wouldn't have noticed one can do that) that made me wonder.

Yeah, you have no/limited bullets for a gun at this point in the game, so obviously you have to kill the zombies in other ways.(Was my dad's comment when I voiced my concerns)

But why do you have no bullets? And just why are there so many rusty saw blades lying around? (And the barrels full of flammable liquids. Those, too. Why are they there, in every area of the game where you encounter enemies? I never see many of those in real life.)

I got the impression that the game expected me to enjoy killing enemies in "creative" ways. Gory ways.

I kept playing, because there's something strangely addictive about pretty much any well-made video game, but looking back, the only thing I really enjoyed was the physics puzzles, where you e.g. had to lift swimming platforms by putting floating empty plastic barrels under them. (It was ages ago that I last played, so physics actually working in real world ways was a fascinating innovation.)

What kind of person enjoys extremely gory killing so much that it's a selling point? Are those people safe to be around?

I mean, I don't think that everyone who plays egoshooters is a school shooter in the making, but I think we all agree that a game where you play as Hamas is in bad taste and no decent person would want to play it, so clearly, there's a line somewhere.

And on here, we all know that what people watch does have effects on their psyche - see porn's effect on men.

Any opinions on this?

Obviously, Half Life 2 is rather mild compared to other games (you do play a hero and never kill any living humans), but it is the most brutal game I played, and I did feel rather troubled by what it expected me to do at certain points.

Perhaps I identify too much with fictional characters but then, I'm not the only one who does that, am I? (Interestingly, the developers commented that beta players were inconsolable when their vehicle crashed, so that didn't happen in the final version ... but you get a bunch of allies who follow your command, and I haven't found a way to keep all of those alive? What .. does that say about the players? Am I just too stupid? I was playing in easy mode and they still got killed!)