I am become Death

It's not every day I get to confess to a bunch of imaginary crimes. It's almost every day I get accused of a bunch of imaginary crimes, but I manage to resist the urge to spill forth, crying and begging for forgiveness. Something's being pressing on my mind recently, though, and that is that I've killed a shitload of people. Seriously, more like ten shitloads*. A very hypotheical genocide.

I guess my non-stop assault on the living started when I was about ten, playing a little-known Master System game called Secret Command.

I was never sure what the Secret Command actually was, but it sure did involve killing a lot of people.

Since then, it's been impossible to play almost any computer game without inflicting horrendous amounts of carnage on the enviroment. In Sonic, I slaughtered my way through an army of robots whilst stealing anything reasonably shiny within reach, like a psychotic magpie from a bad neighbourhood trapped in the Terminator 3 universe. I played Jurassic Park, ensuring the past stayed well and truly dead with an arsenal that would have put Rambo to shame. Gradually, I moved on to the harder stuff.

Metal Gear Solid came around, a game dedicated to breaking necks, shooting people in the head and stapping C4 to their backs before kicking them into a pool of motlen lava. In Command and Conquer and all of it's subsequent spin-offs, thousands died under the iron treads of animated battle tanks, were mauled by dogs, electrocuted by glowing Chirstmas Trees or drowned in purging nuclear fire.

Oh god, what have I done?

It's been downhill from there. From Command and Conquer to Cossacks: European Wars. From Metal Gear Solid to Halo, Gears to Operation Flashpoint. Every Modern Warfare ever made. In the cold, depthless voids of space thousands of Federation crewmen died as their ships were torn apart by phase-fire. In Rome Total War, Spartans impaled their way though hundreds of enemies. I stormed the beaches in Medal of Honour: Allied Assault, and killed the Lord of Hell in Tenchu Stealth Assassins. Face to face with a chainsaw, or with the cold caculating click of an 'autoresolve' button, thousands of animated, imaginary people suffered, bled and died at my will.

And before I knew it, I was a monster, launching religious purges across Europe, or hacking prostitutes to death and stacking their heads in a bathtub. I can't stop it anymore, waiting eagerly for my copy of Skyrim so the pointless slaughter can continue. There isn't even a moral anymore. There is no black and white. There isn't even the morally ambigious shade of grey.

There is only the comforting, soothing red.

It's not even a blog, it's a cry for help.

*A cookie for the reference. Well, nothing for the reference but personal satisfaction, which is almost as good.