Splat

PATRICK J. WOOD, PUBLISHER

Author of new book Patinas of Life available in local bookstores.

Dear Reader,

There is a sound that has no business being casual, and yet somehow it has become exactly that. Splat.

It is the sound of a body hitting the ground in a video game, the sound of a digital adversary being dispatched in a hail of cinematic gunfire, the sound that registers in our brains as little more than a score notification or a scene transition. We hear it thousands of times before we are old enough to drive. We hear it ten thousand more times before we are old enough to vote. And somewhere in all of that repetition, something in us quietly goes numb.

I am not here to argue about the Second Amendment, or to relitigate the culture wars around Hollywood, or to point fingers at the gaming industry in particular. Those conflicts have been performed so many times that they have become their own kind of noise. What I want to talk about is something quieter and more unsettling: the slow, steady erosion of our ability to feel the weight of a human death.

Think about what we have normalized. John Wick dispatches nearly 300 people across four films, and audiences cheer. Call of Duty has players accumulate kill counts in the hundreds of millions collectively, every day.

Dynasty Warriors lets a single player cut down entire armies in an afternoon of thumb-tapping. None of this is experienced as horror. It is experienced as entertainment, as skill-building, as the satisfying completion of a loop. The designers are masterful at exactly that — at making the ending of a simulated life feel like a reward.

Then a school shooting happens. Or a violent confrontation plays out on a street corner or at a border crossing, captured on someone’s phone and distributed across every platform before the bodies are even cold. We watch that, too. Sometimes with grief. Sometimes with outrage. And sometimes — this is the part that should concern us deeply — with a strange and terrible familiarity, as though we have seen this particular scene before, because in a very real sense, we have.

Inoculation, a medical word, means introducing a weakened form of something harmful so that the body learns not to react to the real thing. We have been inoculating ourselves against the horror of death for decades, one splat at a time, and the immunity has taken hold. Most of us are not more violent as a result. But I wonder if we are less disturbed than we should be, less moved than our grandparents would have been, less likely to feel in our bones that what we are witnessing is an irreversible tragedy.

I do not have a clean answer to offer you. I wish I did. I do not think the solution is to ban games or sanitize movies, and I am skeptical of anyone who offers that kind of simple remedy to a complex cultural condition. But I do think something is worth asking, both individually and collectively: when is the last time the death of a human being — even a stranger, even on a screen — actually stopped us? When is the last time it cost us something to witness it? Because if we cannot feel that cost, we are going to keep paying it in ways we never intended.

Splat.