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I sometimes worry about this hobby of mine. There’s a general low-level worry just out of recognition much of the time, but today being today, it does come to the surface in moments of silent reflection. For entertainment, I kill. A lot. Or at least the digital representation of whoever I’m pretending to be at the time waves a pretend weapon at digital pixels of Monsters and Bad People. Its mostly dicerolls and stats and abstraction, but overlaying it all is definitely a lot of killing. Conflict! Excitement! Narrative Adversity!

I’m trying to think of any games I regularly or recently play which don’t progress by beating someone until dead and it is surprisingly hard work. I only came up with Burnout Paradise, which is a tad on the boisterous side, but does not have you actually trying to kill anyone on purpose, and A Kingdom For Kieflings, which simply doesn’t have combat at all. City of Heroes attempts to handwave the unpleasantness with coquettish terms like ‘defeat’ and ‘arrest’, and never ruses the ‘K’-word, citing alien ‘just before the point of death’ medical teleporter technology, but no one believes a word of it, especially with the wide variety of disproportionately apocalyptic superpowers in play.

Everything else I play for fun either involves hitting someone with something sharp until bits fall off, shooting them with something noisy until they burst, casting magic at them until they evaporate and on rare occasions, throwing battalions at them until their infrastructure collapses, or flinging big rocks at them until their planet cracks in half. Which is all very well, but sometimes, I worry that I’m not worried enough about the whole thing. Is it a Human Thing? What would visitors from another world make of my recreational choices? Is it just me?

There are a lot of games out there that don’t involve killing. Most sports games; the Forzas and Fifas are competitive, certainly, but rarely violent, and throughout history, sports have been used as a safe and productive substitute for conflict. Or puzzle games; Tetris through to Myst. Violence and death might be an impetus for story, but almost never a primary gameplay mechanic. Or rhythm games; no-one ever headshot anyone in Rock Band. Many others as well, almost none of which I own or play. It isn’t even a conscious thing, which worries me further. I don’t just walk in to a game shop and loudly demand to kill virtual dudes! I even managed to gravitate toward Puzzle Quest, a game which manages to turn turn-based coloured tile matching into a means to kill monsters! It does seem to be everywhere, to the point where if games in which Things Died were banned outright, there would no longer be a games industry. But still I worry. It seems that I just can’t get enough carnage and on days like this, it disturbs me a bit. Am I totally desensitised now?

I suppose its all about perspective. Earlier this year, I visited the Somme. It is a nice enough part of the world; gently rolling farmland, low wooded hills, quiet country roads and we had wonderful late-summer weather. It was harvest time, and lots of French farmers were out getting on with it all, bringing in the potato crop, for which the area is quite famous, apparently. Not the area’s chief claim to fame, of course, and almost every field has its small yet immaculately maintained cemetery in the corner; rows of white headstones, many unattributable; “Here Lies A Solider Of The Great War” those ones simply read, unable to be more specific. It is a land that ensures you Do Not Forget, and various plaques, displays, exhibitions and museums throughout the region reinforce the point, educating and informing.

I think that this is what Remembrance is about, for me. I don’t have family who were there, that I know of anyway, and for many of our generation, the specifics of the battles lose relevance with each year and passing veteran. That doesn’t mean we can gain nothing from the reflection that this day will continue to bring. I gain perspective. Compared to those years, in that place, my own petty angsts seem very shallow indeed. Wars and fighting of the magnitude and scope of World War One are things utterly beyond my experience and I’m extremely glad to live in an age and world where this is the case. My remembrance is that of museums, aging photos, diary accounts, and walking in cemeteries, of historical accounts of stupefying reasons and horrifying consequences, and the lessons that we can all take away from that.

I cherish my perspective, the understanding that what might be fun in a computer game is at the same time, unthinkable in real life. I like to think that sort of understanding is innate, but a moment’s reflection on a day like this can only help put such things in their place.