Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

Exp

2021-12-02 View on smbc-comics.com → 1 revision
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Exp
Votey panel for Exp
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Explanation

This comic takes the common moral panic about video game violence and imagines what it would actually look like if video games truly did cause real-world violence.

In the first panel, someone asks a character holding a gaming device: "What are you doing?" The gamer responds: "Killing a large number of small mammals in the park to improve my skills at brain-tanning. It takes longer but it's safer than going outside the city. Would you like to buy 400 squirrel pelts?"

The humor is that the character is behaving exactly as a video game player would in an RPG -- grinding low-level enemies (small mammals) in a safe area (the park, as opposed to dangerous wilderness outside the city), practicing a specific crafting skill (brain-tanning leather), and trying to sell bulk quantities of useless loot to passersby.

The caption at the bottom delivers the thesis: "If video games did make people violent, it would be really weird violence." The joke is that the moral panic about video games causing violence imagines players mimicking straightforward movie-style violence, but actual video game behavior is far stranger -- it involves repetitive grinding, obsessive resource collection, bizarre economic transactions, and min-maxing obscure skills. If games truly influenced behavior, the result wouldn't be scary; it would be deeply weird and oddly entrepreneurial. The comic deflates the moral panic by showing that the logical conclusion of the argument is absurd.

View History (1) Original Comic