It's culturally relative isn't it? If you're brought up in a sheltered Western family, then somewhere probably between the ages of nine and the onset of puberty, you're going to have your first encounters with the notion of death and the carnal nature of life and reproduction. Games and horror movies afford a safe space for kids and early teens to explore death and "gore", helping them to come to terms with ideas they might otherwise have found traumatic and to trade the real experience for gentle titillation. From there, the next horrors they'll find fascination in are likely to be social and existential, where our fears, by that age, tend to lie.
I think if you gave the average Sony "violent" experience to kids from a war-torn region of the world to enjoy, where they'd already experienced death and real-world violence, they'd look at you like you were emotionally stunted. And I do think Sony realises that there are also grown-ups who play their games, adults who in many cases *are* maturationally hindered. And so it's important to bury the catharsis under themes that both pre-pubescents and developmentally delayed older gamers won't wittingly notice as being patronising.
Do they go too far with the actual depiction of violence, though? No idea. Don't play that dross. Really I just wanted to see if I could get through this train of thought without using the word "retarded", and look at that, I made it. :)
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