Video Game Cruelty Potential/Quotes

Brian: What are you playing?
Tim: Tomb Raider 3.
Brian: She's drowning.
Tim: Yeah.
Brian: Is that the point of the game?
Tim: It depends what mood you're in really.
Brian: What sort of mood are you in then?
Tim: Well, I got a letter from my girlfriend this morning three months too late explaining why she dumped me. It was full of "You'll always be special" and "I'll always love you" platitudes designed to make me feel better while simultaneously appeasing her deep-seated sense of guilt for running off with a slimy little city boy named Duane and destroying my faith in everything in the world that is good and pure.
Brian: So it didn't really work then.
Tim: No, it made me want to drown things!

—Spaced

The most useful part of sneaking is undoubtedly the 'stealth throw'. While firing a missile weapon or attacking in melee will get you noticed immediately, throwing things at people will not. Stock up on dead enemies' weapons, clothing and severed body parts and you can pretend you're some gruesome comedy version of Sam Fisher. You know you want to.

—The Dwarf Fortress wiki, on Adventure Mode.

"As a Pyro, you can often set enemies on fire and retreat, leaving them to die from the burning."

—Team Fortress 2 Player Tip

You can show your neighbors you love them, or just beat the dogshit out of them.

—Brental Floss's "Civilization With Lyrics"

These types of items can be used to destroy objects or even other summoned items (e.g., a club can be used to hit an animal; steak can be attached to a baby to attract lions; rockets can be lobbed at a man)

—The ESRB on Scribblenauts

"The most exhilarating moment I got out of this game was when I hit a seagull with an RGB6 grenade for the first time."

—Muni Shinobu on Metal Gear Solid 2

You are in a verdant forest. All around you are the sounds of small animals rustling in the bushes, creating an orchestra of ambient, peaceful sounds. The gentle morning sun turns the dew into a soft steam rising from the blades of grass. A young doe eyes you warily in the distance but, sensing your kindness, slowly approaches. All is as it should be.
>kill deer
Wh...why?
>murder the shit out of deer
You slaughter the deer in the most horrible fashion you can think of, for absolutely no reason. The gentle silence is broken by painful screams and the misty grass is tinged red with blood. You are soaked in its entrails.
>frolic
Wow. There is something really wrong with you.

—Robert Brockway: Word Puncher: Revisiting Old-School Text Adventures as a Jaded Modern Gamer

"Every scientist dreams of a world without ethics. Whenever a scientist sees a set of twins, he or she secretly wonders what would happen if you surgically swapped their faces. They already have a chamber set up to harness the power of their screams as they gradually realize what has happened. Every day, ethics barely prevent experiments like this from being carried out.
But what if we didn’t have these ethics? When Nazi doctors were let loose during WWII, the incredible rate of their discoveries were matched only by the inadequacy of words to atone for them. They might have been monsters, but without them, we never would have discovered the yield elasticity of the elderly, or learned what part of a prisoner’s tongue detects the taste of angel meat.
The Sims 3 is a computer game based on these Nazi scientists that offers us a world of moral ambiguity, free to perform psychological experiments away from the leering eye of ethics. Which is exactly what I did. Here are the results of my findings."

—Seanbaby, Exploring the Mysteries of the Mind with The Sims 3

Think about it! How many times have we enslaved and killed our own people just because we couldn't wait few more turns for something to finish building on it's own? How many times do we declare war, kill, conquer and vassalize(lol) in the name of some arbitrary victory ? How often do we run a communist economy !!!!!
Montezuma and Shaka are angels compared to us!

I got a feeling civ games sometimes bring out the worst in us.

—Shirastro of Civilization Fanatics

"Saints Row 2 is fully aware that most gamers are dickheads and if you give them any kind of freedom, their first instinct will be to abuse it. If you give them guns, they will shoot old ladies. If you give them cars, they will run over old ladies. If you give them aircraft, they will ascend to the highest possible heights and hurl themselves out onto an old lady. And if you give them customizable outfits, their first instinct will be to take off their clothes and run around the streets hip thrusting in the faces of old ladies.

—Zero Punctuation

"Switch up your protagonist as much as you like, they're still controlled by a player; an entity as ethically restrained as Joseph Stalin playing with his bath toys."

—Yahtzee on Prototype 2 trying to give a tragic backstory to a controllable monster.

Guy: Raise your hand if you threw the baby penguin off the cliff after getting the star.
[four people in the room raise their hand]
Guy: Wow you're ALL PSYCHOPATHS.

—K009 Comics, "Psychopaths"

"I think it's a common impulse to want to interact with everything in a game. When the only vehicle the game gives you to do that is violence, it means I'm going to stop and murder every adorable animal I see, because that's the only way I can acknowledge their presence.
This is one of those comics where I'm hoping the general response is "wow, yes, me too," and not "Katie, you are a psychopath.""

—Katie Teidrich, in The Rant of "If You Can't Join Them", Awkward Zombie (about The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild)