Can working on violent video games mess you up?

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In commercial games, we celebrate beautiful game art, but how often do we think about what it takes to make the really gruesome stuff? Apparently, to create Halo 3's Flood-infested "Cortana" level, artist Vic De Leon immersed himself in images from colonoscopies, and pictures of tumors and lesions, until he'd get nauseated:

"They'd come up when I was least expecting it. Something would just pop into my head — an image or something — and for a while there I felt…I wouldn't say traumatized, but haunted, like when you're a kid and you see something really disgusting or gory or scary in a movie," says DeLeon. "I started associating that level with feeling disgusting. Once it was built it took months and months of polishing, and in those months I couldn't wait to work on something else. The level was so disgusting, and what I thought was neat at first really came to bear down on me."

At Gamasutra, Alex Wawro speaks to game artists and animators who spend their careers elbow-deep in grotesque reference materials, creating the lifelike gore and impact that some players might experience only fleetingly, but that the artist often spends months getting close to. Steve Bowler, an animator on the famously-gory Mortal Kombat series, had this to say:

"The guys I always feel the worst for are the cinematic artists, because they have to make sure that like, each bone is cracking in a realistic way," he says. "Even the audio guys probably have a bit of like, PTSD, because they have to spent all this time carefully picking out and putting in all these gory, juicy, crunchy, eviscerating sound effects."

The full article is a really interesting read on a question most people wouldn't think to ask.