Last class we had discussions on our theses. I’ve decided to take a topic which came up in class a few weeks ago: how the quality of a simulation affects our reaction to the violence we experience. It’s fairly narrow but that means I can go quite deep into video game violence (a topic where there isn’t really a general consensus), as well as the technical side of things with the current state of simulation quality and where we’re heading. Uncanny valley and all that.
What I’m going to be looking at throughout is how better simulation (through graphics, animation, AI, sound, input, and everything else all together) changes our emotional and psychological reaction to what we experience in games.
Hope I can squeeze 10k words out of this. 
This will be an interesting read when you are finished. I definitely think that if certain types of games were too realistic I would find hard to stomach. Another interesting factor that might be good to look into would be the types of NPC and how we are made to see them, if a realistic “monster” was coming at me in a game would have no problem killing him but a human type character (even a “baddy”) might be a little more difficult.
Good idea. I was thinking of going into that from the German regulations point of view. There’s some regulation about killing humans in games… I think it’s along the lines of “enemies must be as far from human as possible”. That’s why Lara Croft’s blood wasn’t red in the German release. I remember seeing screenshots of the German Carmageddon release and seeing how all the human sprites has been made into zombies and the red blood replaced with green goop.