I need your opinion about violence

I'm so glad a created this post.

Thanks everybody for the amazing ideas you are providing!

I love bloody games.

Basically the less realistic or simpler you make something appear (gore, violence, hurt, weapons, humans, anything etc.) the "friendlier" it becomes ? for instance replacing all the bullets and characters in Call of Duty with cubes wouldn't appear violent to the masses even though all you're doing is changing the textures/mesh.

Another example: They made Tetris friendly to kids by using cubes, imagine if you replaced all the squares in Tetris with pieces of human flesh and when you fill up a line of flesh it ruptures and spills blood everywhere.

You can always throw in something magical or bizarre.

For example, maybe your character has a magic sticker book, and instead of 'killing' the monsters, they get put in your sticker book.

Or instead of dying, they get put in balloons or bubbles and then float away.

Character shots lasers that turns enemies into donuts! \o/

I think the sticker book idea is an excellent idea. While I think turning an enemy into a donut or other things are also workable ideas they also seem to be a cop-out in a way. Shooting something is still violent whether or not you make it look violent.

I would suggest a combination of using Tokinsom's idea of treating enemies as obstacles and also maybe taking it a step further by presenting the player with an area that has a lot of enemies and rewarding them for finding a different way around them instead.