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Because a gangsters are the bad guys. People are alright with to accept bad people doing bad things (some people may refer to it as conditioning, but I like to avoid labels that have connotations). When soldiers - good guys - do bad things it bothers normal people because its outside their comfort zone. Soldiers and other members of the armed forces are heroes in the eyes of many - up there with firefighters if not higher - so the outrage scales similarly.

Personally, I have a deep respect for the armed forces and the sacrifices they make for civilians each and every day. However, it seems that the anecdotal soldiers don't ask questions and politicians don't answer questions has made the world a less safer place.

Life is controversial, people do horrible things to each other, and sometimes part of games and movies is depicting those horrible things.

To me this just says that games are finally reaching a level where they're willing to make a statement and are willing to make the audience uncomfortable to do it, they aren't treating significant subjects with kid gloves anymore. Movies have been making the audience uncomfortable about horrific things for a long time, a lot of the time by tricking them into enjoying it on some level (combining nudity and violence for example...), in this instance a game is doing the same by combining completing the game with slaughtering civilians. That in and of itself isn't anything new but there's a pretty big difference between being explicitly told by the game to open fire on a crowd of innocent people and finish off the wounded afterwards in a serious situation and GTA/Saints row style blood comedy.

I'm confused.

This (from TFA and Activision):

The scene establishes the depth of evil and the cold bloodedness of a rogue Russian villain and his unit. By establishing that evil, it adds to the urgency of the player's mission to stop them.

Does not equal this (from TFS):

Footage shows the player engaged in killing civilians with terrorists

Which one is it (or is it both somehow)? This sounds like a bunch of uproar over a cutscene nobody understands the context of.

Good quote.

So here is what I think Lee might ask today: why do people take pleasure in pretending (virtually) to kill innocent civilians? Or kill in general? Or eat people, as someone mentioned in Prototype (never played it)?

I'm not trying to say degradation of society is directly linked to violence in video games, that playing violent video games causes you to murder, etc. My question is this: why DO people enjoy games simulating things that ought to be horrific to us?

Example: most people don't think that brutally raping a young girl (say, 8 years old) and then slaughtering her is particularly good. What would people say to a video game where you play a protagonist that brutally rapes a young girl and then slaughters her. One is doing it in real life, one is doing it virtually; both in order to do it virtually, there must be some desire to "do it," right?

I think that's where the shock at these video games comes into play. The idea that "normal" people have a desire to pretend to be a terrorist killing innocent civilians is frightening. However, because of a worldview - that is, that people are "neutral" or clean slates and develop morality from there - people think that society should squash these video games in an effort to prevent people from being wired to be terrorists or murderers.

In my worldview, people are bad to begin with. Wanting to play these games is an outworking of who they are, not part of what forms who they are. It may or may not condition them to be less influenced by social constructs and likely helps, as the Christians say, "sear their conscience" ... but IMO, games like these prove one thing to me: that people inherently seem to like violence and war, and that simply shows humanity who they really are. It's not the fault of video games that people like violence; it's the fault of people liking violence that we have video game violence.

So it seems like the response should be this: wow, human nature is pretty violent. What should we do?

Yes, we all know that the Romans and Greeks never slaughtered all the residents of a rebellious city upon taking it, and raped and enslaved the women who remained. No, nothing like that happened in ancient times at all. Combat was noble, and only men with weapons in their hands were killed, nobly and civilly.