Well, at least you can offset the fascination with this healthy amount of dread. But then I hope you find enough contentment to not let this dread turn into despair. Have you tried painting ?

It's a Psychological Horror.

No, more into music creation and possible game design if I ever get off my lazy ass and write out my design doc.

I thought I did and then I picked up a Grand Theft Auto game. I hate to admit it, but beating someone with a bat is still enjoyable.

I wouldn't say I completely lost my taste for violent media, but it has certainly gotten more stale to me. You can only watch a head explode in slow motion so many times before it gets old. It has lost its novelty.

It's more of a return to my young self if I'm being honest, I used to detest violence & brutality as a child, seeing that stuff messed me up, made me lie awake at night with horror. Then as a depressed & angry teen discovered taste and even a lusting for artificial violence, gobbled up any slasher movie I could get my hands on. And now as mostly mellowed out but still often depressed adult I wanna go back to escaping to the happy fluffy safe places that media can offer.

Never had a specific taste for them in the first place. If anything I've become a bit more accepting of them as (mostly) harmless fun that you don't need to feel too bad about enjoying, though I'm still put off by excessive and gratuituos gore and violence just for its own sake. But I dislike censorship as well, and I say to each their own.

Exploding brains, skull fragments, and flying eyeballs
just aren't the same as when you were younger.

My theory is when you get older,
many have experienced, in real life, gore and violence
first hand. It changes your perspective.

Also, there's a psychological term, extinction.
When repeatedly exposed to the stimuli, it no longer
arouses the senses as it did when first exposed.

OK, back to our regularly scheduled Walking Dead Episodes.....

Not violence - still love my splatter (mid 40s) - the more the merrier...

But militaristic. I feel sick when games depict (real or realistic) war as "great adventure" and glorify "zombies in uniform following orders" as heroes or patriots. I think military is (sadly) a necessary evil, there is nothing glorious about war. I'm sick of black-and-white painting in games or movies. It's fine in fantasy or SF scenarios, or in absurd parodies like Iron Sky - but otherwise I feel disgusted if a game openly advertises real people as basically "untermenschen" because they are the enemy of the day and the players side as the unblemished white knights.

I don't think I ever had a "taste" for violent games.

Of course, when you're a child (or later, in your teens) you like to brag about games that you played IF some of your friends/classmates admitted to not knowing said game, or to be not allowed by their parents to play these games.

The same goes for movies.

I guess, that's natural?

Besides: the violence that got depicted in games grew with me.

I'm not gonna bore you by posting screenshots of the Atari 2600 games I played, but when you were a kid back in those days, the violence was very abstract.

Even later on, when I had a C-64, the games graphics were still so simple that the violence didn't seem "real".

When you're bored, click on these links, to see what "violent" games we played:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4gw0uHIM0Y (Blue Max, 1983)
https://youtu.be/OBTud6ujDDw?t=14 (Beach Head, 1983)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYhPplBTdZ0 (Lybia Commando, 1986)

In later years, when the graphics got better, you just adapted...

So, I don't think I ever did not (or even could not) play a game because of the violence depicted in it...however, back in 2003 I played (and massively enjoyed) "Vietcong" and after I was through with that, I longed for another shooter in the Vietnam scenario.

And lo and behold: Shellshock: Nam '67 got announced for 2004.
I was absolutely stoked about that, read every bit I could find and waited impatiently for the release...

And then it finally got released, and I read in a review that there was a mission in which you had to torture and/or kill innocent civilians...and I decided, not to buy and play the game.

See, I have no problem with killing in games, as long as I kill the bad guys.

But if I'm supposed to kill innocents...and even more so - if I get forced to kill innocents...there's a barrier reached for me, that I won't cross.

Remember that airport scene in CoD:MW2?
The fact alone, that the game forced its players to watch the murder of civilians without any possibility to do something against it (no matter how the story "demanded" it), killed any desire in me, to ever play it.

And of course the same goes for Hatred...never would've touched that with a ten-foot-pole.

So, I'd say it's not so much the violence as such that I am opposed to, but the kind of violence...and who's the target of the violence.

And yes - the better (almost realistic) graphics add to that, of course.

I mean, if you watch the "Lybia Commando" video, you see that you have to shoot and behead prisoners...but the low pixel count of the graphics make it so "surreal", that it poses no real problem.

But with today's graphics (and stories, that make you aware of the innocents you have to kill)...I have a problem.

And the same goes with movies.
I love good old splatter movies - but I hate that "torture-porn", that came up in the early 2000.

That shit is looking too real, to be enjoyable for me.

May have something to do with the fact, that I saw enough real-life violence (and its (long-term) results) to still be able to just laugh it off.

No, I'm nearly 40 and still love violence. I am a pretty peaceful guy irl, but I think violent games lets me work out some frustration and stress. There was a period that I only played WoW for a few years, and Nintendo is probably my favorite overall game and console developer, but I love certain themes. I never got into the sport killing or arena type games though. All the violent games I liked were realistic or historical based shooters and war games (ARMA, Ghost Recon, Wolf, Call of Duty, Medal of Honor), futuristic war games (Star Wars, Mass Effect), space sims that are either realistic like Star Citizen or completely arcade like Freelancer, fighting games like Mortal Kombat, and fantasy settings like Hyrule or Middle Earth. The most I've gone into games like Unreal were either the story based entries, or the Tournament series for the number of mods available. My purpose for playing violent games was never just to inflict violence, but put myself in the character's shoes and kind of escape reality for a bit.

I can say that I watched all the Hellraiser movies in a day a couple years ago and felt sick after that, while as I was younger I would just be so curious and want to see more. I guess you get more of a perspective of life overall and start to think about things in a different way. While you were younger playing Quake, you probably just had fun playing the game and even thought it was cool. Now you think to yourself why you are doing this to other people, at least with a story with some type of war it makes a little more sense why it is happening. I think I always put myself in the universe of the game I am playing, which is why I never much liked the arena shooters and such and much prefer a single player experience. It can even be a multiplayer game with offline bots like the old Battlefront series. I find the new multiplayer only Battlefront series or the coming Call of Duty and Battlefield with no bots a completely empty experience. At least the old ones gave you an illusion of playing a story with the bots. I'm not specifically talking about a campaign, but some form of backstory more than just a futuristic tournament. Battlefront is a perfect example, it had 6 movies, numerous books, numerous comic books, and other forms of media to fill in a back story. With bots I wouldn't get tea bagged and could actually pretend to be in the universe.

I agree with what someone said above too. At the mid point in your life, you have seen at least one traumatic or gorey scene irl. It may also highlight how ridiculous some of the gore scenes are when you compare it to what you really saw.

Edit - I completely agree with BreO172 as well. The older games were just comical in their gore or presentation of the violence, while newer games are exponentially more realistic as computers advanced. I guess movies could still be pretty realistic in the 80s or 90s, but I think it something different when you are actually the person inflicting the violence on another person. I dont know if I personally have an issue with the graphic images in a game like Quake, or I just prefer a fleshed out story and purpose for what I'm doing. I don't think I was ever disgusted by violence in a game the way I felt after my marathon of Hellraiser.

AHAHHAHA She killed Doogie Howser!!!

He just wanted to be a teenage doctor and bang a half decent looking girl and she gave him a Columbian neck tie... wtf!