First off, why was violent content — the spurting blood, the chattering bullets — irrelevant to gamers’ enjoyment?Because violence doesn’t contribute much to how well a game plays. What gamers most demand from a game, the researchers found, is awesome play mechanics. Their subjects liked it when a game gave them a sense of “autonomy” and “competence” — such as when the game had well-crafted controls, an environment that wasn’t frustrating and nicely balanced combat and puzzles. This squares with what many gamers have told me over the years: That the longer you play a “twitch” action game, the less you notice the cultural content — the gushing blood, the shrieks of agony. You’re too busy focusing on the gameplay.I noticed this with Wolverine. For the first hour, I found the deranged bloodshed both shocking and exciting; it made me feel like I “was” Logan, the grunting, killing-machine character from Marvel Comics’ X-Men universe. But as I became more expert, the cultural shell of the game boiled away.In a sort of staring-into-the-cascading-numbers-of-the-Matrix way, I found myself looking past the visible aspects of the game and savoring the underlying, invisible mechanics of play. I mapped out the ways that my “lunge” could connect together disparate parts of a battlefield. I experimented with different chained attacks, and mused over the weird millisecond latencies of the button combos. I was no longer thinking about — or even noticing — the blood and guts or the razor-sharp adamantium claws. The game became pure physics and algorithms: Vectors, speed and collision detection. The gore had become mostly irrelevant.But this leads us to the second, and even bigger, question: If the violence in most action games isn’t crucial to making them enjoyable, then why are so many action games so violent?I posed that to Przybylski and his collaborator Richard Ryan, a professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Rochester. Both are gamers, and they suspect that game developers are stuck in the “Hollywood model”: Designers simply mimic the games of last year.“When they look at a successful title from the past, they say ‘Let’s do that again, but turn it up,’” says Ryan. So the endless cycle of games based on brooding, bullet-spraying antiheroes goes on and on.