This, I like - Fullbright's post on Legitimizing Violence. A response to the violence-in-games issue which doesn't reduce to denial or hand-wringing.
I think his solution is a good heuristic. You could trim it further: he says 'an individual with a name and a face', and then is forced to add a caveat that names and faces aren't necessary. '...unless the victim is an individual' works fine for me. I'm not sure about 'legitimate', either. But I'm quibbling.
(My own ambivalent relationship with violence in games - I enjoy first-person shooters, but I always wince when I see the 'pedestrians killed' counter in GTA - is one of the reasons for Fallen London's different kind of death. The Game of Knife and Candle is cricket with cleavers, the Dangerous track has you 'die' semi-routinely, but the distinction of permanent death - or the leprous living-death of the tomb-colonies - can carry actual consequence.)
Specifics aside, I applaud his call for crunchy, measurable heuristics that we can use for discussion and design about what's responsible, what's interesting, what's consequential. We have been sitting around complaining about the state of the art and vaguely claiming that it'll be different in the future for a long time now. Games have specific problems here that other media don't.
Mamet said (I paraphrase) that the only real purpose of violence in drama is to illustrate consequence and reponsibility: therefore, drama where violence occurs without consequence is empty gratification. He draws a parallel with feel-good films which allow us to feel saintly by empathising with a dying innocent, and then reassure us in the last act with a magical cure or a heavenly light: no tragedy, just glurge.
Games are remarkably effective engines of gratification. And that's *fine*. Sometimes a game is just a game. Play can just be play. But if we want to do more than that, we need to have a mature conversation - one where we don't turn cartwheels every time another five-minute Flash art game comes along because it interrogates the form, where we don't give Bioshock a pass on the old ultra-violence because it takes a few pot-shots at Ayn Rand along the way. That means looking critically at games we like as well as games we don't. That means getting specific.
[munged from comments on Fullbright's blog]