This post contains a mild and anonymized spoiler for “Rosewater”.

I had a great time playing Control on Saturday night. On learning from friends that a sequel was recently announced, I resolved to give the game one more try, picking up where I last left off several months ago. Control has long floated near the top of my list of single-player, narrative-rich video games that I’ve long felt pretty bad about not finishing, alongside Elden Ring, Outer Wilds, and many other titles that are near-universally beloved by both trusted friends and the world’s professional game critics. So back into the Oldest House I dove, breathing in the game’s richly strange atmosphere, re-learning how combat works—a violent ballet of unlimited-ammo gunplay leavened with psychokinetic brutality—and completing a main-quest mission. I went to bed feeling a little proud of unsticking myself with this celebrated and significant work of modern media.

My partner, meanwhile, asked me if I was OK. She had heard me muttering out loud the whole time that I played, and detected something dark in my mood. I don’t remember the muttering, but that fact alone isn’t so strange for me. I mutter and grumble in some situations when I’m deeply focused on a stressful task, and I’m not always consciously aware of it. I was grateful for the notice, but assured her that the game didn’t make me feel negative—which was, as far as I knew at the time, completely true.

I picked the game up again hungrily after breakfast the next day, eager to keep working my way through the main story. And, about 24 hours after first returning to Control, I concluded that I need to put it down again, probably permanently. And then I should strike every other game off my to-play list whose primary activities include gunning down hundreds-if-not-thousands of people while completing the core narrative. (Sorry, Red Dead Redemption 2.)

Over the course of the day, you see, my mood sank, and sank. During this time I’d play Control for a while, take a break to do something else while thinking about Control, then return to Control. I was not cognizant of feeling slightly worse after every session with it, despite my steady progress through the story. By the time evening came, I was on-edge and irritable, shaking with undirected anger which seemed to come from no clear source. But you, like my partner, have figured out the source, yes? I came to the realization myself after a quite ordinary texted request from my brother made me growl with rage, as if another goddamned annoyance had been added to the top of a smoldering heap of negativity—of whose presence I only at that moment became aware.

And I knew immediately that it was Control that had buried my heart under a mound of squirming negative input. It tossed on a shovelful of loose dirt every time I gunned down yet another roomful of realistic-looking human beings against a driving drum-and-synth beat, blasting each body until it went down and stopped twitching, all so that I could resume my explorations of the game’s beautiful and mysterious setting. I was so into the wonderful horror-fiction narrative, whose bizarre truths are revealed bit by bit in achingly expert small doses, that I totally disregarded the ever-growing body count for which I was responsible—or what gradual cumulative effect this disregard had on my mood, as I strained to pay as little attention as I could to it.

This is the third time I’ve recognized something like this happening to me, with very similar stimuli, within the last couple of years.

It first happened early last year when my partner and I both became smitten with the gloriously violent multiplayer-cooperative chaos of Helldivers 2. I never took the game quite seriously, playing only easier missions and having a good time accidentally yet repeatedly calling down airstrikes upon my friends and loved ones, and failing upward to a mission-completed screen anyway. But even though the targets are pure fantasy—goopy alien “bugs” and gleaming-metal murderbots—the violence is depicted with cinematic realism as your heavily armed squad methodically seeks and destroys its objectives. And soon I noticed that when I took walks in the real world I started to have visions of all the trees around me burning, all the buildings behind them vanishing in thunderous explosions. This unsettled me. I also noticed that these intrusive visions stopped when I stepped back from the game. I’ve never returned to it.

Months later, some friends invited me to play Valve’s hyper-violent Left 4 Dead 2 with them online. Fifteen years ago, I loved this game. Last year, after a couple of rounds, it left me sick and seething. Something within me had changed in the intervening years. This time, when I stepped away from the game, I found myself experiencing something like the Tetris effect—except instead of seeing falling blocks when I shut my eyes, I saw living flesh being torn apart by gunfire that roared from my own hands, reducing human bodies to quivering meat. And then my bullets carved into the bodies behind them as the first rank fell, and so on after that, because that’s how you play these games; my brain was just idly shadow-boxing the literal experience of play, in order to help me get better at it. And I hated it. I hated these thoughts that put me into the shoes of a mass killer, even a pretend one, drifting up unbidden. I told my friends I couldn’t play Left 4 Dead 2 any more.

Both of these incidents took place over a year ago, so it did take me a day or two to figure out what Control was doing to me. But the truth of it shone like one of the game’s own eldritch beacons as soon as I let myself see it. And… that sucks! I want to keep playing Control! My friends aren’t wrong: it’s a gorgeous video game! But three data points make a triangle, and I simply can’t disregard what it points at any longer, not if I hold my own mental health in any regard.

In this case, I didn’t experience any literal visions. I just felt soul-sick, and got a little bit sicker every time I sighted down my barrel at a security guard’s chest, and then didn’t even bother to watch them flinch and fall as I aimed at the next target. And as soon as my nonsensical reaction to my brother’s text shocked me into considering the possibility, I knew for a fact that letting myself become repetition-numb to innumerable and realistically portrayed acts of mass violence through firearms—no matter how fantastic the setting—just makes me feel awful. Maybe that wasn’t always true for me, but it is now, and I don’t expect it’ll ever change.

An interesting coincidence lets me offer a clarifying counterpoint from Rosewater, another narrative-driven game I happen to be playing through. In the morning of the very same day as my unwelcome Control epiphany, I played through a scene in Rosewater where I tried to talk an ally out of shooting someone else; my companion had the man cornered, and was burning with righteous rage, even as the man begged for mercy. And… it didn’t work! And it felt thrilling and terrible, this one sudden death. My main character became deeply troubled by this turn, making her doubt how she could trust or even understand her companion. The killer picks up on this and also becomes troubled, even though their reasons for the murder remain clear in their heart. I fully expect the single shocking crack of that pistol to continue having reverberations though the story, and my interest and attention is all the more cemented to it from this one act of violence, placed into the narrative with care and intent.

I also appreciate the entirely opposite approach to gun violence employed by Deep Rock Galactic, a cooperative shooter I’ve been enjoying on and off for over a year. The deeply disturbed space-dwarf player characters of Deep Rock are also focused on maintaining their absurd weaponry, with which they defend their mining operations from hordes of enormous and ever-hungry alien insects. But apart from the shooting feeling secondary to the game’s primarily industrial mission goals, the dwarves revel when a fight breaks out, roaring and laughing as bullets smash into chitin, snarling quips like “Die like your mother did!” or “Go lie down forever!” on particularly gruesome hits. Then they all go back to their space rig and spend their wages getting blackout drunk. We are meant to understand that these dwarves are, by modern human standards, not OK. Counterintuitively, game itself overtly acknowledging the absurdity of the violence does something to vent potential trauma before it can accumulate, for me. This game has never given me unwanted visions.

Contrast these games with Control, which seems wholly uninterested in exploring how the player character is psychologically affected by her deputization from civilian life in order to mow down dozens of “corrupted” federal employees per hour, despite suggesting that she does have an active inner life by giving her frequent internal monologues. If the game dropped clues acknowledging her apparent callousness at the relentless bloodshed as another element of the reality-warping setting, then I didn’t catch them within the first dozen hours of play.

Because Control spends no effort on having its characters process the constant violence all around them, the game shunts the task entirely over to me, the only real witness to it all. And I can process it, a little, like I did on Saturday night, the way a light drink in the evening can make you feel good with no hangover. But when I play for hours more, the poisons do start to build up.

I’m not asking for every video game with guns in it to treat them like either Rosewater or Deep Rock do. I’m not asking for any game to change at all. There’s lots of games out there! My list still has so many worthy titles on it even after my new qualifier crosses a few out. I just need to accept, for myself, a disconnect that has developed between my mental stability and games that treat gun violence as breezily as… well, Space Invaders, or the like. Today’s video games still want to include engaging experiences about zapping screenfuls of baddies, and I’m not one to say they should stop. But the expectations for what this experience looks and feels like have changed a lot, and I’ve changed too.

I share all of this because I’m not sure I’ve encountered anyone else with a long history of playing and thinking about video games finding themselves no longer able to play an entire class of games due to its thematic or experiential content. A few months ago I anticipated a future when the oldest lifelong gamers start finding themselves aging out of enjoying the medium due to simple senescence. Maybe my observation in myself today is related to that, somehow. I’m not “worse” at games, compared to how I played them when I was younger. But I am not the same person I was back then, either. Maybe my tolerance for this particular toxin isn’t as high as it used it be. Whatever the reason, I just… I just don’t want to pull the trigger so much, any more.