I do not have a problem with violent video games, but I do find the morality of certain seemingly-innocent games fascinating. I often like to spend my time playing a space simulator called 'Elite: Dangerous', a virtual-reality compatible game in which pilots can choose a career as a pirate, bounty hunter, or a trader in what is described as a 'cutthroat galaxy'. By comparison to a game like 'Gears of War,' on-screen violence is fairly minimal. I usually play as a bounty hunter, and when killing certain computer-controlled pilots (by destroying their vessels), I will earn in-game money. However, sometimes when I destroy these pilots' ships to a certain degree, they will beg for mercy over the ship's intercom. Violence in video games is nothing new, but I often find this begging, and my own personal reluctance to forfeit my reward, quite disturbing. After all, these pilots often tend to have tiny bounties for minor infractions, but the game does not tell me this until after I unnecessarily kill them. In an otherwise accessible game, this is a curious case, and I sometimes wonder if the developers intended players to feel guilt about their ruthless money-making tactics. I decided to create a shoot designed to evoke this, using papercraft models of the in-game ships I found online. In the shoot, I included typed snippets of intercom chatter from the game, which appears as text in the player's ship menu.

I decided to use a chronological narrative structure when creating this shoot; the images tell a story in order of my first ever encounter with an enemy in 'Elite: Dangerous.'