[Barrin92]

It's something Roger Scruton writes about in Modern Culture. He pointed out that one of the distinguishing features of modern entertainment media is the collapse of persons into bodies, subjects into objects, fantasy rather than imagination.

In the imagination that art produces, and I agree with the article that Shadow of the Colossus deserves that label, enemies are not bodies, they're persons. In great art they can be more real than reality. In fantasies bodies are consumed for gratification and stimulation, they have no interior life.

It's also the difference between pornography and erotic art. In the former the people depicted become objects not even bodies but body parts, they're profaned. The only person that matters is the consumer. In erotic art it's the opposite, the eroticism happens between the subjects of the art, the viewer is placed at a distance.

There's a lot of games that have wrestled with this in regards to violence. Kojima back in the day already in Metal Gear Solid 2 but he made it an explicit design choice in Death Stranding (less so in the second than the first one, sadly I suspect for commercial reasons) in a way that reminded me a lot of SotC.