Personally, I’m not a huge fan of violence. I repeatedly quit football and wrestling in high school because I couldn’t find the necessary aggression within me, and I much preferred cross-country — a gentle yet competitive sport full of exploration and focus on the self.

But there are some who are just the opposite. They revel in the current trendy sport of choice: mixed-martial arts fighting. Words like “fear,” “danger,” “pain” and “courage” continually raise their heads in justification of this hobby, but I think proponents often miss a few points by not distinguishing between several key ideas, those being conflict, aggression, violence and choice.

Too often, people see these terms as synonyms. Thing is, they’re not. Let’s go through the list one-by-one, shall we?

Now, as anyone schooled in rudimentary literary education can tell you, conflict is all but required in books, plays, film, even songs; and yes, video games, which is what I’ll be focusing on. What is not required, is aggression and violence.

Conflict is quite simply an opposition, a state of incompatibility. When we’re presented with the problem that our princess is in another castle, we have conflict. We also have conflict when rogue agents of FoxHound seek to activate a walking death-mobile, and when we are speeding down a winding mountain road in a desperate grab for first place.

Aggression is motivation; aggression is our purpose in pursuing the goals that have created conflict. In the above examples, our goals are to rescue the princess, to stop an act of terrorism and to win a race.

These goals are incompatible with the game parameters, which are inherently designed to obstruct our paths.

Similarly, an MMA fight is little but a constructed set of rules and parameters: Make your opponent submit through the use of combat.

That’s where my argument differs from the advocates of MMA fighting: the subject of violence.

Although I’ve seen the word violence used to describe a great many things, let’s limit it, for sake of argument, to intentionally bringing physical harm to either the environment or the beings that inhabit it.

MMA constricts the participant to violence. There’s no way to win but to, as my wrestling coach used to say, “bring on the pain train.”

Likewise, there are plenty of games where at least some violence is a necessity. You can’t win a Slayer match if you don’t kill the enemy. You can’t save Princess Peach without dumping Bowser into the lava – or spitting fireballs. You can’t stop Metal Gear without destroying it.

What is arguably better about video games is that, particularly in this generation, designs are branching out. In “Metal Gear Solid 4,” you couldn’t earn an extremely large share of the trophies if you killed any enemies. In “Mass Effect,” possessing the necessary Paragon or Renegade points often allows players to navigate otherwise-deadly territory.

Choice is our greatest asset, both inside and outside of video games.

We can choose what our goals are, how to pursue them and what actions we will and won’t take in accordance with our own morality.

MMA fighters choose to scrape their flesh and bruise their knuckles. They don’t have to.

Similarly, we can choose to remain in the realm of shooters and hack-n-slash titles. But we don’t have to. We can demand and support games and developers that offer us exactly what we possess in real-life: choice.

This column appears courtesy of Sophie Prell’s blog, “G3 – A Girl’s Guide to Gaming.”