SAN DIEGO — For one day, at least, major video game developers were finally willing to talk video game violence.

At Sony's PlayStation Gamers Day, the usual tactics of silence, defensiveness or above-it-all cool that game companies enlist in the face of attacks on violent video games were replaced with two less common approaches: satire and gory but thoughtful detail.

The first sign of something different came Wednesday morning in a cafeteria-size room at Sony's San Diego studio that had been converted into an exhibition hall for the year's remaining PS2, PS3 and PSP games. The morning began with a stage presentation of PSP and downloadable PS3. During the presentation, Sony producer Travis Williams got onstage and told the couple of hundred reporters on hand that the company was making a new game, "Pain," based on the idea that many people enjoy watching videos of stunts gone wrong. He cued a trailer.

With that began "Sony Computer Entertainment presents moral panic: The false perception that some cultural behavior poses a menace to society." The scene was an empty city street. A man, and then a monkey, dropped into it from the sky and bounced a couple of times, knocking open a manhole lid. Quotes appeared from fake publications like The Neocon Weekly ("an aberration on the moral fabric of society"). Just when it could have seemed that all the verbiage was referencing the made-up "Pain" sport of flinging people into billboards using a giant slingshot, one more quote appeared from "Suzy Homemaker" that read, "My kids are NOT playing this!"

Sony's "Pain" trailer was making fun of people who get upset about violent video games. Now that's something new.

In previous years, when video games both violent and tame were showcased at the Electronics Entertainment Expo, video game makers did not go out of their way to refer to controversy. "Gears of War" made a mark at E3 last year not by nodding to opponents of violent video games, but with the demonstration of its gunplay and close-quarters chain saw vs. flesh combat.

Offstage at Sony's San Diego event there were other indications of a change in tone. Take the comments from two designers heading the new "God of War: Chains of Olympus" game for the PSP. The hero of the "God of War" series is Kratos, an exceptionally violent antihero who spent some of his last game — March's top-selling, M-rated "God of War II" — killing heroes from Greek mythology. He takes out the bad guys too, but he's no class act. Under the player's control he has to find a few scrawny translators and smash their heads into ancient books, using their sacrificed blood to progress through the adventure.

"Chains of Olympus" creative director Cory Barlog knows some people are put off by what Kratos' adventures ask of them. Standing in front of a big-screen TV playing the game, he argued that the discomfort some players feel is intentional. "During [the ancient Greek] wars, people weren't hugging — it was very, very brutal," he said. "We really wanted to stick to that mentality, creating situations within the game to force the player to choose, and kind of morally have to be, what Kratos is like. In 'God of War I' you have to burn the guy in order to progress forward. That was something that some people had a problem with. But it's [a matter of] having to live as the [character]. It's not a [role-playing game], but it's still forcing you to choose, in gameplay, to actually be like this character.

"It's a very delicate line that you walk," Barlog continued. "It's very easy to walk too far over it. The main thing about this character is he's not Superman. He's not Spider-Man. He's not any of these heroes that are like, 'Hey, I'm saving the day.' He's a guy who's out for himself. But in doing things, he actually does help other people."

Ru Weerasuriya, whose Ready at Dawn Studios is handling most of the creative duties on "Chains," agreed that the line is sometimes hard to see. "You go as far as you can," he said, chewing a piece of gum. "Sometimes you have to push it far to then bring it back a little."

To illustrate this, Barlog gave a vivid example from the creation of "God of War II." He said one of the game's animators was working on ways for Kratos to kill the Cyclops. The killing move was supposed to involve pulling its eye out, but the animator went further, having Kratos stuff the eye in the Cyclops' mouth and then step on the head to trigger the requisite gore. "That was a perfect example of going too far," Barlog said. "You pop the eye out, and that's a visceral, brutal, exciting movement. And then when you go to the popping the eye in the mouth sort of stuff, it gets maybe to someplace 'Devil May Cry' would go, but not necessarily where we're going to go."

Kratos is a bad man. Firing people out of a giant slingshot is cartoonish but is still, undeniably, an activity meant to amuse via violence. These are the kind of truths that critics of violent video games would likely point out. For one day in San Diego, the people behind the games beat some of their critics to the punch.