Another 'Games are Evil' post but this one has a funny side

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I thought I'd stay away from this forum (too easy to get inflamed) but I had to share this with you. A UK MP has decided to jump on the games are evil bandwagon. To be fair to him he is specifically complaining about gratuatous violance and does include TV programmes along with games. He is also stressing the longer term affects of making violance acceptable rather than taking the 'it makes people killer' approach. Right, now I've got all my quantifying comments out of the way, he also said:

"I watch my kids constantly playing blood-spattered video games."

Laughed, I nearly had a hernia. So as a parent he has no responsability for the upbringing of his kids. It's all the fault of the games producers.

Anyway, the full article is here:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/2652747.stm

 

Wow, Slappy.

This is like, your first post since last January.

Anyways, yeah; alarmists dont arouse me. And don't get me wrong; there are some VERY hot alarmists.

But I just don't care for the lifestyle. God, I could make millions of dollars if I could just get rid of this nasty conscience I have. I think I can feel good old Natural Selection at work...

 

On a sidetrick to the topic;

Another 28 year old asian guy died in our Diablo II online community for too many hours straight gaming. I don't know the guy at all. But Does that make the game evil, when people die from it? It is so hard to get things perfect in Diablo, that one can play hundreds and hundreds of hours and still be an average punk. Isn't that an evil game? People die in the hunt for the ultimate weapons. So don't come and say games doesn't affect us at the lowest possible denominator; survival.

[ January 14, 2003, 14:29: Message edited by: Nobleman ]

 

While some games are evil, most of them just include choices that people make when they fear no judgement. Like revealing the true self. Or sometimes they run mad on killing frenzy out of pure escapism and/or frustration. Thus for me Quake is full of evil and satanism and BG2 isn't.

The worst sworn enemies of violence in games are the guys from TV. Actually they try to trun parents' attention from Japanese Mangas of constant walloping and American quasi-heroic serials of brain dispersing their children adore and drown in. Simply said, it's all about money. The only exception are mislead zealots, but well... the're very exceptional anyway.

 

I have some sympathy for the position of this MP, although I lack respect for a parenting style that allows children to engage in a pastime he considers immoral and dangerous.

I completely agree with the remarks from this column, "Too many computer games and television series are trivialising violence and making heartlessness acceptable" and "I look at the video games my kids play, I look at some of the movies they and their friends think are wonderful and I see no humanity at all, nothing that tries to highlight and underpin the finer virtues that are in people and society". I'd add books to the hit list too.

There are not enough efforts made to add moral lessons to children's entertainment. In fact, since that entertainment is usually directed at meeting the nastiest and bloodthirstiest tastes of children, instead of gently exposing them to more civilised and ethical heroes, probably we are engaging in the reverse of moral instruction - we are encouraging them to wallow in their basest instincts. I have been shocked silly by some of the things the kids I babysat were allowed to watch, read and play with.

I have heard the argument that says that children won't read/watch/play something that has a moral lesson. I reject it. Didn't we all grow up reading, and loving, CS Lewis, Tolkien, Madeleine L'Engel, Ursula Le Guin, Robert Heinlein, Edith Nesbit, Enid Blyton et al? Even the old-style Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys stories emphasised the importance of good moral choices and courageous, responsible behaviour, although I hear these have since been edited to compete with less educational entertainment. You might as well let kids watch bondage porn if you are going to say there is no point trying to expose them to wholesome influences and protect them from unwholesome ones. Kids are impressionable. Why let them become jaded to violence and immorality?

 

I'd like to shoot those people who say that video game violence affects people.

(that was a bad joke, just so you don't flame me.)

And isn't Carmageddon like, six years old? They have 2 sequels out now. Unless they just generalize. Honestly.

I saw one of those specials after Colombine, where they kept saying that the shooter played Quake and Doom a lot, but I noticed something. Every time they showed a screenshot from Doom, it had the same basic run. The player has the shotgun, and he's shooting at the zombie soldiers.

To those who don't play Doom, (angry parents included) this was a guy running round with a rifle blowing humans away. (They weren't traditional zombies in any sense, for those three people who haven't played Doom. I didn't even know 'til I read the official guide.) If that was the whole game, sure, I can understand why they'd be pissed. But they didn't show the parts where you shoot a plasma rifle at a floating, one-eyed, lightning-belching demon head. Or the parts where you fire the Big Fantastic Gun at a brain on mechanical spider legs. Or what about the bits where semi-invisible demons try to chew your legs off? Oh yeah, all teenagers are learning to kill people from that.

I have never seen a plasma rifle, a cacodemon, the Spider Mastermind, or the BFG 9000. Shooting blue energy at a big red floating head has no connection in my mind with stealing a gun and blowing my classmates away.

And, hey, if aliens from space or demons from hell DID invade the planet, wouldn't you feel safer knowing that the youth of the world have already been training for it their whole lives?

 

relax, as gamers, you and me and many others already knew that those who don't play games will never understand those who play games. The situation right now is, those who don't play video games when they are small are ruling countries and making laws. i assure you that someday in future, we will have a president or prime minister or chairman or sultan or raja or king or dictator who grew up playing Super Mario. Then by then those who are ruling the countries will understand what video games truly are.

 

Long live the Atari/N-8 bit generation.

It's a lot easier to blame the games than to blame the people, apparently. It's not like parents are RESPONSIBLE to monitor what their child plays or whether or not their child is developing aggressive tendencies, self-mutilating practices, or is becoming isolated from the rest of his peers because of video games. That would be absurd!

Amon-Ra

 

Happens more and more often that kids below any age limit existing for games play the most violent ones. Parental advisory label prevents the game from being sold to a minor only. It's exlusively due to computers that we now see twelve year olds discussing killing techniques, military tacticts, drug effects and so on, everything being taken from games and in some cases from webpages. The amount of violence and aggression accumulated within them is such that they react with anger and verbal brutality (and/or abuse) to anything distracting their attention or concentration, provided it's not a weaker creature like for example younger children, girls or kids wearing glasses. They follow the patterns from what they drown in in everyday life. Dressing like commando soldiers, (anti)terrorists etc, speaking like veterans, behaving in offensive manner. What's more, after such material they have not much respect for authorities, for elders, family, teachers, clergy and whomever fits in here. It's popular among them to disregard education and mental skills in favour of brute force or sneaky dilligence. This results in severe changes to their future prospects as well as their personalities. Parents usually don't react fearing the problem. Then they fear the child as (s)he grows...

I've seen many cases like above mentioned. The kids behave like after a large dose of caffein (a litre of coffee for instance) or even drugs. Their reaction to being deprived of the games or the time/opportunity to play them resembles cases of posession. Some of those are actually confirmed by RC exorcists.

In less severe cases the kids see too much of the dark side of life and humanity in too immature an age. A good deal of them has above average intelligence (guess who's not adult here if (s)he doesn't tell that in public), but they lack the experience acquired through age and normal, gradual, processes of maturation. Their characters are yet weak and not prepared to resist twisted evil they many a time cannot discern. Tried to explain to a twelve year old that (s)he's being indoctrinated into satanism 'just because' of pentagrams and mocked Crucifiction in Quake?

 

I'm bumping this thread because I see it as having an interesting relationship with the "Action without Consequence" thread. I was startled to see how many people here - pretty much everyone except Rallymama - chose an act of violence as the one thing they really wish they could get away with. I am certain that this does not reflect the way the average human being feels. Even in the Army, where I had close relationships with many people who had killed or were willing to do so, I have never encountered so many people in one place who actually wished to commit an act of violence.

So.

Are the people here at SP more bloodthirsty and violent than average because of the types of games they play, the books they read, the television they watch? If not, what's the answer? Where does this taste for destruction come from? Am I the only one here who sees a connection between the interest that brings this community together and the unusually high level of violent desires among the participants?

PS. Sorry, dear Slappy, for opposing you in this thread. I won't make a habit of it.

 

Sprite, did you see the recent polls on Age and Gender? The results showed that the voting population was heavily male and largely young (late teens to early 20s). Assuming that the respondents to those pools and the respondents to the "Without Consequence" are largely the same group of people, what part do you think testosterone has to play?

Guys, I don't mean to sound patronizing and I certainly don't want to degenerate into any gender bashing. My curiosity is genuine and purely clinical.

[ February 04, 2003, 18:19: Message edited by: Rallymama ]

 

Just a wry note here: as a male aged 22, my testosterone does not make me want to kill people...

 

Male, age 18, I don't want to kill people, but I enjoy playing games where I can freely do so without the consequences. They are a rather entertaining form of competition. Nobody, after fragging [killing] someone in a game like Unreal Tournament 2003 says: "HAHAHA I JUST KILLED YOU, YOU DUMB$#@*!". They might stoop to, "Haha, you suck!" or the like, but noone really playing the game is feeling like they are KILLing eachother. If they did, it would be quite frustrating, because both teams keep respawning and coming back to life.

That being said, I can say that having grown up in this generation, I am far more desensitized to violence than other generations. I find myself carrying a flipknife everywhere I go [4 1/2 inch, pocket-legal]. I am convinced I would use it if I had to. I could just as easily carry pepper spray or something of that sort, but my manliness would be offended by such. Not to mention, my knife has utility, to open things, carve grapefruits, etc. You try opening a box with pepper spray!

Also I find I am quite gray to violence in general. When I arrived at school on September 11th, the first thing to run through my mind when I'd learned what was going on is, well, there's no reason for them to bomb any place near me, so, oh well. It's not like I can do anything about it. I'm just a punk kid in high school. I didn't mourn, but at the same time I didn't wish vengeance on others.

You see, the term "desensitized" is misleading, and often interpretted simply as "removing the threshold that keeps people in fear of violence, so they are more likely to do violent things". In truth, for me and for many other desensitized people I know, it does remove that threshold, which might make it easier for us to do violent things, but we don't because violence to us has no meaning. I don't want to kill someone, because I'd get nothing out of it, except maybe arrested or killed myself.

Desensitized does not mean sadistic or animalistic. It means violence doesn't register in our brains as good or bad. Just, violent, destructive, and often illogical because of the repercussions to ourselves. But not morally wrong. Just my $(2/100).

 

I play a lot of games.

And I would really like to kill a person, if for no reason other than the sheer hell of it.

Satanism and Evil...nice...

 

I'd say that my gaming makes it LESS likely for me to go out and kill someone. Of course, I'm nearly 30 and have my head screwed on straight -- maybe the ganes would have an influence on a young teen without much life experience. That's what PARENTS are for, to control and moderate their children's activities, not just sit back with their hands on their mouths and say "wow, I don't like what my kid's doing -- I think I'll write a letter to a software company instead of actually TALKING to my kid and setting some BOUNDARIES!"

You know, when the printing press really started churning out books, there were tons of articles about the fact that the preponderance of "unwholesome" books would lead to a decay of society as we know it. It was a stupid argument then, and it's a stupid argument now when applied to more modern media.

 

But you do have to admit that there are the occassions were violence on television and video games can influence someone to turn violent. There is a case here in California, Los Angeles I think, where two kids cut off their mom's head and wrists and threw her some 90 feet into a ravine. They freely admitted they got the idea from watching the sopranos.

 

Elios, I'm right there with you -- that's why we have rating systems. But for those boys to claim that watching the Sopranos removed all rational, moral thought from their minds, making THEM completely irresponsible for their vile actions. THAT sort of talk torques me right off.

So, to sum up, no, they shouldn't have been able to have seen it, but having seen it, they should not get away with murder and mutilation just because they saw it. Individual responsibilty still applies.