Also, the Child’s Play charity was started partially in response to these sorts of arguments. So you can at least say, “Yeah, some people who play video games are nutjobs, but most of us just donate millions of dollars every year to sick kids.”
My issue is the amount of violence shown on TV. I remember when my boys were really little and we would be watching baseball and a commercial would come on for a extremely violent TV show or movie. They would show the guy with the gun and a viscous look on his face gunning down some guy. I remember I used to scramble for the remote or distract my kids so they didn’t see it. Or a newscast would come on giving you the gruesome highlights of the violent ‘story at 11’. It’s just really hard to not be exposed to a high level of violence at an early age.
Now my kids are fine and probably most kids are as well, but who knows what effect this has on the Lanzas and Holmes of the world.
Like movies and books, videogames lets us experience the world from other eyes, and do and feel things we would have never done. This is a extraordinary vehicle for empathy. What games don’t do for you, is to tell you what feel about stuff. So while videogames can place you in the room with hitler, don’t tell you what to feel about hitler. This is both good and bad, but consider the other option: a movie about hitler can make you feel like he was a misunderstand cool guy.
Perhaps videogames are too young a craft, and we have still to develop the power of movies and books to instill a feel in the reader/viewer. Very rarelly you feel what you are doing in a videogame. Wen you are murdering people in a COD game, you just are scoring points or tryiing to have streak of kills. But you still mock the dead guy, because he can see it (or read it) and nothing has lasting negative effect. Videogames share much more with sports than with movies or books. Chess is not practice to killing kings. I suppose videogames get this trait from games.
The idea that a game like COD is violent is a misunderstood of this, and I feel is because people don’t really understand games. Gamers are show in fiction gesticulating and jumping in a place, wen in reality gamers shit in a place with a pretty languish face and the eyes fixed on the screen. A objective observer will conclude that are working on some boring and sad work. Only wen something awesome or infuriating happens, the gamer park the controller and celebrate or rage.
The cure about saying stupid things about violence and games, is to become a gamer yourself, I think.
You can’t make a violent person more violent with videogames, or make a pacifical person violent. If you ever try to produce violent people with videogames all you will achieve is a bunch of people that will love to sit for hours in a comfortable sofa, burning not enough calories/hour.
Society is always looking for easy fixes to complex problems. Ban guns! Ban violent video games! Protect the children! But it’s never that simple. In a nation of 300 million, of course there are some vulnerable game players that are pushed over the edge by the experience. Who can say, however, that films, television, or the local news (“If it bleeds, it leads!”) wouldn’t have had the same effect if games weren’t available?
That’s why I find both the defenders and attackers of video games to be extremists. The attackers think our problems will magically vanish if they succeed in their crusade to shut down one small contributing component to an enormous problem, and the defenders think the hobby is blameless. Neither is correct, and some more stringent controls tied to age ratings would doubtless help a subset of mental health cases while being far from sufficient on a larger scale.
i read this, and i can’t help but think the real issue is menatal health. We need to create a societial response to violent/psychotic mental issues. Or those easily suceptable to influence. If a person has this vulnerability they need to be restricted from access to volient content, AND we need a more robost mental health solution to give these people help. I’m a dad, worked in a group home 20 years ago, but I have no idea where to turn if one of my kids turned psychotic. Well no where i would be confident i could help them/protect the rest of my family.
Solutions may exist, my but having them more readily avialable, AND educating parents on those resources seems to be the real gap right now. What are the warning signs? How you should handle it for your family if you see them? All these should be more widely known.
Well it depends doesn’t it? As Toms front piece article mentions, EA having direct links to Arms companies and promoting business with them (to kids playing games!) is in many peoples eyes stepping way over the line of where ‘entertainment’ and taste/moral concern should meet.
This isn’t a anti-game rant or concern, this is an anti-bad thing concern. It’s neither good for games or kids.
Why should a game publisher get to behave or promote the same kind of business an actual arms seller does and not get called out on it? Have you met arms sellers before (i have), do you know exactly what it is they do in the world and where there concerns lay?
I’ll give you a clue, it has nothing to do with being concerned about innocent people getting killed (be it in a school in america or a school in the middle east). It’s all about the profit they can make from making sure these things happen more often. EA became an arms seller, they deserve to get a kicking for it (and the idiot behind the ‘idea’ fired).
I’m sorry but as a gamer, i’d be with your uncle on this particular debate. There is far too much complacency amongst gamers and game publishers and devs about all this. It’s not just a game, not all the time and not at the level of graphical and audio fidelity we can simulate things, and certainly not at the business end when games fund actual weapon manufacturers, or get funded by them to carry on making ultra-violence ‘games’ for all our kids to grow up playing.
That’s all i’ll say on the subject here (as i have the other threads also for the finer details) and give those links if you want to see both sides: