| Title | Medal of Honor: Warfighter's awkward partnerships with reality |
| Author | Tom Chick |
| Posted in | Games |
| When | December 27, 2012 |
EA's Medal of Honor: Warfighter is a game that's gotten more attention for its attempts to get attention than for the game itself. Which is hardly surprising. The game itself is an absolute by-the-numbers snoozefest of epically common proportions..
Read the full articleWhile I tend to be a pragmatist when it comes to gun control*, i.e. banning guns is a political impossibility in the US and probably would not do much to curb shootings in any case with all the guns out there already, I do agree that EA is being irresponsible with this partnership.
Video games are primarily escapes from reality, a way to forget the world by doing amazing, dangerous, and sometimes illegal things. If your game is Cooking Mama and you want to do a tie in frying pan, OK, go for it, but when your game is all about killing people and then you want to go and sell your audience the real life tools to kill people I think you have crossed an ethical line there.
The real problem is that by their very nature corporations do not take ethics and values into account when they make these decisions. The employees and officers have very, very limited liability for the actions of the corporation. The officer's mandate is to make money for the shareholders, to the point that if they are lax in that cause they face the very real threat of losing their jobs. So they make decisions that bring in the most profit per share, regardless of ethical or legal considerations. There are examples up and down the fortune 500 list with companies such as GE, Sears, Samsung, Tyson, BP, and more being convicted of felony crimes in the US. If the potential fine is less than the profit to be made from acting illegally then much more often than not a corporation will act illegally or unethically. With EA having been delisted from the NASDAQ-100 they are certainly not going to be giving up any sources of income like their partnership with gun manufacturers.
*To be clear I only support limited forms of gun control, i.e. limits on magazine capacity, large caliber weapons, automatic and select fire rifles, heavy weapons, etc.I do not own any firearms.
Your boring
The beauty of the Internet.
What about your boring? Is it smooth or rifled? We need to know these things!
Don't forget the recent Zero Dark Thirty Osama Bin Laden map pack for Warfighter.
Whoa, really? I thought the game avoided any connection to the bin Laden mission. Now there's a map pack? Ugh, please don't tell me you can now deathmatch on a map of the Abottabad compound.
I think this is going to change in the future, Mr. Gaffer. Gun manufacturers are coming under scrutiny more widely these days, and not just by people like Rosie O'Donnell. As I was reading up on this stuff about EA, I discovered a recent split between Bank of America and one of the EA partners, and an official from the group -- I think it was the guys who make the sniper rifle -- claimed it was because BoA didn't want to do business with a gun manufacturer. Of course, BoA still does business with Bushmasters, so I'm not sure that holds water.
But I'd love to see gun manufacturers treated even more circumspectly than alcohol companies and cigarette brands. As the debate about gun control is less driven by white right-wing politicians and their constituents, we'll see the public perception and the business relationships shift over time. As far as I'm concerned, it can't happen soon enough.
So it turns out you don't actually play in bin Laden's compound in the Zero Dark Thirty DLC. Instead you play in "an area of Pakistan thought for a time to be one of Bin Laden’s hideouts".
Gun manufacturers are coming under scrutiny because a bunch of children just got shot. If there is one thing that motivates Americans, and people the world over, it is threats to children.
You probably have a more optimistic outlook on this than I do but I strongly believe what we MIGHT see is congress passing a new version of the assault weapons ban that expired in 2004. To get it past the house it will need a sunset clause as well, so again you end up with a temporary bill. As the terrible shooting that happened in Newton fades into memory I think everything, for better or worse, will be back to business as usual.
If we are really serious about reducing mass shootings though we should be talking about mental health in this country. But America doesn't like to talk about mental health services nor access to mental health services. Even people with good insurance don't always have good access to these services. When I had one of Kaiser's better plans the best you could do with mental health visits was once every three weeks. Since it has been in the news recently I will visit an older mass shooting, one that happened in 1966, Charles Whitman killed 14 people and wounded 32 others. He was the product of an abusive home, abused amphetamines, and had a tumor in his brain. If you read his notes he left behind it seems the tumor may have been affecting his mental health and contributed to his actions. So many of us ignore completely our mental health to our own detriment in this country, when it is just as important to living a fulfilled and contented life as our physical health.
So basically they are letting you deathmatch in Osama's hideout while not really letting you deathmatch in Osama's hideout?
Thing is, the US ranks pretty well when it comes to the mentally ill, and even if you did make it a prestige project, you still wouldn't be able to reach everybody. A common element of mental illness is refusing treatment, and there's really no scale to suggest when forceful treatment is appropriate or not.
On the other hand, a reform of gun laws is something that does apply to everyone, and while some argue that people with guns are too dangerous to legislate and enforce against, I'd say that argument makes legislating against them absolutely critical.
Australia did something similar in 1996, with almost immediate results. The fact that guns are exciting or make half of a country feel safer shouldn't serve to make them an imperative for an entire society. Feeling safe and being safe are two very different things.
Mental health services are something neglected the world over, so comparing the US to the world is not going to tell us how good of a job we are doing making services available. I would also be curious if you can cite any data to back up that claim, not that I disbelieve it.
The refusal of treatment is very well defined legally and while some mental health professionals would like to expand the scenarios for forced treatment I think most of America is happy with the rules as they now stand. That being said there are lots of people who would likely accept and even welcome treatment who either can't get it, can't afford it, or feel stigmatized admitting to mental health issues.
When it comes to guns the reality is that there is a very limited amount of regulation that is feasible. The courts have largely ruled on what regulations are constitutional and which are not, the second amendment is not going to get repealed in our lifetime, and so at most we will get something like the assault weapons ban of 1994. That is IF the current administration has the political captial to get it through and I really doubt that.
So sure, talk about gun control, campaign for new legislation, campaign even for a repeal of the second amendment. Maybe you can change the political reality when it comes to gun control in this country. But if you are going to rely on the passage of another assault weapons ban to cure mass shootings you are deceiving yourself.
It's not about "curing" mass shootings, they're just the symbol of the gun problem. Whether you're preventing mass slaughter, homicide, suicide or accidental death, those people will still be alive instead of not.
No matter how hard people try not to hear it, the data doesn't lie. It's not like the rest of the world is more mentally balanced, or less exposed to violent media. They just have fewer guns.
That is great but as I have said its not going to happen here. So we better start focusing on things that will.
Personally I don't believe in politics as a zero sum game. Pretending to treat the symptoms so people forget about the cause is a cheap trick, not real help.
I paused for a second when I read your comment because it didn't make sense to me. Then I realized we have such completely different views on the subject that your comment wouldn't make sense to me.
"Pretending to the treat the symptoms" is exactly what I believe the current push for another assault weapons ban is. Please tell me what you think this will accomplish in regards to gun violence in this country? Keep in mind that from 1994 to 2004 we had an assault weapons ban in place. Many mass shootings happened during that period. The legislation being talked about today is basically the same thing as the 1994 bill. So if it manages to pass everyone gets to pat themselves on the back and when their seat comes up for reelection say "look what I did to reduce gun violence" when they didn't do anything that will reduce gun violence. It is treating the symptoms, i.e. method of killing, rather than the cause, i.e. someone deciding to kill people.
I am not necessarily against gun control btw. I don't own guns, I don't plan to own a gun, I don't belong to the NRA. I just believe this is an effort that will make some people feel safer while not actually making anyone safer at all.
When I hear someone say "No matter how hard people try not to hear it" I understand that the person speaking believes their views to be right and other's views to be wrong.
Preventing private citizens from owning guns would probably very likely reduce the number of homicides and accidental deaths, perhaps even the number of suicides.
But suicides would still happen. Accidental deaths would still happen, and murders would still happen. As a country we could ban the use of automobiles and save more lives every year than we lose as result of guns. I tend to want less government regulation of my life as a private citizen than more. I'm not a Ron Paul supporter, I support socialized medicine, etc., so don't think you can lump me in with a bunch of wingnuts, but when it comes to this kind of stuff, private ownership of guns, I do not think the pros outweigh the reduction in liberty.
I thin it's somewhat funny that this politically charged post has < 20 comments, when the Halo 4 review has several hundred, or whatever it's at now.
Maybe the old adage about what not to discuss at cocktail parties should be modified to include console exclusives.
That's just as careless a disregard for variables as pointing out that most of those school shootings featured lawfully purchased submachineguns, or assault rifles.
It's arguably a bit more complex than that, and likely knowing a thing or two about guns, you'd know that the original assault rifle ban was woefully under equipped to actually keep those weapons off the street.
I'd assume the NRA crowd were mortified until they actually read the text. All the manufacturers had to do was slightly modify their products, and they were back on the street. I'm in favor of a measure that actually gets rid of those guns, not one that simply allows them to tweak the design and re-designate them as hunting rifles in the eyes of the government.