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Soldier Of Fortune: Must Be 18 To Play
Here's the line that grabbed my attention:
Soldier of Fortune allows users to assume the identity of John Mullins, an anti-terrorist mercenary, who kills and maims animals and humans during a series of armed missions.
"Depending on which weapon is used, the participant can enact gory violence that results in the horror of evisceration, decapitation, dismemberment and victims burning to death," said a report from Mary-Louise McCausland, B.C.'s director of film classification.
Here's how I feel about people who complain that animals get killed and maimed in video games.
For relaxation and burning off some stress, I enjoy fighting some bots in QuakeIII or some human beings in MythII. I've never played "Soldier of Fortune," but the screenshots are roughly as bloody as Q3A's giblets of flesh when a rocket hits a dead body. Or Myth's (smaller, but painfully realistic) arcs of bleeding limbs that bounce around after an explosion, leaking red into the ground.
Myth's "WW2" plugin is quite good. It's fun to throw a grenade into a knot of unsuspecting enemy soldiers. That pretty much covers "evisceration," "decapitation," and "dismemberment" (distinctions without a difference, since the bloody body parts all start to look the same after a while). As far as "victims burning to death," the new plugin allows four or more flamethrower units on some maps.
I also work with a local animal rescue organization. Every week at shelters across the country, dogs, cats, rabbits, and other nonhuman animals are being put to death because nobody will take them. We try to take in a few animals, those we can find room for, to give them a chance at life that lasts longer than seven days. And we help educate adopters, to give the animals their best chance in their new home.
Also, I'm a vegetarian (vegan, actually). Why? Because in comparison to the quick, clean death of the shelter, most animals' encounter with humans is bloody and violent.
Every day, we slaughter and eat tens of thousands of cows, gentle animals. Every day, a million pounds of veal - or, let's call it what it is, baby cow. Sixteen billion pounds of pig every year (divide, please, by the edible meat per pig).
I'm sure I don't need to describe the conditions under which these animals live and die. Everyone knows about factory farms already. Most of us simply try not to think about it. When I hear about someone abusing a dog, or a horse, or some other "popular" animal, I can't help but think about the pig, or the cow, that at that exact second has finally given up its life, and whose muscles will be on a plate later this week.
And when I hear about lawmakers wanting to stop digital violence, I think about the one in my area who called about an accidental litter of babies from their unspayed and unneutered pets. In poor health, they didn't live long; but even if they had, unwanted animals rarely get much of a life. Every new litter either ends up in the shelter, or crowds some other animals in to be killed.
Is violence against animals more acceptable because it's done at arm's length, in gas chambers - or perhaps because they starve to death before their eyes open? Is that same legislator going to vote, in his career, to stamp out cartoon violence, or computer violence, or some other kind of unreal images?
The "animals" that you can "kill and maim" in Soldier of Fortune are dogs and cows. One area that the player fights in is a meat-packing plant, and there are a few cows in a pasture nearby that can be shot (or not).
How horrible that 17-year-olds might be able to pretend to kill cows in a virtual slaughterhouse. Of course, the real slaughterhouses in British Columbia pump well over $100 million annually into the economy, 15% of which comes from resources owned by the government.
Want to kill real cows? The government will be glad to subsidize your job. Want to kill virtual cows? Sorry, son, you're too young; we can't have you exposed to such violence.
So to the Attorney General and to the so-called "film classification" office of British Columbia, who are so concerned about violence, take a look in the mirror. What have you done for animals lately, besides double the rate at which you slaughter them?
Groups like this always claim that they are concerned about children being desensitized to violence. I only wish they had a chance to get sensitized in the first place. As if it isn't enough of a mixed message - the stuff that we force kids to eat while telling them that hurting animals is wrong. Now 17-year-olds can't play a video game because it's called violent - and real violence is still called dinner.
You are obviously lying about being a French Canadian, because if you were you would have written your post in French first, using bold letters, and then again in English with smaller text. :)
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
This isn't enough. Just the other day I was gruesomly by a mallet wielding child.
I was watching with the 4 year old child what I assumed to be a a family show about a talking duck and a talking rabbit. Soon the show turned violent when the rabbit hit the duck with a very large mallet. (Later, this same rabbit was seen wearing a dress and makeup. An obvious homosexual propaganda attempt to steal our children's prescious innocence and make them turn to the homosexual lifestyle.) Not five minutes later, the child left the room, got my large mallet from the garage, snuck back into the room, climbed onto the back of the couch and walloped me on the head 4 or 5 times.
I thought the child was going to kill me. Luckily the child's mother came home and found me in laying in a pool of my own blood with her child standing overme with the blood stained weapon.
Why did the child do this? "I wanted to play with the birdies."
Write your congressman and senator now!!! Hearings need to take place before another child blungons someone!!!!
that depict the horrors of falling into deep crevices, having anvils fall on animal heads and crushing them into the ground, as well as exploding ACME devices which leave the user in smoldering ruins when they backfire.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
You all missed the point:
This story had good SlashDot irony.
Big (anything = corporations/government/etc) doing anything that may bother SlashDot but that also has a certain ironic angle that SlashDotters can stand around and look smug and say "See! Once again Big (Fill in Blank) has done it again!"
It does not matter if it is offtopic, relevant or even interesting. Just that it has that certain, ironic twist to it and allows like-minded participants to scream their standard answers.
Standard answers posted below for those who left theirs at home
1) Pure corporate greed!
2) Lars sucks!
3) Pure corporate BS!
4) Mod this up!
5) I would like to see a Beowulf cluster of these
6) Who cares?
7) Off topic
8} Where's Jon Katz?
9) Republicans
10) Democrats
I choose to be an omnivore because evolution (or God, whichever makes you happy) made me that way. I also happen to think that animals are quite tasty, so I generally tend to eat bits of one every day.
Seriously, I don't think that this piece of editorial tripe belongs in this story. Sure, animal suffering is a bad thing, but if you want to highlight the plight of animals, don't be sneaky about it...stand up and write an editorial and give it its own title!
=h=
You have to be 18 to RENT, not to PLAY. This isn't the "government trying to raise my children". This is the government enabling me to raise my children. Now the choice to rent these games is back in the hands of the parents.
So then you can argue "but kids can get around the rules with older siblings/friends or less restrictive parents". Yes, but which rule is a child more likely to follow "Don't play video games with excessive violence" or "Don't play video games that are rated R"? Since they can rationalize the first one away, the second one is a better rule.
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"I've never played 'Soldier of Fortune,' but the screenshots are roughly as bloody as Q3A's giblets of flesh when a rocket hits a dead body"
For those of you who haven't seen the game in action... SOF is probably the most violent game I've ever played, because they went to great lengths to simulate the effects of weapons on various areas of the body. In Quake, a bullet hit is a bullet hit. In SOF, the enemy will react according to the part of his body you shot... grabbing his throat, losing an arm, grabbing his crotch and moaning in pain, etc.
There's probably more blood in other games, but trust me- SOF has brought a wince to the face of many a jaded gamer who wouldn't bat an eye at a Quake3 gibfest as they see an SOF enemy have both his arms blown off with a shotgun and then sink to the ground with a knife in his groin.
Still though, it's not much more BLOODY than other games, it's just a little more realistic-feeling...
Also, I really liked Jaime's point about the animal violence... if they're REALLY concerned about the animals, why do they kill so darn many of them up there? :)
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I am omnivorous. I choose to be that way because meat is good for me (in limited quantities) and I like the taste. That's all there is to it.
I'm not an inherently cruel person. I don't torture animals for fun. However, I would like to make it very clear that animals have no inherent rights. A "right" is a human construct: in the wild, "rights" simply do not exist. Therefore to talk about "Animal Rights" is to ascribe rights to animals that society has not yet given them.
I do not torture kittens because society has decided to give those particular animals the right of humane treatment. If we, as a society, come to believe at some point that killing animals for food is wrong, then we will have given them the right to life. Until then, they are ours to do with as we please, simply because we are the most powerful creature on the food chain.
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