Interview With Gary Gygax About Game Violence

bdavenport writes "After yesterday's post on game violence and the relation to real-world violence, i found this interview with legend Gary Gygax. He expounds his views on a range of subjects, one of which is his opinion that gaming violence, having been vilified since the 1970s when it related to D&D, is not causationally linked to actual violence. "

Comments

An ex-Sargeant's opinion

[WillSeattle]

Example: Normal people off the street will not, unless circumstances are extreme, kill someone. The US Marines need to train people to kill someone when they are not in direct personal danger. So they use pop up targets with the shape of a human. This trains people to pull the trigger without thinking. This is the same psychologically as playing Quake or Halflife.

Well, I've had quite a bit of training in the Canadian Army myself. Even with training, we still expect that more than half of all combatants will not shoot at another human being, but will miss. This is pretty much a constant.

Playing Quake or Halflife is nothing like using a force-feedback rifle simulator. They used to ban us from paintball games because we actually used weapons and knew about kickback, reactions, wind drift, shadow perception, and all the other factors necessary to complete a real kill. And even a simulator is a far cry from real combat. It's not quiet in real war, it's way more boring and way more exciting, and even the best game is jigged for playability, whereas real combat is a heck of a lot of misses and a lot of unseen targets, regardless of technology.