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The Joystick Is The Root of All Evil
Waab writes "David Yoo, of the Parsons School of Design has taken some time out of his busy schedule to put together one of the funniest sites I've seen all year, Mothers Against Videogame Addiction and Violence. With articles like "EverQuest: A Threat to Society?" and "America's Army: A New Low" (articles currently offline "due to editing"), MAVAV gives worried parents one more senseless cause to rally round. Even Tycho and Gabe love it."
For every site that parodies stupidity like this, the actions that the real intolerants take will be seen and treated with less seriousness. Compare this site to the OLGAnon web boards started by Elizabeth Wooley, mother of a suicided gamer. She blames Everquest for her son's death. Everyone else blames his obvious mental problems. Accordingly, she has a great deal of trouble with people from other EQ message boards who come to hers to try to flame and spam her into non-existance.
The most successfull of those trolls, however, and the ones that do the most damage to Liz's crusade of self-victimization and responsibility avoidance are those that parody the 'real' posters who frequent the site.
Not only do those parody posts make everyone laugh at the people who don't seem to have the ability to take responsibility for their own actions, they make the site less credible as a whole.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
All good parodies bring to light something that is "wrong" while suggesting corrective action. Usually that corrective action is absurd and this is why it is a parody. The parody that comes to mind (from a literature standpoint) is Johnathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal", and while his is a little more grizly the real meaning of the paper comes out crystal clear. I suspect that a lot of people on slashdot may be shocked and sort of disgusted at this parody - but there is a very real problem with video game abuse (not the video games or the industry) these days.
I knew someone, let's just call him Joe Geek. He'd wake up at 3am every day, play EverCrack until he leaves his home for work at 8:52am (of course Joe is supposed to be at work at 9am). Then Joe would stumble in to work and do little for a few hours while checking the boards... then a few hours of hard core work while dosing on caffiene and nicotine to keep awake until he left early at 4:25. The moment he got back to his house he would play until he passed out around 1am. Then his 3am alarm would go off and he'd start it all over again. After a few months of this he looked like a crystal meth freak and had to be torn away from the game.
Addiction and abuse are real no matter what the thing that is being abused is. Personally I think this is a good parody.