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."

Comments

Re:M.A.V.V. is a parody right?

[miltimj]

Clues that it is a parody:

Articles like:
"Videogame Networks or Online Training Camps?"
"Videogame and Tobacco Companies: Frightening Similarities. Secret Industry Report Revealed"

One thing that seemed to point to the contrary was:
"MAVAV (pronounced may-vav) is a new organization run by a group of worried parents..." ...though a whois query turns up:

Organization:
MAVAV
David Yoo
172 E. 7th
New York, NY 10009
US
Phone: 646-245-8414
Email: contact@mavav.org

project page

[Klerck]

You can find his project page here where he has graphs from his hit counter among other things.

David calls me the inspiration for his final project, as we both visit the same IRC channel. The inspiration came from my petition (cached because petitiononline.com has seemingly removed my petition) to rename the LOTR movie "The Two Towers" to something else. Of course, it was a joke. However, I'm still receiving responses to this day thanks to a site another friend of mine set up and which I wrote the FAQ for.

Congratulations, David, on another successful internet hoax!

Re:M.A.V.V. is a parody right?

[Zeinfeld]

It is a parody, and a pretty funny one. The ironic part is, if you truely beileved in the cause, you wouldn't be able to tell the diffrence.

There is a difference, albeit a pretty subtle one. The family friendly crusaders talk about the harm done by violence but without exception attempt to control sex instead.

This was certainly the case with Mary Whitehouse who was the 'keep sex and violence off TV' harpie in the UK. The porn site whitehouse.com is actually named after her, not the building on Penn Ave.

The anti-sex crusaders talk about violence because that is something most parents are worried about, they don't want their brat beating up the other kids. Violence on TV is a reasonable thing to be concerned about when you are dealing with 12 year olds.

Once talk turns to censorship however violence is completely forgotten, the real issue is controlling all access to sexual material, especially material that suggests its ok to be gay or sleep arround or generally have fun in ways not authorized by the social mores.

That is why people will put more effort into controling images of violence on TV than stopping violence. If it was really about violence those people would be upset at the idea of bombing civilians in Iraq etc. But its not about violence, never was, its about sex and their inability to handle their own sexual hangups (like being caught in flagrente delicto with Gary Hart!)

Of course the problem with hoaxes like these is that they can end up being used as political ammunition. It does not matter to the censorship brigade, they have no qualms about using material they know to be bogus. The infamous CMU 'cyberporn' study was used to prove that the Internet was full of porn in Congress long after it had been proved to be faked.

The US started the Vietnam war as a result of a hoax, the infamous 'Battle of Tonkin Bay' that never was. LBJ used that as causus belli even though he knew at the time it was fake.