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Take-Two Interactive and Sony Sued Over GTA
An anonymous reader writes "Apparently Take-Two Interactive is being sued by the parents of two kids who killed a man. I remember reading about the killing incident a few weeks ago, but this is the first I've read about an actual lawsuit. The part that I found most interesting was that Sony will also be named in the lawsuit because GTA was exclusive to their console." Update: 09/18 16:27 GMT by M : The Independent has moved/deleted the story on their site, breaking our link. We've already mentioned this story anyway.
Perhaps the parents should sue themselves for buying the cosole and the game in the first place?
IAXM (I *AM* Ex-Military), and I don't seem to remember combat training for shooting floating eyeballs and zombies with RPGs...
Strangely, shooting a gun required things like using sights rather than just pointing in the right (compass) direction... Ah the old days...
For us carnivores, "Sucking the marrow out of life" isn't a transcendentalist philosophy but a practical instruction.
The part that I found most interesting was that Sony will also be named in the lawsuit because GTA was exclusive to their console.
Does that mean Microsoft can be added to the lawsuit in 2004? They have tons of cash and would be a great target to add to this frivilous suit.
So if this game is so bad that it caused these kids to go out and commit this crime (no, I don't actually think there's a causal link) , then WHY WERE THE PARENTS LETTING THEIR KIDS PLAY IT!
Reminds me of a great bumper stick I had just seen recently, read:
DUMBASS
It's Lack of Parenting
NOT
Video Games
*DrugCheese rants*
We should also sue the electric company, for without their power they couldnt play the game. And oh yea, lets not leave out the TV maufacturer. Maybe we should even sue the person we bought the house from, since this is where they played the game.
Seriously, give me a break. How about parents stop blaming everyone but THEMSELVES for their kids actions.
Don't Tread on Me
Grand Theft Auto and its three sequels are designed in Britain and have topped the UK and US games charts, selling more than 20 million copies in the past five years.
And how many of those 2x10^7 kids became killers?
Yeah, that's what I thought.
Sony isn't being sued because GTA was PS2-only, they're being sued because GTA was available on the PS2.
If it had been available on other platforms, the other companies probably would be named in the suit also.
Of course, that's stupid if you assume (as is most plausible) that the kids probably only would have played the game on a single platform of their choice, whatever they happened to own.
But then, the very idea of suing a game manufacturer because their game inspired real-life crime is stupid.
People are responsible for their actions. Actually committing a crime? That's a crime. Depicting fictionalized crime as a form of entertainment? Not a crime. There shouldn't be any civil liability either -- all liability should fall on the heads of the dumbasses who thought it'd be a good idea to imitate pixels.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Right, because, obviously, America's children are so influenced by everything they see or hear that it must be the game's fault. Sure, the kids say they were trying to recreate scenes from GTA, but come on... this shows a serious lack of the consequences of their actions, not any sort of thing that GTA will help or hinder.
If console and computer games can so easily influence kids, then how come we don't see hoards of them acting out Everquest or Soulcalibur scenes? Where are all the kids running around collecting rings after playing Sonic for five hours in a row? Huh? Answer me that...
This is nothing more then an attempt to shift the blame. Parents don't want to think that their kids could ever do this on their own, someone or something must have "made them do it". Sorry, Mr. and Mrs. Buckner... your kid is fucked up. He deserves to go to jail and learn the consequences of his actions.
As for the lawsuit, I hope it summarily thrown out.
Kierthos
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
Doesn't GTA have a mature rating?
Either way, a game isn't going to make some kid go out and pick up a gun and start killing people. There were serious problems there before the kid started playing the game. This is the parents trying to deflect the blame away from their poor parenting skills.
You also have to ask where these kids got the guns from. What parent leaves guns lying around that their kids can get access to.
Take responsibility for your own actions and stop trying to pass the buck.
So if you rape someone, can you sue the Porn Industry because they sometimes portray rough sex?
If you run someone over in your car, can you sue the makers of Matchbox cars because you used to run over your GI Joes or whatever with them?
Lets just sue {insert deity here} for creating these people in the first place... maybe we should sue the aliens that put us here, or the cosmic rock dust or whatever it was...
These people need to be smacked. A good pimp smack.
I mean, what the hell? People have been shooting people for years, GTA is nothing new. Its just got better graphics.
How rediculous.
This is my sig. Its pathetic.
From the article:
"Mr Hamel, a nurse, was killed while driving home to Knoxville, Tennessee. Miss Bede, who was travelling in another car with her boyfriend, was seriously injured and has eight fragments of shrapnel in her pelvis."
"Miss Bede and the family of Aaron Hamel plan to sue Take-Two Interactive Software, which publishes Grand Theft Auto, for liability in a wrongful death lawsuit. Take-Two owns Rockstar Games, which is based in Edinburgh and designed the first version of the game in 1997. Sony will also be named in the lawsuit, because Grand Theft Auto was made exclusively for its Play- Station consoles. Sony declined to comment on the case."
if they would've completed the mission's objectives. The giant MISSION FAILED that popped over their heads should've been a give away.
*runs up to passanger side door of police cruiser and tries to open door; runs to drivers side and drives away*
What is music when you despise all sound?
Do you want to back that up with some evidence?
Even if it's true, it isn't against the law to give out ideas. In fact it's a constitutional right.
Wouldn't that be a refreshing take on these foolish lawsuits? Have the game developer team up with Social Services and sue the parents for doing such a poor job raising their children that they would commit murder. Having the parents suggest that a video game could cause them to commit such an act only strengthens the case that they were unfit parents.
What about the twinkie? - Dr. Peter Venkman, PHD
Where were the parents of the two accused killers when they were playing GTA in the first place? Yet another example of the "Victim Culture" the legal system has steered us towards.
Trolling is a art,
George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, and Dick Cheney are in for at least $300 mil for setting a bad example for our youth by starting a violent unprovoked war in the middle east
CNN owes $500 mil for it's gratuitous, jingoistic, spoon-fed-propaganda coverage of the war
I figure that the parents of the kids gotta be in for about $2.5 billion apiece
And Joshua and William Buckner, since they are the ones who actually committed the crime, are in for $400 billion each.
Oh, wait. They do.
So, the parents buy a game that states persons under 18 should not use the game w/o parental supervision. Then they let the kids play the game unsupervised, knowing (at least from the game packaging) the the game is violent. Oh, and the kids also have access to a rifle, which they are too young to legally possess in Tenn. This is who's fault again?
Somebody call the Department of Family and Childrens Services.
It's a standard reaction on behalf of the parents and a sad one. There are kids who will go out and do terrible things, but violence is not exactly a new thing in human history. If anything, todays' societies are remarkably non-violent compared to past ones.
For the parents - especially of the killers - it's an attempt to find blame somewhere. I feel sorry for them: since Freud's time, parents have been told "you are responsible for the way your kids turn out", when in fact many studies show that parents are amazingly irrelevant to their children's character. One long twin study showed approximately 50% coming from genes, 45% from unknown sources but presumably peer influence, and 5% from parents.
There is violence in our genes, but it generally needs a certain kind of culture to bring it out. The place to look for the causes of such killings are the youth cultures these kids hung-out in. There is no evidence at all that violent games or movies influence children, but it seems clear that violent children prefer to express themselves through violent games, virtual or real.
Court cases like this resolve absolutely nothing, because they divert the discussion in meaningless directions. Let's ban all violent games and movies... OK, will that change anything? Take a look at (random selection from a large pool) Uganda, where the kids watch no movies at all, yet 10,000 young (5-12) killers roam the north.
It is very difficult to change a violent culture, but it is possible.
The first thing is to understand the way violence is propagated. Like all youth cultures, it goes from youth to youth, bypassing all adult control. You have to work at this level, thus.
The second thing is to understand how individuals get drawn into violent behaviour that reinforces itself and finally becomes habitual. Can a young man turn to authority for fair protection? If not, he is more likely to use his own force for self-protection. Can a young man who uses drugs turn to authority for help? If not, he is likely to resort to retribution and violence. Can a young man escape from a violent or oppressive environment? If not, he will eventually give up on himself and "go postal", taking his own life but first taking the lives of as many of his peers as he can, in an attempt to regain some face.
I think it's clear that the rigid and somewhat intolerant mentality of adult-youth relations in the States is a large part of the problem.
Banning violent video games goes further in the wrong direction. Now we make criminals out of those youngsters who want such games. Excellent.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
I usually rant on about how rediculous I find these lawsuits and get pissed about how people just can't seem to take accountability for their own actions. "Oh, Billy just shot you? It doesn't matter that I didn't train him proper firearm useage, had one readily available to him, and didn't teach him it's wrong. I'm suing a game company."
However...the part that REALLY scares me is the fact they're suing Sony because that was the console it was on. So when people start suing movie directors and studios for violent movies, does this mean they'll also be able to sue AMC theaters? Unfugginbelievable...
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
OK, two things:
1) Why were a 14 year old and a 16 year old allowed access to the rifle?
2) Why were a 14 year old and a 16 year old allowed access to a game rated Mature?
Perhaps the parents should try to answer these questions before taking a stupid case to court.
These 'kids' are 14 and 16 years old. If they can't tell the difference between fantasy and reality by now, the fact that they killed one person and injured another is beside the point. They should be locked up forever since they will always be a threat to those around them.
Steve's Computer Service, Hobbs, NM
In related news, RockStar Games sues The United States of America, for influencing them in making the GTA series.
Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. - Ambrose Bierce
Reading articles about the GTA lawsuit and the Everquest, it outrages me on how little responsibility the parents take for the actions of their children and how little they hold their children accountible for their own actions. The Everquest mom let her son play the game and he was 21 years old. The GTA parents let their kids play a game that was rated for adults.
Many people like to point the finger at other things besides themselves. Outside forces caused them to do it. The sad fact of reality is that we live in the outside world. There are things beyond our control that may try to influence (drugs, crime, moral decay). We can control ourselves and not be influenced by them.
Many people will say that these games are beyond anything previously experienced. They point to all sorts of studies on how games influence violence. Evil is as old as time itself. There is a very old book. It has tales of patricide, matricide, murder, rape, incest, polygamy, adultery--every ill we know. It's called the Bible. How come none of these parents ever sued the church because it is a bad influence? Because if the silliness of it would get the lawsuit tossed out of court in a heartbeat.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
The article reads:
This should instead read:
Hope this helps.
++ Say to Elrond "Hello.".
Elrond says "No.". Elrond gives you some lunch.
While I can believe this (I had my own weird mood swings on Ritalin for a bit in high school), I'm frankly inclined to say that every so often, in a large world, you just plain get some crazy kids every once in awhile. With teenagers, you get the hormones all out of whack that's messing them up anyway -- combine the two, and blammo. It's the price you pay for living among humans.
The lawsuit is misguided and stupid. Although it's worth mentioning I wouldn't buy violent games for teenagers.
Tennessee has no Child Access Prevention (CAP) Law and has no Trigger Lock Law.
So first off the parents of these kids basically are under no liability for the apparent availability and possibly unsafe storage of their weapons. Yet they have the gall to blame this tragedy on a game clearly marked for adults, which they most likely purchased for their kids.
Don't even get me started on their lack of responsibility as parents to at least be aware of what their child is watching on television or playing on a game console.
Parenting is more than breeding and feeding.
brightloudnoise.com
Your first clue should have been where the kids were from. This is what happens when brothers and sisters marry.
This issue continues to come back up, time and time again. Whenever there is a killing or attack by someone under the age of 18, ANYWHERE, games, television, and other items which identify the current culture are being put to blame.
If it were necessarily true that kids follow games, then why aren't MORE kids out there killing and maiming? The mentality is set to a small group. If there was a mass hysteria, sure, maybe then there would be something. But for God's sake, people, it's a video game! I played them on the Commodore 64, Apple 2, Atari 2600, Intellivision, and the original Nintendo when I was a kid!
Did they have an effect on me? Well, as a kid, I never knocked over a turtle and kicked it away a la Mario Brothers! I never stole a car and took it for a spin around the city like many racing games! Hell, I never went out and had sex at age 12 because of all those crappy sex games the C-64 had available for it, either.
So the question remains: why are kids being blamed, and in this case saying, that they learned the behavior from TV and video games? Simple answer: their parents and the media. Parents today are worried about their kids, and they have every right to be. But what do they do? (And I have noticed this with friends and family who have children of various ages.) When their kid is in trouble, they ask them where they learned it. "Was it on TV? Was it in those video games they play?" The parents are giving the kids the scapegoat the kids want and need, and the companies that make the games are the ones getting in crap. The media blows all of this out of proportion, with CNN reporting hours-upon-hours of how the games are corrupting the youth.
Grow up, people! Yes, some people may be influenced by games, but those people need some form of attention and intervention; it will not go away by removing one video game. Take some responsibility for your own actions, and that includes random blaming of games and television for acts which are probably rooted deeper into the kid's psyche (although I am not a psychologist).
Given that God is infinite, and the Universe is also infinite, would you like some toast?
Your honor, I would like to claim damages from Sony for taking away my parenthood and teaching my kids to kill. I was too busy watching TV to teach my kids any values so I would also like to sue Fox.