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The State of Violent Gaming
Ownt.com writes "Today we talk with Running With Scissors' Vince Desi of the controversial, recently released gore fest, Postal 2. We talk with Vince about The State of Video Game Violence and his thoughts on the violent gaming, where it's been, where it's going and many other aspects surrounding whether or not games actually 'teach' the players to go... postal."
No, no crappy joke this time..
I for one enjoy playing violent games, in particular Grand Theft Auto Vice City... but if I had kids old enough to use a console, even as teenagers, I'd be very reluctant to let them play such a game. Am i a hypocrite?
Jolyon
Please read my Canon EOS tech blog at http://www.everyothershot.com
I'm never actually going to go around shooting the heads off of innocent pedestrians just to see the blood spurt out of their necks, but in GTA: Vice City, I can do just that. I can also drive around in a tank and blow things up, and all without anyone getting harmed. I'm not a violent person, but I do enjoy some violence.
Now if the media would report that, we wouldn't be looking at legislation against it.
People like to be emotional, and education for the media-destined points this out. That's one reason it's hard to find unbiased media...it simply doesn't make people feel emotional, so not enough people view it for it to become mainstream.
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Note; this holds true for most first-person shoot-em-up, right back to Castle Wolfenstein and Doom.
Is it violent? Yes.
Is it speculative? Certainly.
Does it use blood and gore as a selling point? Off course.
But does it leads to more violent bahaviour? Now that is hard to prove... and unless it can be absolutly disproved, there will always be people who claims it does and will try to tell the gaming insdustry what they can and cannot do.
We'll always have parents and 'worried people' screaming up on how bad the latest games are. But instead of blaming the gamingindustry - who are basicly turning out more of whats popular - for perverting the youth, shouldn't they instead be taking time to be with their offspring, and possible keep some sort of controll at home over what games the children plays? For some reason, I'm reminded of a certain movie from a few years back, where concerned mothers started a war with Canada because their kids had learned a few naughty words...
Parental responibility. Is that to much to ask for?
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
Has anyone noticed that, after playing Grand Theft Auto or Vice City for several weeks, you start to look at parked cars a little differently?
Jason.
Screw all these morons, who [...] think that video games are for some reason not protected forms of expression
Uh, since when is a video game a "form of expression?" What exactly are the authors of GTA:VC trying to "say"?
They're not "expressing" anything. They're just trying to make money. They're producing a commodity to appeal to a marketshare whom they think will be profitable to them. Not that there's anything wrong with that, just don't pretend like its some noble form of meaningful expression. It's not. It's just a game, it's just business. Nothing more.
Like woodworking? Build your own picture frames.
I remember seeing the first Postal. It was practically the only game I've ever found so revolting that I felt sorry for the people who actually thought it was fun. And this is after I had been playing all the Doom and Doom-derivitive games for years. Just going around and shooting people without a just cause is absolutely fucking stupid. At least Doom was fighting against an invasion from Hell or something. In Postal, it wasn't even self-defense.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
Only when the increase in play of violent video games is matched with a corresponding decrease in parenting...which is usually the case.
If you let video games and TV raise your kids, it isn't the video games' or TV's fault when your kid becomes a violent killer. It's yours.
Instead of letting video games raise your children, try talking to them...playing baseball...treating them like intelligent beings with the potential to become full members of the human race. (No, it isn't automatic. That's the double-edged sword of intelligence).
Video Games and Guns cause violence like condoms cause sex like a car causes auto accidents like a knife causes you to be a chef.
I'm so sick of scapegoating. Nothing but a nation (or planet) of less immature children on a proverbial schoolyard.
Stop. Just, stop.
The sad thing is that (in the USA at least) graphic violence is apparently more acceptable than graphic sexuality.
That's because it's easier to use violence as a control.
You can better control the populace if you outlaw depictions of sex, because sex is normal and natural. The message sent is that sex is not normal and natural, but the population will continue to have sexual impulses (because we're hardwired to want to reproduce), which will cause them to repress these impulses.
You then make depictions of violence acceptable, which sends the message the violence is acceptable. The popluation needs an outlet for their repressed sexual impulses, will resort to violence (as that is acceptable.) - either through violent crime, or as the police force, who enforces your 'tough' laws by committing acts of violence against the criminals.
It's no accident that countries that have a more permissive attitude towards nudity and pornography have a lower crime rate.
Postal 2 is only interesting due to its violent nature. The general consensus is that the game is offensive but the design underneath the offenses is not solid enough to be worth a purchase.
First it was comic books. Then Rock music. Then D&D. Then Beavis and Butthead (remember when Beavis smoked? Good luck finding it now.) Now violent video games.
I don't know how this bar is set; maybe it's whether the activity is nostalgic or patriotic, or if it's just different enough to scare the generation in charge. Did anyone ever question running around with plastic guns playing 'Cowboys and Indians'*? 'Cops and Robbers'? War? Did plastic Army Men ever have problems? Paintball seems acceptable for teens, and it involves ACTUALLY SHOOTING AT REAL PEOPLE WITH WEAPONS THAT REALLY CAN HURT THEM. (I've had enough paint bruises to know.)
Personally, I think it's more that video games are used instead of family interaction. Whether it's games, books, drugs, TV, or staring at a wall, if there isn't any home interaction then good social skills will come harder. If they aren't nurtured through school activities, then it just gets worse and worse. I've generally found that a naturally outgoing person will find ways to grow socially, it's the naturally introverted that suffer most without a strong family upbringing. (Note - by 'strong' I mean 'open, talkative, compassionate, etc.'. There's no magic formula for that.)
Blaming the current fad instead of poor family life will probably never change. The reasons for it would probably be an interesting socialogical study, but most likely no one who could fund such a study would want a true, balanced answer that 'kids are just kids, and home environment matters most'.
(Offtopic footnote)* - besides the obvious moral problems of whether it was right to subjugate the indigeonous people, I'm simply refering to the fact it idolized violence in general. I'd guess it isn't played very much anymore, though that could also be put to the fact there are fewer westerns nowadays.
R: That voice. Where have I heard that voice before? B: In about 365 other episodes. But I don't know who it is either.
If you ask me, the fact that using certain words in your language is more of a taboo than watching animated violence or graphic sexuality is even more sad. Though, personally, I like all three.
XJS*C4JDBQADN1.NSBN3*2IDNEN*GTUBE-STANDARD-ANTI-U
So, the age-old question. Do violent video games negatively affect kids, make them more likely to be mass-murderers or amoral killers?
My usual response would be, "Hell no!" But a couple of days ago I started thinking about it again. Thinking about people who lived in North America in, say, the 18th century, when quite a lot of things that are no longer acceptable (e.g. slavery) were acceptable, and quite a lot of things that are now acceptable (women wearing miniskirts) would not have been.
Someone who was born in 1798 and lived until 1844, for example, might quite possibly have been of the opinion that it was perfectly acceptable to own another human being as property. Would we, nowadays, blame that person, say he was an evil, immoral bastard? We'd most likely say that he was a product of his times. Granted there were people who, by our modern standards were more "forward-thinking" than that, but certainly not an overwhelming majority, like today.
So why did our hypothetical pro-slavery guy believe what he did? He was subject to it as he grew up; it was part of the culture he lived in. Say he lived in the deep South, e.g. Georgia, in a culture whose livelihood much depended on slave labor. We could hardly blame him.
Imagine another hypothetical person, growing up in a hypothetical place and time, where the use of violence as a problem-solver was as prevalent as the Southern use of slave labor was in the early 19th century. Again, would we blame someone who lived in that time for resorting to violence to solve problems? Probably not. He'd be considered a product of his times.
But now we come to the early 21st century, and we have a burning question: do violent media affect the likelihood that young people will be violent? On one side, we have people (like me) who say that, no, of course not, just look at me and my friends. When we were young, we all played horrifically violent video games that involve murder, genocide, and things being bloodily hacked to pieces; but none of us are violent. We don't go out and kill people. People who believe this, let's call them the Unaffected.
The other side says, ah, but look at all these cases of young people who have played lots of games like this, and subsequently gone out and killed people. Or scientific studies that have concluded that exposure to violent media (not just games, but movies and TV as well) impel teenagers to be more violent. People on this side, let's call them the Influenced.
So who's right? I'm beginning to think that neither side is on the money. I realize that this isn't scientific, but it's become intuitive to me that anything we experience can influence who we are. The key word there is can. Not everything we experience influences us to the same degree, or even, necessarily, to any measurable degree. It seems intuitive that certain people are more easily influenced into committing violence than others; or rather, that some people, when seeing violence, think that it might be a good idea to mimic that violence.
The continuing explanation from the Unaffected is that proper parental guidance will (generally) teach children that the violence they see in TV and movies and video games is not real, and using such violence to solve problems is not an acceptable way of going about things. The Unaffected believe that whatever current epidemic of media-induced violence there may be, is due to a lack of proper parenting.
Meanwhile, the more hard-line of the Influenced claim that children can be corrupted by exposure to such violent media, regardless of how good their parenting is.
This last bit is unambiguously false. At the very least, some non-zero number of children can be exposed to vast amounts of violence and be none the worse for wear. I'm certainly living proof. I saw countless violent movies and played countless hours of violent video games as a child -- but my parents, especially my father, were always sure to reinforce the idea that violence
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
DIZZY: My mother always says that violence never solves anything.
RASCZAK: Really? I wonder what the city fathers of Hiroshima would have to say about that. You.
CARMEN: They probably wouldn't say anything. Hiroshima was destroyed.
RASCZAK: Correct. Naked force has settled more issues in history than any other factor. The contrary opinion 'violence never solves anything' is wishful thinking at its worst. People who forget that always pay... They pay with their lives and their freedom.
I love Heinlein.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
The sad thing is that (in the USA at least) graphic violence is apparently more acceptable than graphic sexuality. This appears to be exactly backwards.
Nope.
Sex is a private, personal, individual thing without any conflict at all. Story-wise, it's an extremly graphic kiss, and on-screen sex borders on pornography. (Simple supportive arugment: mainstream movies have been cut & pasted together to porn-like streams of only their "love" scenes.)
Violence, on the other hand, is the most basic form of conflict. Graphic dipictions of violence are actually better than black-bared violence--people who know what the gruesome result will be are less likely to comit acts of unnecessary violence than people who have no solid grasp on the consequences.
To put it another way: when distilling stories down to the spoken word, a discriptivly violent tale is a war story or a cautionary tale; a discriptuvly sexual tale is just a dirty story.
(The inverse is true for static art, like a painting--it's a heck of a lot better to have a masterwork nude than a masterwork corpse--but video games, movies, and television aren't static.)
As backwards as that sounds, I'm part of an organization that does just that; and I'd like to offer the reasoning behind that. At our conception, one of the most popular games in existance was Starseige: Tribes, a game rated T, meaning there were often teenagers(both young and old) playing. Now, Tribes features no blood and no gore, so it's largely "fantasy violence", not unlike say Power Rangers, or some other show akin to that. This, coupled with the desire of some members of the community to play in an environment where they wouldn't be harrassed(or cursed at/towards/or otherwise see), resulted in us setting up servers like that for Tribes.
To this day, the servers are extremely popular, and always full. Sure, it's a handful to keep new players under control, but people seem to like playing in an environment where they don't get cursed at, or otherwise treated poorly by other players. We run such servers for other games too(including M games) for the exact same reason, and those servers are also popular.
It may seem backwards to you, but to some people, that's simply how they want to live.
You can better control the populace if you outlaw depictions of sex, because sex is normal and natural.
But unrestrained sex is disasterous. Sex isn't a toy, but making it so can be a very costly proposition.
Classic baby-boomer mentality. So the kid was afraid of you for a couple days? So what?
My grandparents...the "Greatest Generation"...they knew how to take care of children. You just let them run loose and discover things for themselves, but whne you catch them fuck up, you let them know it (with a broken broom handle).
My parents, on the other hand, treated me like I was the fucking Prince of the Universe. You have no idea how this fucked up my head. I was a wuss and crybaby. I thought I was above everyone. All because they tried to be my friend instead of my parents. It wasn't until I got into high school and had some sense knocked into me by some larger classmates that I started turning around. The way I see it, I raised myself from then on. I develpoed a sense of respect and humility that I never had as a child.
Sure I'm always hearing baby-boomers complain about how rough they had it when they were growing up...but that's how it should be. Kids today are too damn spoiled because their parents decided they weren't going to raise their children the way they were raised. So instead they do the complete opposite. Just look at the all the school shootings going on. These kids do this because they grow up without any sense of humilty. They can't take it when bad shit happens to them.
You say it cost you blood, sweat and tears? Hell, the kid's your son. My dad threw me against a wall once (later on in my life...I think it was a "moment of weakness" for him), but I still love him. Sure I hated his guts for a while and I was afraid to go near him, but those emotions only last momentarily.
I say forget all this pseudo-science, psychobabble bullshit and bring back the yard stick.