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Violence in Videogames with VG Cats
me at werk writes "Following up on Tim Buckley's interview, CBS News' GameCore has posted the interview with Scott Ramsoomair of VG Cats. From the article: "Psychos will always be psychos; they don't need video games to help them. Though this one time my brother punched me in the arm when I beat him in Mario Kart. Does that count?""
OK, so I like VG Cats. It's one of my favorite video game comics. I'd love to read an interview with the cartoonist about that. That being said...
The interview is all about a subject that the interviewee has absolutely no authority in. Well, OK, as a video game cartoonist he probably has enough authority to judge how many games are violent. But the other questions, like how many crimes are related to violent games, he has no way to answer.
This would almost be like interviewing Illiad about the SCO case against Linux. I'm sure he has an opinion on the matter, but there's no way he knows enough about the legal system to do anything other than spout opinion.
What do these lines of questions against the comic artists hope to accomplish? I met scott once. Nice kid (not literally ;P). But I don't think he has done any study of video games in the realm of psychology. Some psych is fairly intuitive, but unless an independent group studies video games outside, correlates and reports their findings, these interviews seem.. out of place.
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ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
... after reading the interview with Jackass Thompson I came to realize two things:
1. He wants to ban GTA and then extend the ban to other games. Because for any example he can ONLY cite GTA. "There is no sportsmanship in GTA". No, because you're playing GTA against noone that cares about sportsmanship. Once you factor in multiplayer games with their sportsmanship rules like "no camping", "no aimbots" and "no kill stealing" you get a completely different result.
2. This man is a lawyer that can't tell the difference between prostitution and rape. In one moment he's talking about armies pillaging and raping, the next he claims GTA bridges the gap between sex and violence. Hell, those whores in GTA had zero to do with the violence (okay, they're targets like anyone else) except for being in the same game!
He also realizes that parents are failing to do their job but attempts to escape by citing some anecdote about a child that was killed despite correc upbringing. I doubt he is REALLY too dumb to realize that the upbringing of the killer is the kicker, not that of the victims so this is just plain malicious. And what's with that crap about "the industry will rue the day they introduced that rating"? Does he imply they never should have implemented a rating system or wtf is he trying to say?
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
While i do agree the onus should be on the video game retailers for selling to minors, what in gods name is a child doing with GTA? My parents had 1 rule in my house: No toy guns. Wanna guess how many toy guns i had as a child? Zero. Why? Because i had parents. Remember when those kids burned down their house because Beavis and Butthead did it? All the lawyers ran to blame MTV, Beavis and Butthead, but none of them asked "Hey, this women let her kids play with matches, why the hell did they have matches? And why were her kids up at 1am to watch Beavis & Butthead?"
In this society, for whatever reason, everyone is looking for a scapegoat. McDonalds made me fat, Marlboro made me smoke, Video games made me kill that guy. People need to shutup and take responsability for what they do. If i drink to much and beat a guy up i cant sue Molsons Brewery can i? ( Concequently something needs to be done to the justice system to make it less appealing to sue everything on the face of the earth )
I'll tackle GTA since everyone "hates" it from a moral standpoint.
In no GTA game (AFAIK), there's no mandatory mission forcing you to kill good cops (in SA, the cops are crooked). Nor do you even have to kill innocent civilians. It's mostly drug lords fighting for land or killing backstabbing mobsters or the occasional informant or rapper.
Much like real life, killing cops in GTA is a choice with consequences. The cops chase you, you have to run away. Killing civilians is the same way. Why don't these radical censorship groups distribute readmes on how not to kill cops in the game? The difference between GTA and most other games is that vulnerability is relatively uniform. You can't swing your sword at the town elder in Zelda; the game simply won't let you. In GTA, everyone is equally vulnerable.
In the US army's own game, it's possible to kill your drill seargent. You'll also get sent to jail for it.
It's just s friggin' sandbox. If you want to go kill random civilians in the game, it's possible (not exactly productive and the cops will chase you). In real life, the cops go after you as well (though it does take less to set them off and they'll persue you with greater tenacity).
Personally, I thought Dungeon Keeper 2 was much more violent than GTA ever was (you know, torturing good people to death and the like).
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
in that case if your girlfriend (I know, wrong web site to make such an assumption)
Damn straight. But thats my point. Without a need for tampons, no number of tampon commercials will convince me to buy some. Just like no number of violent games will convince me to flip out and kill people since I don't have a need to kill people.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.