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?""

Comments

Next, on Interviewing Subject Non-Experts...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Next, on Interviewing Subject Non-Experts...

[UWC]

It might be that those more heavily invested in the gaming culture will have a more complete knowledge of the average and maybe even the extremes of those affected (or not) by games. Being immersed in the culture can provide insights and truths that studies can't. Likewise, I'm sure competently performed studies can provide useful information that an intelligent gamer can't. I think there need to be more efforts like this to connect those outside that are trying to find out about (or destroy, I don't know) gaming as a feature of our culture with those more familiar with gaming. It's obviously stupid to have people who know nothing about gaming legislating it out of legitimacy. But it's also not a good idea to leave it totally up to those enamored with the genre. Either way there's going to be some blindness to potential issues. I'm not advocating the superiority of one position or another.

As a gamer myself, though, I think the ESRB does as good a job of ratings as does whoever rates movies (MPAA? I can't remember). There needs to be more awareness of the rating system, and of the fact that gaming is not just for kids, and thus not all games are intended for a young audience.

May be a bit late but...

[KDR_11k]

... 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?