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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?""
In other news, we read a /. story that might as well be the same thing we read yesterday. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go become a serial killer because I spent an hour playing Call of Duty online last night.
Windows isn't the answer... it's the question. NO is the answer!
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
Politicians and law makers can sqaush them at will with no repercussions.
But only if they saw it first in a video game.
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I'd be very careful who I talked to about this. It sounds like someone dangerous wrote it... someone who might snap at any moment, stalking from office to office with an Armalite AR-10 Carbine-gas semiautomatic, bitterly pumping round after round into colleagues and co- workers.
Might be someone you've known for years... somebody very close to you. Or, maybe you shouldn't be bringing me every little piece of trash you pick up.
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
but don't people do stupid shit they see in movies too?
yes they do. Found that trying to track down the story of the kids lying in the road after seeing it in a movie. That's a scene from The Program. And it lead to a death and a serious injury from idiots who got run over. I'm sure one could come up with examples of people doing incredibly stupid things under the influence of just about any piece of media. There must have been Shakespeare inspired killers at some point.
Imagine the guy had dropped an anvil on the policemen's heads,squashed them flat and said "Meep, Meep".
Who would be culpable then?
Warner Brothers?
It's good to see Gamespeak hearing from all sides. We need this kind of dialog. It'd be nice, though, to hear someone answer one of his more pressing questions with a "I don't know." I'm hoping for something more from Bungie later in the week. But so far, I've been disappointed with the gaming response on Gamespeak.
So let's get two things out of the way: it's clear that it is not just games that causes violence, it is games + X, where X = unstable childhood, major psychological problems, etc. Secondly, I think everyone would agree that in most cases, if the person didn't use a game as inspiration, they would've used rock n' roll, or Catcher in the Rye, or Pulp Fiction.
But nevertheless, we need more intellgent responses than talking about brothers losing in Mario Kart and the differences between guns and controllers. Not only that, but the game industry should be as troubled as anyone that many of the last decade's most heinous tragedies have had some kind of connection to video games, even if it is as tenuous and silly as the 9-11 to Flight Simulator connection.
The most recent 60 Minutes had a segment on video game violence, and specifically the police shootings associated with GTA. When the show compared the walkthrough of the shooter in the police department with one of the missions in GTA, it was eerily similar. If I were the brother of the slain cop, I would've sued Rockstar as well.
In the Gamespeak article, Ramsoomair, who probably planned his answer overnight, speaks to the causality of video games by responding, "this one time my brother punched me in the arm when I beat him in Mario Kart." Other defenders of video game violence often cite that people have played Pac-Man, but no one is running around gobbling yellow dots.
But it is physically impossible to shoot people with bananas and pick up large blocks and eat powerpellets and fruit in a black maze with neon walls because they don't exist. There is a chasm between the fiction of games like Mario and Zelda with reality. That chasm disappears in GTA. There are police stations. There are real cops. There is such a thing as shotgun, and people do die in both reality and in the game when you point it at people and shoot them. There's a reason why the US Army uses video simulations, like Full Spectrum Warrior for example, to train its troops: it works.
Jack Thompson is an ambulence chasing idiot. But the responses on our side have been as equally unintellegent and insensitive. Billion dollar companies, like EA and Take 2, must be overjoyed to have so many advocates like Ramsoomair working for them for free (EA especially likes unpaid work).
We need to think about this more. We need to start answering these interviews with "I don't know"s. We need to be more sensitive to the victims of crimes that are associated with video games, especially when the relationship between the video game and the violence is so brutally direct, as in the 2003 police shooting. If we'd done this earlier, if we'd developed a more intelligent response than screaming the first amendment and making games like Manhunt, maybe there wouldn't be a place for assholes like Thompson. Just because we can, doesn't mean we should. "Everything is permissible, but not everything is beneficial."
I'm reminded of one of Chris Rock's comedy routines where he talks about a guy who lives with a woman who smokes crack. He says, "If you don't smoke crack, YOU WILL." citing the inevitability of people influencing each other, one way or the other.
I tend to agree. People who argue against violence in games and the media influencing people only look at the issue from a shallow, instant-cause-and-effect-or-else-nothing perspective. Yes, if you watch someone shoot someone on TV, that doesn't mean that you will go out and shoot someone. Nor does it mean that if you see someone purchasing a big Dodge pickup truck, you are going to head out later that day and buy yourself a big Dodge pickup truck.
HOWEVER, to deny that these images do not transmit subtle (or not-so-subtle) messages which ultimately, either consciously or subconsciously affect our perspective, is naive and foolish.
They do, otherwise commercials would be useless. Just like advertising seeks to change peoples' perspectives on products and services, games, television and other media also alter what people think of things. In commercials, you only see the positive side of consumption; in television and video games, you also tend to only see one, seemingly clinical and detached version of violence -- which inevitably will serve to convince people in minute segments, that such violence isn't as abhorrent as society's moral structure may dictate.
Ask yourself, if a video game where one goes on a killing spree in a police precint can be defended by the status quo as being innocuous, would they feel the same way about a game where you play the Germans exterminating jews in WWII? They're both morally reprehensible, but you can bet that many more people would argue such imagery would be deterimental towards peoples' moral judgement. What's the difference? The difference depends upon who you offend and how, but in essence the same argument applies to all media and to deny that it only applies in select areas is ridiculous.
If you're playing games to the point that you're not interacting with people, there are other reasons you'd be violent. Antisocial people don't need video games to isolate themselves, and they certainly don't need them to inspire them to mail bombs to people. Did the Unabomber even have electricity, let alone Nintendo?
Something that got me in the interview with the lawyer last week is that it said video games "build up the synaptic pathways to kill. You learn to do in real life what you do in the games..." didn't make sense. The game would build certain pathways, but I would think you'd learn to do down down back forward high punch from muscle memory, not to actually rip somebody's head off with the spine still attached.
One of my life goals is to walk up to one of these people and make the hand motions to perform some sort of Mortal Kombat move, and then say, "If you were right, you'd be dead now."
... 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 )
Number of copies of GTA San Andreas sold in 2004: 5.1 Million
Number of incidence of violence related to GTA: umm... let's say there were as many as 100.
That's 0.001%. No stastician would say that there could be ANY correlation with a number like that.
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.