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

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.