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Columbine Student on VG Violence
Sophia wrote in to mention some discussion of Video Game Violence on 1up.com this week. Brooks Brown had the experience of attending Columbine High School around the time of the now infamous shooting incident. Via his blog, Brown goes into a detailed discussion of Why Violence in Gaming is a Good Thing. From the article: "GTA isn't about fucking hookers or killing cops. It's a story of a guy who got screwed trying to get back on top. It is, by nature, a story game. Postal 2 may let you kill anyone you want in bloody and disgusting ways - but that's not what it is about either. It is, by nature, a tech demo in the abilities of programmers and AI. it is WE - the gamers - who change what the game is about and determine what happens. It is the person playing who determines what the game contains." Jane Pinckard has a quick reaction to his post. More commentary on this subject is available via John Davison's Blog, who met Brown at a taping of a news program which was ostensibly to be about gaming in general. Instead he was ambushed about violence in games and ended up walking out.
How people are actual killers and nut jobs? I mean this in all seriousness. It is probably a split percentage point. How many people can watch a movie with gore and walk home without thinking twice? Probably 99.x percent of the people on this planet.
The problem with his blog entry is that he talking about the vast majority and not the absolute minority. And while I don't think that video games on their own create killing machines, they are an influence. That is the problem, the summation of all factors is what causes the problems!
Here is the kicker, in his last statement he says the killers were "f'd up". Well, duh, yeah! However, they blended in since our society does not think twice about violence and that is a problem.
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
People find ways of rationalizing whatever the heck they want to do, regardless of how good or bad it may actually be.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
The real danger is with racing games. Try racing an Audi S4 around in Project Gotham all day, then hopping into a real S4 to go to the grocery store. Dangerous stuff.
That I agree with. I played Midtown Madness (can't remember which) for a few hours straight, then went straight out driving. It was such an effort to restrain myself at traffic lights, queues etc. That was the most I've ever been effected by a game I think.
(Of course, I'm a rational guy, it was actually somewhat reassuring to have realised quickly and checked myself in time. I wonder about other people I know however, and worse, people I don't know.)
If I recall correctly, Opiates were first banned because there was fear and panic that 'drug crazed negroes' would rape white women. This was in San Fran, or one of those more westernly of the United States Cities.
This was also what stirred the first (recorded) police increase of calibre size, as it was thought that anything below a .38 would not be enough to kill someone on Opium.
Also, the reason Drug Use is pervasive amongst youth is because it is forbidden. You make something verbotten, and its appeal instantly skyrockets among teenagers, mainly because teenagers have a built in mechanism whereby the seek to break as many rules as they possibly can, due to the fact they need to explore and find the boundaries of what is acceptable behaviour, and more importantly, what they can get away with.
Probably important to becoming a well-rounded adult.
Edward@Tomato - /home/Edward/ man woman
man: no entry for woman in the manual.
"Qua!?"
Isn't most of GTA:Sa(quite far into it) about a guy trying to go straight and stop drug dealers?
Shocking really.. who would of thought you that? I've only ever used a prostitute once just to see WTF it was that happened, then I couldn't careless.
I like muppets.
Yeah but you can only do any of that once you've beaten the crap out of some poor civil service worker who was just trying to do their job.
But seriously. GTA is about violence. Face it. We like killing things. Guns are fun! Acting out our fantasies in any way is usually fun. The point is maintaining the division between fantasy and reality which people these days are pretty crap at. For example, the male fantasy of women is percieved by women to be the ideal. Hence they end up with this stupid distorted fantasized body image.
Killing things is fun, and as long as nobody actually dies it's fine. Can we all just grow up and admit it now please?
I think hes right on - video games are fast becoming world sims, and story aside, its you who controls the character. GTA has such great re-playability because you can just walk around doing whatever you like, i think the future of GTA is to just get rid of the story line all together and concentrate on making it a good world simulator, this is a place where you can do things you couldn't or wouldn't want to do in real life, you can drive around fast and shoot people with no consequences, when the game gets to the point where you feel the same sensations as real life then why would you feel the need to shoot someone in real life? you wouldn't.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
In Japan, many kids play violent video games and see softporn pictures on the television. You will commonly see bared breats during the prime time on the television. Yet, the rate of violent crime, including violence (i.e. rape) against women, is much lower than that rate in the USA.
Similar comments apply to Western Europe. (I do not have statistics for Eastern Europe.)
What in American society is spurring the violence? American society encourages competition. It, in itself, is a form of aggression. In American society, if you lose your job, you just might suffer malnutrition because welfare-based food stamps have a finite duration. If you cannot find a job during that duration or before the expiration of unemployment benefits, you are screwed.
The Europeans take a kindler, gentler approach. They accept a lower standard of living in exchange for lowering the level of aggressive competition. The Europeans give cradle-to-grave entitlements to anyone with European citizenship.
Japan appears on the surface to be pure capitalism, but the Japanese also practice European-style paternalism. Companies are not allowed to fail, thus throwing millions out of work. Banks continue to lend money even to companies that surely should go bankrupt. Major companies in Japan avoid laying off workers. All this paternalism breeds inefficiency. The average Japanese worker is, in fact, less productive than the aggressive American worker. There are some exceptions: e.g. Toyota blue-collar workers.
Which society is best? Less aggressive society with a lower standard of living or a more aggressive society with a higher standard of living? There is no clearcut answer. The choice is one of tradeoffs.
As I drive to my brokerage to check on the high return of my mutual funds and other investments, I always pass by a prison. America has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world. America is one of the few industrialized nations to continue to liberally practice capital punishment.
In Silicon Valley, if you refuse to work 13 hours per day on minimal pay, the American multinational conglomerate or startup will fire you and hire an H-1B worker from China or India. You either compete or die.
In the thought that video games are responsible for any of our actions shows, to me, an emotional instability and lack of capability to understand that video games are NOT real life. To actually think that video games are actually capable of 'suggesting' even to us to 'control' our actions..shows that the individual was weak minded and highly succeptable to suggestion. It is up to us to decide what we are capable of and what we arent. If we are taught we can do whatever we want, with education that can be a powerful thing, but also if we are taught to obey and follow then I guess video games could be a very dangerous thing for one too. I have been playing FPS's since Wolf3D, and ive never gone out and wiped out a family of 6 yet, nor do i plan to. Ive actually just finished playing postal 2 and have the addon installed, so does this mean im going to run out to my local gunstore and lock and load? no. because i recognize and KNOW that video games are entertainment, this is the difference between myself and someone who cannot possibly make decisions for themselves. who NEEDS a 'figure/idea' to follow at all times. Id LOVE to do a case study on ppl who are similar to me, who have played these games ALL their life...and why i am different than the ones who cant differentiate apparently between reality/fantasy.
So true... I was lucky enough to go to a private high school (by my own choosing) where the teachers got to know all of their students. There was still the geek, goth and hippie crowds (all of which I considered myself a part of), and we/they were still picked upon by the jocks and preps, but we didn't care. There were enough of us that we essentially formed our own support groups. We also had the sympathy of the teachers, who over the years saw that the vast majority of intelligence lay in us. Indeed, we were lucky, moreso than we could realize at the time. Looking back now, I shudder to think what would have happened had I attended my public high school. I was never truly an outcast in middle school, I had friends in the "mainstream", etc., but I likely would have found my niche with the smart, free-thinking outcasts. Frustration, anger, and hate are very powerful emotions, ones that I have known. My reactions to such a situation could have possibly been disasterous, at least for my future. My greatest sympathies go out to the geeks, the gamers, the goths, and anyone who finds themselves downcast from the self-indulgent social circles abound in our schools. You have been given the bittersweet view from the outside. From your vantage point, you see the problems inherint in our systems, but feel powerless to induce change. Be strong. You time will come. ~nepharis
Maybe after living in the real world for a few more years, Brown will realize that life isn't "about" anything. That a storyline doesn't redeem gratuitous violence. Now, I don't know any more than he does whether videogaming influences kids to be more violent. Though the few days I played GTA were followed by a couple of incidents here in NYC when I came closer than I have in decades to taking up the common offers to get into a serious fight, with a jerk in a bar. But since such a risk is such a threat to profitable videogame companies' profits and owners, I'm starting to wonder why they don't fund scientific studies by reputable researchers to come up with some numbers.
If they'd started such a study 10 years ago, we'd already have a decade of developmental psychology to study, with actual data on subsequent violence (or its lack) by the people being studied. Such a study is, of course, incumbent on those who'd make a claim that violent games "cause" violent acts, or violent people. But the industry would do itself a favor by clearing the air with such a study. Of course, if they perhaps have such a study already, though unpublished, that shows that there is a cause/effect, they'd be in serious trouble. Although suppressing such studies in the tobacco business just put off the inevitable, with much higher cost to those liable, as well as those unwittingly damaged.
Just hearing from a person who grew up in the Columbine environment, which fostered such a violent event, doesn't convince me. He might be more sensitive to violence, having seen it played out, but he isn't any more expert in child psychology itself. In fact, his closeness to the event could just as easily influence him to engage in denial, that he's that similar to the killers, or capable of it himself, with their common background. Especially when he believes that children's choices are entirely their own responsibility.
--
make install -not war
350,000 jobs created in march of 2004 The New York Times reports Bonds down on employment news.
Elections Go well in afghanistan country is enjoying the best economic growth it has ever had, reporting Opium traffic on rise and taliban still holding out.
20/20 Stages Explosions in cars auto companys are filleted by lawyers.
I don't really want to go into the media's coverage of aids and environmental except to point out that because of them (by and large) our policy on these issues might better have been framed by hysterical children.
I can go on this is just things off the top of my head. My point is that the media is by far doing greater violence to the body politic than video games. There is no real standard of liability for reporters and if you look at shield laws in most states if they use anonymous sources they can just make up whatever they want. A prime example is the sacramento bee where a reporter had been doing queen for a day sob stories about people for 20 years. The problem most of the people didn't actually exist.
Just things to think about when you see the News Media gathering to bang the drum on an issue.
The sad thing is, that you genuinely believe that if the graphics engine is not a tech breakthrough then obviously the game has no breakthough technology...
The AI was the tech breakthrough, it had nothing to do with graphics.
I'm not really sure why the parent was modded funny, it should be interesting.
I was never much into the GTA games, but last year I was given GTA:San Andreas as a gift. I have to admit that the game can be fun without indulging in gratuitious violence. As the parent mentioned, there are taxi, police, fire, and EMT missions to take on, there are delivery missions, collectibles, mini-games, races, stunts, etc. It's a very large game world with a lot of stuff to do, and gratuitious violence is only one part of it. A friend of mine had the game and had completed all the main missions without doing much of the sidequests, and I copied his game save onto my memory card and now have the entire game unlocked and I find that just driving around exploring the city and doing a lot of the non-violent sidequests and stuff is a lot of fun. Am I missing out on a lot of the game? maybe, but the game is friggen huge and as it was a gift, and didn't cost me anything I'm not going to complain.
Famous Last Words: "hmm...wikipedia says it's edible"
I worked at a company doing QA work for a while. Long hours (like 80 hour weeks). Low pay. 30 people crammed into workspaces that more ideally fit 10 or 15 people max.
After a while, crammed in with the same people in close proximity for 6 days out of 7 for weeks on end, the rough edges of everyone's personality starts to grate on your nerves.
Then we started setting up LAN games of Ghost Recon: Desert Seige during the lunch hours. It was great.
For an hour a day, I wasn't a sardined-in cog in a corporate machine... but I was ZANG, mighty hunter of the eviiil otherpeople, ownz0ring each game map with my trusty sniper rifle, or M60 machine gun... striking terror into those unfortunate or foolish enough to be in my path. Lots of adrenaline, and shouting back and forth between sections of the cubes.
Then the lunch hour would end, and it'd be back to checking out a few hundred more entries in the database searching for dupes, and wading through a couple dozen more non-sensical blathering emails from clueless upper management posers.
But, after the massive adrenaline rush and mental escape provided by each day's LAN game, things went smoother.
Personally, I think that there would have been a lot more problems and breakdowns in the work group structure if there HADN'T been the "release" of video-game violence every day at lunch time.
Same thing with kids and video-game violence. Better that the local 16-year-olds be all at home playing at being imaginary thugs in GTA, than be hanging out bored in front of the 7-11 at 10 at night looking for something to do.
I went to a couple different boarding schools (moved) from 5th-Sophomore year. Strangely enough there tends to be less exclusion than at public schools. Sure there's always the kid or two that gets picked on but they're still your friend and they know that, they just happen to be the Cartman of the group.
Not since Marie-Antoinette played milkmaid has looking simple and honest been so fake and complicated.
It is just sad you are true. Anyone that looks into the recent (as in 30 years) history of the US will understand at least some of the antipathy against the US. Just the fact the US has a history of wanting to influence other country's politics will have set some major antisympathy...
The really sad thing IMO is that Osama got what he wanted: the US full of fear - NO, it was not about those people, it was about the fear... and he succeeded.
Oh, and why hasn't he been captured yet? His kidneys are disfunct - how can he keep evading the US troups?
I still think we are missing two larger more important questions:
Do videogames trigger violence?
If so, is it reasonable to limit their sale?
Of course my view is that the negative contribution of videogames to a players behavior is dwarfed by other outside influences such as the condition of the family, which I think is the single most important contributer to a persons behavior next to their biological chemistry.
I know plenty of people that don't get the least bit angry while playing a violent video game, but for me, I can't start up an online game without falling into a rage. Hell, even Tetris pisses me off.
Unfortunately, we live in a cutthroat capitalist society which teaches us that our value lies within our ability to succeed at any task given to us. Can't preform to some expected level at your job? Good luck finding a new one. The disposable nature of our society is beyond reproach. Can someone tell me how anyone can find security in a country where you can be expected to work 80-100 hour weeks, and where failure to preform to these standards will result in your inevitable replacement?
The combination of competition, profound individualism, unrealistic expectations, and our lack of personal value leads to fear. One of our natural reactions to fear is anger. Anger, of course, correlates well with violence. Is it any wonder why America has such a dissproportionate amount of violent crimes when compared to other industrialized nations.
The only solution is for our country to place limits on what is expected and to strengthen the value of the community.
6th paragraph down. That was us. What do you know? None of us shot anyone and ended up doing anything violent. Most of us graduated college fine. One of them ended up a computer science major with a degree from Yale and a rabid Slashdot reader, so maybe they should put a warning out for kids like us... Do we still have LAN parties and play shooters? Of course!
EvilCON - Made Famous by
Hey all. What we need to do is instead of just sitting on Slashdot discussing the problem, make the counsellors and principals and parents realize that this problem exists and make them pull their heads out of their asses. What I have done is taken the very first comment on this page (the one I am replying to right now), which was EXTREMELY insightful btw, and have made a nice PDF out of it. I am making an anonymous hotmail account and emailing this to my guidance councellor.
I suggest everyone else do the same.
I myself am sort of a mixture of some sort. I am friends with all of the "cool kids". I smoke pot with them. I get so drunk I can barely see straight.
I also run Linux on my desktop at home and read Slashdot. So I know how things are on both sides of the fence.
At school, the bigger kids used to pick on me. Then I would pick on the even weaker. I did this until shortly after I read a commentary similar to these ones about Columbine.
Ever since that day, I'm the person who is always telling my own friends to fuck off and leave the nerdy kid ive never met before alone. Most of the people who pick on other kids do it to fit in (at least I did), so that they aren't put in the "geek's" shoes. They want to fit in with the other bullies.
The thing that fucking pisses me off, is that the Teachers have the power to stop this, and they just don't care. They know little Johnny gets beat up every day at Lunch, yet they would rather run off for a smoke break instead of letting him work on homework in the classroom during Lunch, or even just watching him from afar. Some other kids beat the living shit out of another "geek" and get suspended for a few days. That little geek brings a pocket knife to school to try and be cool and fit in with the popular people, and he gets expelled and a letter sent home for it.
Columbine, while being a complete and utter tragedy, was also a glowing oppurtunity. If only stories like this, and comments like the first one for this story, were posted on the front page of the newspaper, instead of fucking stupid articles like "Are Violent Video Games Going to Make Your Kid Kill?", maybe all of the bullies, teachers and principals would realize that those students died not only because of the two "crazy kids" but because of people like themselves. That the principals at Columbine, the teachers, the counsellors, the parents of the killers, are owed just as much blame as the killers themselves. That this mass murder was the fault of Society and not the fault of the "nerds". It could have made all of the difference in the world, even if it only saved one kid from being bullied. But instead of taking advantage of this oppurtunity, America (and Canada where I live, as well as numerous other countries) instead went on an all-out witch-hunt, while being so incredibly naive...and, well, downright fucking stupid....that they just made the problem worse.
So I say everyone print off the first comment for this article and make sure as many people as possible see it.
Actually, I think I need to thank Slashdot. It gave us a voice when we didn't have one. A stupid local journalist decided to write an article on us because his daugther, who went to our school, told him about us. Did he ever interviewed us? NOPE. He just made it all up from hearsay. Then one of us posted the experience on Slashdot and got the NYT Times and Katz' attention. The article was a vindication for us. We really had nowhere to go. Some of us were applying to colleges at the time and didn't want the world to know who we were. Who knows how colleges would have reacted. People just knew there was EvilCON and the article let them know we weren't psycho without revealing exactly who each member was. It's a bit hard to explain but thanks /.
EvilCON - Made Famous by
http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html/
This article is pretty good. In the context of Columbine, it states, what I believe to be, a partial why of the situation. Other than the obvious fact the shooters were fucked up. Then again, save self-defense, what human being that shoots another isn't fucked up?
Am I open minded towards open source, or closed minded towards closed source?
Right now, the US is one of the most paranoid places in the world,
The US Govment is one of the most paranoid organizations in the world right now, not the rest of the US. You can still walk down some of the busiest streets in the world with a backpack on your back, and people will just leave you the hell alone, rather than having a jack-booted counter-terrorist force assault you for no other reason than "you looked like a terrorist, oh, and sorry about your book bag".
The last time I went into a major downtown area, there were no federales with machine guns. But drive down the road in Mexico, and you're bound to come to a federales checkpoint, and they are indeed armed visibly with M-16's.
Personally, I think all teenagers, regardless of homes, economic situation, etc, will test positive for some psychological ailment, simply because the way that we've set up our neuroscience programs to detect such things; in adults.
A teenager's mind is controlled on little more than assumptions and hormones, the mix of which is pretty much give or take given the kid. Now we might say that a well adjusted kid will be in one direction or another, but I come from a place where I've seen a very large spectrum of kids (and I still consider myself to be one, even at 18 years old *I'll be a kid until I'm not a teen/can drink, I'm going more for legal definition here for those pedants who like to pick and poke*). The "more adjusted" ones tend to do better in school, but in real life fumble in all kinds of unpredictable ways. Meanwhile the "broken" kids seem to do better in the real world because they based their assumptions more towards the real world, and less to one their parents, guardians, and teachers prefer.
Now I'm not saying there's no such thing as mental illness in children, I'm just saying too often we give a label to something that isn't there. Because a kid doesn't like to read and would rather play legos and build things isn't a mental ailment, and yet is too often treated as one. Kids like this are branded throughout their school careers as being dead ends, tracked for vocational schooling and forgotten about when these same kids could grow up and be the best and brighest engineers if you'd give them access to the things they need to learn to do so.
I was/am one of those kids, and I'm finding it very hard in college simply because I wasn't granted the same kind of access as children who were branded as "normal" and tracked for college. There's simply so much that I need to know still that I don't that I find myself feeling unprepared for college, even after being here for a year.
Give a kid a tool and show them how to use it. Let it be up to the kid if he or she wants to use the tool; explain the consequences of its use, and the probable outcomes of its use and if the kid isn't a sociopath or mentally challenged in some way, the kid will use the tool in accordance to how he or she was taught, but not nessicarily identitically as taught. That's the beauty of us human machines.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush