Hillary, GTA, and High School Football

The LA Times is running a really worthwhile story discussing the recent attack on video games in congress. It talks about GTA, the decline in youth violence, and mentions that football actually encourages real aggression, causes real injuries, and is treated totally differently. It's worth a read. Unfortunately I'm fairly certain that very few U.S. Senators are listening over the sound of hype.

Comments

Yeah, but has he actually played GTA?

[DingerX]

from TFA:

The great secret of today's video games that has been lost in the moral panic over "Grand Theft Auto" is how difficult the games have become. That difficulty is not merely a question of hand-eye coordination; most of today's games force kids to learn complex rule systems, master challenging new interfaces, follow dozens of shifting variables in real time and prioritize between multiple objectives.

I haven't seen SA, but from what I've encountered in GTA (a noble series that it may be), there are no "complex rule systems": just a big sandbox and some simple rules. "New interfaces" are nothing that a bog-standard game controller can do and has done for the last fifteen years, and "multiple objectives" are pretty much ruled out by the straightforward mission structure.

Worse if the game actually were as characterized, it wouldn't sell as many copies: way too difficult, not entertaining enough.

But the description sounds really good. "Training the wage slaves of the information age"

Re:true, sort of

[Shky]

The author of the article seems to have taken some of their ideas from the recent Discover Magazine article titled Your Brain on Video Games [discover.com]. A very interesting read, a lot of which I agree with.

Steve Johnson wrote both of those, and the book Everything Bad is Good for You. He's been in the news quite a bit lately.

Re:Do-gooder

[nmb3000]

Speaking of "do-gooders", at least that moron Jack Thompson isn't mentioned in the article. That guy is so full of shit that he doesn't even care if anyone really takes him seriously as long as the morons in the media pay attention to him.

Interestingly enough, the most recent VG Cats deals with this topic, as does a recent Penny Arcade. It's nice to see a funny spin on this continuing GTA and "videogames kill!" bullshit.

Re:Very Nice Article

[yali]

Isn't it possible that kids no longer need real-world environments to get those thrills, now that the games simulate them so vividly?

This is a very outdated idea from psychoanalysis that has leaked into the popular consciousness, but actual scientific evidence suggests otherwise. Freud observed that biological drives like hunger and thirst are temporarily diminished when they are satisfied, and he incorrectly assumed that all motivated behavior (including sex and aggression) worked the same way.

Think of it this way: If this were true, armies would be complete pussycats (because they would've gotten it all out of their systems in training), and pacifists would regularly go on murderous rampages.

Re:Do-gooder

[Anonymous Coward]

altruism : unselfish regard for or devotion to the welfare of others. Your post is a clear example of redefining terms to fit an argument.

Re:Do-gooder

[MattW]

I think Rand came nowhere near it. Rand seems to have a complete inability to understand altruism, or the idea of helping others at all. Its throughout her writings that she has no respect for the idea. Her "enlightened self-interest" basicly means "fuck everyone else, I got mine". Itt would eb very interesting to see Rand get a psychological evaluation (ok, she's dead, a bit hard)- I wouldn't be surprised at all to find she was a sociopath.

Have you actually read The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged? "Fuck everyone else, I got mine" doesn't really come anywhere near her philosophy. It was more like, "Everyone being self-serving ultimately leads to the greatest good, because we only get what we want by producing for others." Unless you're self-sufficient, and that's basically no one now, you get what you want through trade. The surest way to get what you want and need is to aggressively pursue your self-interest. Since people spending time working hard are far more productive than people who spend their time niggling over what society "owes" them, the net sum of productivity is drastically higher and society as a whole benefits. Her protagonists are generous. Howard Roark uses his talents to build incredibly cheap, effective, quality low-income housing; Hank Reardon is generous with his relatives. But in the former case, Roark's work is perverted by meddlers crusading for "more, more", refusing to accept his work as it is, wrecking the project and taking things back to where they were: a project they can't afford, a project of lesser utility, and ultimately a failure. And Reardon's relatives hound him relentlessly, yammering about his social duties. He's creating a bold new railway system enabling massive increases in transportation efficiency and leading to the employ of thousands, but they ride him about his greed and his uncaring until he finally throws them out. But both of them start working for the greater good. Rand's lesson isn't that generosity or charity is bad; it's that when honest generosity and charity cross with greed and corruption, such virtues are likely to be perverted. Roark's housing project and Reardon's family are just two examples of people doing good who had their good deeds demolished by unproductive self-righteous busybodies.

Rand's characters and stories are meant to be larger than life and iconoclastic. They have heroic characters with heroic talents. But they illustrate the nature of man astutely quite often.


Now there may well be a minority of people whom she does describe. But by and large, she's off the mark by a mile. The typical do-gooder isn't doing somethign because it makes him feel good- he's doing it because he thinks he's doing the right thing. He beleives it 100%. Its like religious zealots who try to convert everyone- they believe they are saving your soul. Assuming that they aren't what they claim to be wil cause you to entirely mispredict them.

That depends on the type of do-gooding. For people who are following Hillary's "for the children" crusade against violence and sex in video games, it falls into a combination of:

(1) People too lazy to take care of their own children and think the government should protect them from everything
(2) People who are so horrified by sexual content of any kind that they will try to ban anything, anywhere, any time. They've been fighting for laws to keep alcohol out of stores, pasties on nipples at tittie bars, and making it illegal to show porn without getting a credit card first. In other words, they're people with a strong feeling of moral superiority; or a terrible fear of certain vices which manifests as moral superiority.
(3) Demoagogues like Hillary, or GWB & Karl Rove. They're there to capitalize on this mass of uncritical thought and feeling, to channel it into action. "Sexual content in video games! To arms!"; let's not stop and actually think about what we're crusading for or against. It's a bit like GWB and his "Wherever people stand for liberty, we stand with you