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Why We Fight
AsiNisiMasa writes "The Contrarian in this week's The Escapist is a brutally honest and exceptionally disturbing piece entitled 'Why We Fight.' It examines the underlying mentality behind our affinity for violent behavior in games, citing the desire for efficiency at all costs. From the article: 'Your people face famine, plague, poverty and unrest. What policies would you enact to solve these problems? (Fans of Tropico, you know how this works.) My friend's solution? Death camps. Round up the sick, the lame, the infertile, the ignorant, the useless, the unproductive and execute them.'"
I have come up with an idea years ago that I think would solve many of these issues. A free punch card.
Here's how it works:
Each citizen gets a "free punch" once a year. You can punch someone and as long as you have your free punch still there can be no lawsuits or jailtime.
See right now there is no accountability in America. People can act like assholes and hide behind suing you if you hit them, and they know it. but, if you had to wonder if the person still had their free punch card, you might not be so quick to be an asshole.
While it is not really feasable to implement in any way, I am dead serious, and it would end a lot of stupid shit that goes unpunished these days. What it boils down to is accountability and punishment, there is none anymore, and this needs to be dealt with.
http://teasphere.wordpress.com - A little spot of tea
The story in the summary reminds me of "Conscience of the King" -- a ruthless dictator killed half a colony's population during a famine so there would be enough food for the other half. (The story took place years later, after the ex-dictator had gone into hiding. Kirk and another Enterprise crewman had grown up on that colony, and recognized him in -- of all places -- an acting troupe.)
Where I live, whiskey is usually the cause.
Religion for nerds. Stuff that really matters
"My friend's solution? Death camps. Round up the sick, the lame, the infertile, the ignorant, the useless, the unproductive and execute them." Hmm?
http://teasphere.wordpress.com - A little spot of tea
When resources are scarce, we usually don't attack our own societies, we attack those next to us. Don't look for cover for your fascist ideals in "human" nature. It's just your nature. The rest of us *do* weed people out who assert it, whether it takes a censure or a war.
I think this is a work of satire. Especially if you read through the entire article to the closing statements. As I read through I couldn't believe he could think so highly of such a single-minded enterprise, and I heavily disagreed with his statement that hardcore gamers only wanted to games that allowed them to kill. Maybe the definition of hardcore has shifted in the years, but my pile of strategy titles would argue with that initial claim.
Whether it's intentional or not, this article is pointing out how shallow and narrow our options for interactivity are. Technically we have a wider spectrum of options available to us in our games today, but it's really just a wider spectrum of violence. Solutions to problems that don't involve gunning down waves of enemies seem novel in action titles now-a-days. Half-Life was a memorable action title because you could actually *talk* to characters, the first 30 minutes of the game didn't even present you with a weapon.
I hope what the author is trying to say, is that we really need to look at other ways to interact in these worlds. I like the occasional action title as much as the next guy, but by *nothing but* killing waves of mindless enemies we're not only dumbing ourselves, but making the gamer demographic look more unappealing and less intelligent from the outside as well.
This is supposed to be a new artform. Play some Katamari, people!
Wow, that was the stupidest political rant I've read recently, which is pretty bad considering how many we see on Slashdot.
I especially love this part: "A friend of mine studied political science at Yale. In one class, the professor posted a game scenario: You are the newly empowered dictator of a third-world country. Your people face famine, plague, poverty and unrest. What policies would you enact to solve these problems? (Fans of Tropico, you know how this works.) My friend's solution? Death camps. Round up the sick, the lame, the infertile, the ignorant, the useless, the unproductive and execute them.
---
The professor was overjoyed. Finally, a student saw the point of the exercise: making comprehensible what looks incomprehensible when viewed through the media, understanding how Papa Doc and Pol Pot and all their ilk come to power and why they make the decisions they do.
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My friend figured it out. He played the scenario and won. He saved the Kobayashi Maru. It should come as no surprise that he was a hardcore gamer."
That's the most retarded economic/political idea I've read in a long, long, time. It would devastate that country and put it *back* several decades, as your state destroys the people who create your nation's wealth. One of the few things that Adam Smith and Marx would agree on is that a nation's wealth comes from the productivity of its workers - and no, having the government kill off the 'unproductive' would not help at all. High unemployment is a sign of poor utilization of labor, not of defects in the population.
How well off would the U.S. have been in WWII if they had 'liquidated' all the unemployed during the depression? And did you notice how many great scientists came to the U.S. fleeing death camps like his friend proposed, to avoid being labeled as 'unproductive to society'? Some of them helped build the A-bomb, I'm sure you've heard of that? Point is, governments who make judgements about who is 'useful' to society and tries to destory those who aren't usually harm their society itself.
Notice the examples he cites - Papa Doc and Pol Pot - are not known to have improved their countries at all. Even cursory knowledge of history would clue you in to that. This is why Poli Sci people should never be trusted with anything more important than a Sim city or civilization.
Congratulations, John "Dumbass" Tynes, you've managed to give gamers an even worse reputation than before - now we're not just mindless killers, we're closet fascists waiting to have our putsch, too.
Suddenly, a new market for Punch Cards opens up. Sellers and buyers haggle over price and everyone who owns one can sell it!
;)
Rich people could own dozens of punch cards and personally punch the living daylights out of anyone they choose.
Or, better yet, they could hire professional boxers and lend them their punch cards with a contractually signed designated target. Think Mike Tyson as Hit (er Punch) Man. Talk about getting your money's worth.
Also, punch cards could be considered sexism since (on average!) women can not punch as hard as men.
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There's an easily implementable solution, repeal the murder laws.
AJLOJYQY (or BGLUAWML).
Murder is no longer a crime.
AEZAKMI
If you really want to have some fun mandate that everybody must carry a serviceable firearm at all times.
FOOOXFT
Have fun playing out your scenario.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Not a single game *I've* ever seen has declared its sim-king to be morally skilled by a moral maze of moral obstacles... maximizing the goodness of all at the sacrifice of the fewest violations of principles
You have no clue what your talking about do you? The reason games don't attempt to score things on a moral basis is because the media would have a shit fit if games took that trend. What moral set are you using? Who decides the weight of those moral choices? What's immoral? These are matters that to this day have not been agreed upon, and you want a scoring system based on it? Ridiculous. The media will latch onto any angle they can get to sell advertising. If that means they will crucify video games one minute for being to violent and teaching our children to kill, and they will crucify them the next for attempting to force a moral ruleset on them. You cannot win that fight. And companies looking for a profit don't want to pick it.
Now the fruits are falling off the tree in larger numbers (Columbine). The game industry needs to find a book somewhere (SOMEWHERE) and realize what exists outside a gun's barrel... what the consequences are for asking everyone to enjoy being a Barbarian for an hour. Rome falls.
Quit getting your numbers from the media, they are over sensationalizing things to sell advertising - that's it. Check out the numbers , especially chart 1.1 where you can clearly see the amount of fatal violence going down. The real problem lie in those children, and their parents. If you are susceptable to being turned into a killing machine from a video game, you are one weak willed fool. If your parents didn't teach you the difference between pretend and reality, then they suck as a whole.
Don't give me the bullshit that "Everyone Knows Its A Game". The evidence is mounting high right in that article that more than a few take the metaphor very seriously... and our current political shift... blowing off debt and lives without care... show it is growing indeed. Shallow, mindless politics from shallow mindless ethics.
Everyone does know it's a game. Just becuase someone takes the metaphor seriously doesn't mean that they will actually go out and kill everyone who disagrees with them. Rational people don't do that. They realize that in order to make the world as they see fit, that would probably be the most efficient and quickest way, but probably not the BEST way. Even you are exhibiting behavior, unilaterally deciding what politics are shallow and what ethics are mindless. In a free society if somebody wants to watch football all day, ruin their credit, and vote the way they want - they can. You seem to abhor that behavior, and allude to anyone who behaves in this manner as inferior. Am I to assume that if given the chance to change things you wouldn't? And how would you realistically do that without becoming a facist?
All the games referred to are huge, complex body count simulation systems to tell a story.
That's the point, they are cathartic. I love my tactical stealth games and squad shooters because I NEVER WANT TO ACTUALLY DO THAT SHIT! I would like a decent simulation though where the only person who gets hurt is a non-existent internet man. A bunch of ones and zeros fabricated from someones mimagination and brought to life through a console conduit. To say that this type of material in the hands of an adult is going to be the downfall of our rome is assanine. Rome didn't fall because the actors were putting on violent or Facist plays. It fell because a small handful of power weilders tried to manipulate the whole for thier own gain - and that mentality did not come from any media they ingested.
Pol Pot wasn't killing people to reduce famine and disease, he was killing people, so he would have a communist utopia of farmers and workers, void of intellectuals and enemies. Dictators are not rational. They don't do a cost benefit analysis, that's why they are called dictators, they dictate, there is no consensus among their underlings on the best course of action. Besides, non facist governments kill and commit genocide as much as their non facist counterparts.