The 64% Violent Pacman

DreamWinkle writes "During the recent Senate hearings on video game violence, one expert claimed that the ESRB underrated violent games. They went on to say that Pacman was 64% violent. To some, this means you shouldn't play Pacman; to others, it highlights what's wrong with Senate hearings. Whether a game is violent or not depends on how you classify violence, and the ESRB has the job of doing just that. They're not regulated by the government, they let the game makers recommend their own ratings, and don't play every game they rate. Is the ESRB to be trusted?"

Comments

Anyone have more information?

[Jerf]

Obviously, the context-free statement that Pac-Man is "64% violent" is pretty silly. I doubt you can really measure a game's violence that way. "Percent" implies certain mathematical properties, like Pac-Man is exactly twice as violent as a 32% violent game, or that each individual thing that contributes a given number of percentage points is equally violent, and perhaps most entertainingly, that it is impossible for a game to be more than slightly over 50% more violent than Pac-Man. (Bet you didn't know that Grand Theft Auto is only ~50% more violent than Pac-Man!)

Numbers should not be assigned to fundamentally non-numeric entities, that way lies a number of cognitive and rhetorical traps.

But I am curious, does anyone have more information on where that number may have come from precisely, however flawed it may be? Ideally, some form of "violence checklist", where you check off various attributes of the game and add up the "score".

I'm sure it will allow us to all-the-more effectively collectively mock the number, but hey, who knows, maybe the list will have some redeeming value.

Ahh, nostalgia....

[sesshomaru]

When I was in grammar school, I can remember the teachers complaining about violent videogames. "Space Invaders is just about killing things," they'd say, "And in Pac-Man you are eating them up."

I'm not kidding around here, I believe I was in 6th grade. Another thing I remember about 6th grade was live white mice being fed to the class snake for the edification of our young minds.

So, Pac-Man eating Ghosts==Evil and Wrong

Real Snake eating Real Mice==Edumacational.

Re:Nice attempt at not connecting the dots.

[Atzanteol]

Do you expect me to purchase a game and play it through before I give it to my children?

Good lord no! I fully expect you to do as little as possible and yet maintain your expectation that your children will not be exposed to things you don't care for.