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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?"
Saying Packman is "64% violet" is like saying the meaning of life is "42".
"...US Government declares eating violent."
Pac-Man is not violent. If anything, the game promotes drug usage. Popping pills in dark rooms with techno music? Come on now.
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.
Baseball -- People whack the heck out of an innocent little ball with a large wooden club.
Football -- People kick the heck out of an innocent ball.
American Football -- Two teams blitz, bomb, and violently tackle each other.
Hockey -- Nuff said.
Basketball -- People bounce an innocent ball repeatedly against a hard floor.
Pong Pong -- People whack a very small ball back and forth.
Golf -- People whack a very small ball, often wounding it and/or sending it into water/sand.
They all sound unacceptable violent to me...
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
34%... That tens column is frustrating though, I'll give you that much
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.
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
Actually, I thought he was 100% yellow.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
If Pac Man "music" sounds like techno, you're either not playing the original arcade version, or you've already popped too many pills :)
The remaining 36% percent has been determined to consist of:
15.08% squeely beeps
18.00% necrophagy
27.71% drugs
24.02% gender ambiguity
10.62% spin-offs
4.08% blue period
0.57% unknown... scratch that... tar
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
And apparently you only learned 98% Math in school :)
(34% + 64%)
It comes from in a bad edcation, particularly one lacking in how to handle data.
You can't take a (admittedly fuzzy) interval measurement, convert it into and ordinal measurement, and tally them up over a data set to create a rational measurement.
By that method, you'd decide that a three stooges is far worse than a snuff film.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Those aren't power pellets, they're frozen embryos!
basically the game consists of pac
slaughtering ghosts, dots, and bigger dots.
Ghosts are also hunting pac when he isn't
hunting them.
30% of the screen isn't available to the characters
because of the way the maze is designed. This leaves 70%
as the max violence percentage.
However, in the post 9-11 world, pac killing ghosts has been
reclassified as doing Gods work, and is seen as promoting
freedom and democracy while killing evildoers.
Integrating over time, we can see that only 64% of the game is
actually violent, and 6% of the time pac is doing gods work.
35.99999468.
I really must upgrade my old Pentium 60.
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.
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
- Charles Darwin
Hey if you, me and the grandparent poster get together, maybe the four of us can get a discount on math lessons.
you mean, parents have responsibilities? Surely not!
It's up to the congress to legislate our childs upbringing.
It's only through laws that we can teach our children what they need to learn.
80 CC D8 AF AE D3 AB 54 B7 2E CE 67 C7
It's the square of ate.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?