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How Videogames Became the Bogeyman
Tom Leupold, writing for the Inside Bay Area site, explores why videogames have become an American bogeyman. Talking with prof. Dmitri Williams, he discusses the rise, fall, and resurrection of games as a part of mainstream society. From the article: "Today, as games have once again infiltrated the mainstream, a growing number of adults are again enjoying gaming and understand there are games that are appropriate for different age groups. But that hasn't stopped crusaders from trying to censor them in the name of 'saving' the children. Williams, 34, said those under 38 have a different view of games than their elders. Most have grown up with games and, like television for the previous generation, games are embedded in their culture. "
See: How Rock'n'Roll Music Became the Bogeyman in 1950. Bunch of wound-up old people that don't like change.
First it was radio... then it was television, rock and roll and comic books. After that it was video games, rap, heavy metal, and goth music. Now it's the internet and more realistic games.
Message to parents! If your child screws up, it is probably your fault! Sucks, doesn't it?
Religion for nerds. Stuff that really matters
'Cause all their Lemmings died.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
Games and Movies and Music oh my!
Games and Movies and Music oh my!
We can't be exposing our youth to violence and smut now can we?
Won't somebody please Think Of The Children?
Nobody under the age of 18 is allowed to read this post.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I'm willing to be it's because television, music a movie industry interests are lobbying our representatives to place restrictions on the games industry, which they see as a threat. The games industry just isn't ponying up enough money to counterract the rest of the entertainment industry's lobbying dollars and stay off the regulation radar, and now they're paying the price. It's a terrible way to run a country, but people in power are making too much money to change it...
"I like systems, their application excepted", George Sand (French)
That should read: "I'm willing to bet it's..."... Caught it too late.
"I like systems, their application excepted", George Sand (French)
Williams, 34, said those under 38 have a different view of games than their elders.
I think he needs to go higher than 38, I'm 41 and I too grew up with video games. I play HL2 deathmatch on a server where the majority of players are older than me.
"Nobody knows the age of the human race, but everybody agrees that it is old enough to know better." - Unknown
I do remember a campaign to restrict sales of adult-themed games to adults and a profound distrust of developers who pushed the limits of the M-rated game to protect their sales through Walmart.
If you want to know why videogames became the Bogeyman, you only have to look at adolescent idiocies like Hot Coffee and Super Columbine Massacre RPG!
It is not Fallout, or System Shock, Resident Evil or Half-Life, or any of a hundred other significant, popular, M-rated games published within the last ten years that make the headlines.
It is the handful of games from the handful of publishers we all know are aiming for the flashpoint.
Wait until the Wii drops...imagine small children maniacally hacking their way through hordes of enemies with a machete, FarCry style. Their parents will most assuredly be outraged and write obscen letters to nintendo and ubisoft for creating such a monstrousity. I find it humorous that they would feel so entitled after having disregarded the large 'Mature Audiences' rating on the box and placed it into their preteens' wii little hands.
Ah yes, first it was The Novel, then it was Radio, then Movies, then Comics, then Television, then it was Lenny Bruce, and now it's video games. Anything that is new and exciting to the younger generation (AKA what wasn't around for the previous generation) is evil simply because it is new and untested. The game The Texas Chainsaw Massacre for the Atari, which had no blood and only showed death as children flipping upside-down before disappearing, caused a massive storm of controversy for all of two days before everyone started speculating about the end of the fad.
Thanks to Nintendo, the fad has now become a staple of entertainment and everyone's left wondering why. This confusion quickly leads to hatred and FUD which brings us up to date. And now you know the rest of the backstory....
Good day.
Back in my time it was Dungeons and Dragons. You'd watch the news and see these "exposes" on the kids who are LEARNING TO LOVE SATAN because of the EVIL D&D game. Oh yeah, and Satanism was also a dire threat to our kids. Oh and Styx and Kiss too. Then 2 Live Crew. My neighbor tells me that in his day it was Bob Dylan that was symptomatic of evil.
The vast majority of what goes on in the world, from legislation to war, can be attributed to people's desire to control other people's actions.
I used to carry a bottle of whiskey for snake bite. And two snakes. -Nefarious Wheel
Take for example, The Whole Nine Yards. For those who haven't seen this movie, it's a compedy. There is nothing beyond comical violence in it. There *is* some nudity when Amada Peet is topless.
Now, take a look at the ratings. Pretty much every single country except the US has it rated for Young Adults 13-14. The US has it rated "R", which means it is barred from anyone under 17.
I will let you draw your own conclusions.
People would rather blame than take responsiblity.
What can we blame for the lower per capita crime rates?
Particularly when we consider some things weren't crimes, or weren't widely reported earlier.
Yes we have had graphic headline grasping crimes lately, but there has always been something. I'm sure there were pissed off kids taking swords or clubs to each other before they invented guns.
...What videogames were Duane R Morrison playing that prompted him to kill Emily Keyes in her school in Colorado? What video games made into a sexual abuser?
Yes, games are a terrible waste of our time and money, and a contributor to drinking, institutionalized violence, and selling sex!
... ooops!
It sucks billions and billions out of foolish peoples' pockets...
More riots, beatings, and other assorted violence take place because of games!
During games, people are exposed to repeated messages selling them alcohol and sex as well!
Did I mention that hundreds of pro and amateurs are permanently injured or killed playing these "harmless" games?
In fact, there are numerous studies proving that these games suck money away from vital education programs and game-players often score lower on standardized tests!
Yes, they are evil.
Wait a sec, we *are* talking about sports aren't we???
crappy triceratops
It seems like the media and some parents just point the finger to anything that there child loves. While I never enjoyed it, Pokemon was a good example. Some Christians found it to be Satanic and animal lovers found it supported animal cruelty. However if these people just sat down an watched an eposide of the anime, I'm sure that they would find that it was a good (as in good and evil) show.
You can usually find those claims at the end of some drama. Some teenager goes bonkers, goes on a killing spree, kills himself or just rapes the girl next door, THEN, and only then, you get those witchhunts for the culprit.
... in the 20s, that aweful dances ... in the 30s, the damn radio ... in the 40s, that aweful swing music ... in the 50s, that godforsaken rock music ... in the 60s, that hippy music ... in the 70s, that disco music ... in the 80s, that devil's spawn D&D ... in the 90s, those gangster-rappers ... and today, violent video games
The parents? How DARE you! Those poor people gotta live with what their son did now! They cannot be the ones to blame. So it has to be...
Glad we found a culprit.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Today, as pot ha(s) once again infiltrated the mainstream, a growing number adults are again enjoying pot ... But that hasn't stopped crusaders from trying to censor them in the name of 'saving' the children. Williams, 34, said those under 38 have a different view of marijuana than their elders. Most have grown up with ganja and, like television for the previous generation, pot (is) embedded in their culture.
Off the topic of video games but on the topic of blaming everyone but the parents.
We are all just people.
Very well said. Wish I had mod points today.
-:sigma.SB
WARN
THERE IS ANOTHER SYSTEM
I went to Canada a few years back to visit friends. I stayed the night in Seattle because, hey, it's a long drive. At the hotel, there was some crappy movie on broadcast tv with Richard Gere and either Darryl Hannah or that other actress I always think is Darryl Hannah. As coincidence, a week later I saw the same movie on some broadcast channel in Vancouver. In the movie, two things of note for this conversation occurred:
1) Darryl Hannah got topless for about 3 seconds.
2) Some guy got hit in the face with an axe.
In the US, #1 was censored, #2 wasn't. In Canada, you got the boobs but no axe.
One of many reasons I currently have documents filed with Immigration Canada.
there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.
I'm an Old Person (tm), and a gamer. I've been doing it since line-printer lunar lander games on mainframes. Pac-man is newfangled :). I'm as against this idiotic blame shifting as anybody.
Blame it on stupid people, instead, some of whom happen to be old. We're not all like that.
I can't speak for everyone, but speaking for me and my friends, of which I'm the youngest at 26, we love the M rated games and buy lots. GTA: SA rules. Also turns out I can get a lot more games now than when I was a teen since I hold my own job. I'm not saying I don't buy lower rated games, Civ 4 is another favourite of mine, but there's tons of good M rated games. I don't buy based on rating, but I wind up with plenty of them all the same.
Rock and roll used to evoke similar hostility. But that's changed, as rock moved from rebellion to senility and lost its political connection.
It's suprising how little hostility hip-hop and rap evoked, considering that much of '90s rap was about killing people. ("Devil, to gangbanging there's a positive side and the positive side is this--sooner than later the brothers will come to Islam, and they will be the soldiers for the war; what war, you ask; Armageddon; ha, ha, ha, ha, ha" -- "Armageddon"; RBX, The RBX Files, 1995, Premeditated Records, © Warner Brother Records, Time Warner, USA.) But hip-hop and rap switched from guns to "bling", thereby encouraging shopping. "According to American Brandstand, a Web site that tracks brand names on the Billboard top singles chart, of the 111 songs that made the Billboard Top 20 in 2003, 43 mentioned a product; 84 different brands were named."
So we can expect that as in-game advertising becomes more pervasive, media criticism of games will become muted.
Even more interesting is that most politicians love sports, or at least pretend to.
"When the atomic bomb goes off there's devastation...but when the atomic bong goes off there's celebraaaaation!"
Two words: Jack Thompson.
The Super Columbine Massacre RPG was designed to attract media attention (i.e. it was a media whore, just like you know-who). In the same manner of JFK reloaded, it causes a massive amount of "omg-evil" reaction to something that is ultimatly minor - in the same way that Cecil, the brooding Dark Knight, has to prove his goodness in a quest that is ultimatly meaningless in the grand scheme of things.
Hot Coffee was not intended to be released. Also, the video game that it appears for was developed in Europe, not America - wherein the culture has more tolerance for sex stuff but less tolerance for violence. It's no different than a Canadian accusing all American stores of selling "prohibited" automatics and handguns because they are banned in Canada. Regardless, it closed off a loophole in the rating system that excluded content that is not available on the disk.
Hot Coffee is also tame compared to Duke3D.
Also, your list was missing I'm O.k., a video game designed by Jack Thompson that is just as violent as the Super Columbine Massacre RPG.
GTA3, is rated 'M', which is 17+. If anyone is emotional enough to react negativly to this kind of content to a degree where they want games banned, they are not 'M'ature. (A person emotional enough to react negativly to not like the game is A-OK.)
Wait just a minute!
Super Columbine Massacre RPG is a satire about games and gameplay conventions, and it is also an attempt to encourage serious discourse about a socio-cultural event in the context of a game. It is decidedly *not* an "adolescent idiocy."
No, it's the fact that the people who legislate the games aren't the ones who play them. They also don't realize that "Hot Coffee" wasn't made by Rockstar Games, "GTA" was. "Hot Coffee" was something some bored programmer threw in there as an Easter egg for his own enjoyment.
www.linuxpenguin.net
"...it is hard not to conclude that video games are just the latest in a series of bugbears of parents who have become frustrated and frightened about how violent American society has become. In sympathy with those parents, I truly wish that video games, TV, rock n' roll, the nickelodeon, and wireless radio receivers were at fault, because then we could just have banned these things in sequence and our problems would have been solved long ago."
-- "Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games," p. 64
As others have mentioned, this is an old saw made new.
At one point, it was it was rock 'n' roll, or jazz for the elite rebels. In the '60s it was pot and long hair. Acid (courtesy of the CIA) has been used as a target at times, as has heavy metal, movies, cartoons, video games, and now online chat/blogging communities.
On the one hand, they're all scapegoats. Someone is always looking for a _cause_ for evil or deviant behaviour. Bad messages for the sake of entertainment are meant as entertainment, and will always be there. It's only the broken psyches that believe in the message or take it seriously.
However, that's not the entire story. There's at least a legitimate cause to question the content. On the one hand, all of these things preached rebellion, and thats a disrupting influence on the norm. Destructive rebellion is generally not a good thing. However, one should also look at the specific details. Elvis' gyrations made girls faint in the aisles at concerts. Did they encourage promiscuitity? Perhaps, perhaps not--the message was still fairly implicit. Compare that to these lyrics:
I see you windin n grindin up on that pole,
I kno u see me lookin' at you and you already know
I wanna fuck you, you already know, i wanna fuck you, you already know
Hard to mistake that for anything innocent.
Likewise with movies. Psycho might have inspired dementia in an already-unbalanced individual. Compare that to something like the remade Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which is more like an instruction manual.
The messages are getting more graphic, and more explicit. It's wrong to point at them as the cause of problems because it still comes down to individual responsibility. However, the medium and the content aren't totally free of blame either. Makers should have some sense of responsibility. However, they don't and they won't--money is money, and the bigger the audience, the more money there is to be made.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
There are three problems with this argument.
The first is in Rockstar's disastrous PR which claimed that Hot Coffee was a third-party mod.
The second is the fact that mini-game could be unlocked in the PC and two console pressings of GTA:SA. That strains coincidence when you have already been caught in a lie.
The third is that you will not be allowed any excuse if you release AO content into the wild. Mark Twain had to pull a first print run of "Huckleberry Finn" because an unknown engraver made pornographic changes to an illustration.
the video game that it appears for was developed in Europe, not America - wherein the culture has more tolerance for sex stuff but less tolerance for violence
Rockstar North was based in Scotland, I believe.
But this is precisely why they ran into trouble. You can't exploit the gang violence of the American inner city in a game without expecting a reaction from the inner city itself. Least of all when your core market is the suburban, adolescent, white male.
Rockstar was blind to the realities of the inner city. Blind to the realites of suburbia. Where it is the instincts and passions of the soccer mom which govern, not the gamer.
Thompson is a distraction. Insignificant in the larger scheme of things.
But a gamer cannot afford to ignore Mrs. Clinton, who is very strong in these very different environments.
"Hmmm...Baby, the other, other white meat!"
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
A bored programmer inflitrated the Rockstar headquarters, set himself up as a regular employee, and stealthily inserted content into the gold master that was never meant to be in there. HE USED MAGIC!!! HOW COULD THEY HAVE KNOWN!?!?!?!?
Death and danger are my various breads and various butters.
Video games, tv violence, music messages--these have little to do with today's societal problems. Accountability is today's major concern. Three examples:
1. The common acceptability of divorce--people don't have to hold themselves accountable for being careful about selecting a mate and then they don't hold themselves accountable for maintaining the relationship.
2. The lack of accountability for good parenting--I have many friends who 'require' dual income to maintain the Escalade in the driveway and the nice home in the richest neighborhood. So both parent's go off to work and leave the majority of the raising of the children to daycare centers. They comment to my wife and I that they wish they could manage as we do, with me working and her staying home to care for the kids during the work week...but they can't 'afford' to do so.
3. Bankruptcy without accountability--you can claim bankruptcy and the government doesn't hold you accountable for your mistakes, nor do they force you to learn how to manage your expenses. I know someone who has claimed bankruptcy twice. This person now makes a low-to-mid income wage, has a monthly alimony and childcare payment, but just purchased a $30,000 car on credit 6 months after the bankruptcy. The government doesn't restrict the amount allowed for a car or home purchase just after a bankruptcy and the bankrupt individual is doomed to repeat the same mistakes.
Videogames are just another in the long line of topics that talking head politians use to campaign for family values. Whatever draws the most attention is where you'll find these people, if some kid kills his abusive father but has a copy of Vice City in his house then it's obviously the videogame's fault [sarcasm]. However let me get one thing strait just because videogames have no direct connection with violent behavior doesn't mean some twelve year should be playing a game like Manhunt, on the other hand it also means that videogames can't simply be a media for companies to exploit the most base of human nature. Sure game makers have the right to create whatever the hell they want, but they also have a responsibilty to others within the gaming community to try and push games to a greater stage in modern culture, so that people can finally get past stigma of thinking videogames are just kids.
id you actually pay attention to Hot Coffee or SCMR? Hot Coffee required players to download and install a mod, the content was not available to players who simply purchased and played the game. There was no "cheat code" you could enter to get the content. SCMR was an attempt at serious social commentary, it emphasized imagry the killer's deaths, as well as imagry of the mourning families of those slain. It specifically didn't show images of those murdered.
Congrats: you've bought into the misinformation. You've passed judgement on things you didn't know and erroneously concluded that some unusual outliers are worth focusing on.
Completely unlike people who create books, comic books, film, music, or movies aiming for the flashpoint. We got over our irrational fear these other forms of media, this too shall pass. These days if someone makes an offensive movie or publishes an offensive book, the specific work is criticized, but people manage to avoid running around blaming the medium for the message.
Search 2010 Gen Con events
Post-natal abortion.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
What the fuck, I have karma to burn...
Currently we're working on pooping in the potty.
This is one of many reasons I will never have kids. Somehow, giving birth, or becoming a sperm donor, slowly but surely transforms one from the kind of person I might actually want to talk to into the kind of person who posts on Slashdot about their kid's progress in the taking-a-shit department and uses phrases like "age appropriate" in everyday conversation. As life becomes more routine and mundane the brain atrophies, conservative tendencies sprout and grow, and within 3 years of producing a child, the parents are agonizing over the fact that they're turning into carbon-copies of their own parents. I'd rather be dead than sleepwalk through a life of PTA meetings and play-dates.
Someone's going to have to explain to me some day how, exactly, swearing "hurts" kids. Or how nudity or knowledge of sexuality "hurts" kids. I'm willing to bet one of two things: either no honest, unbiased study of such things has ever shown any such harm, or that any harm shown is the result of puritanical societal attitudes that, despite being wholly irrational, are so deeply ingrained that psychological harm can actually result from contravening them. In either case, the solution is to become more, not less, permissive about these things until those archaic remnants of Judeo-Christian authoritarian morality fade away. We'll all be better off for it.
If people want to be oversensitive about something, they should try violence. It truly is abhorrant and harmful. Bitch to the FCC about the torture and killing on TV, not Janet Jackson's nipple.
tfinniga, I'm sorry to single you out like this. You may well be the kind of person I'd enjoy talking to, parental status notwithstanding. But your post reminded me once again of a phenomenon I see everywhere, all the time, and it bugs me, so I rant about it. I find myself bugged by more and more these days, so rather than just accept it all with a sigh of resignation, I exercise what free-speech rights the Bush administration has left me and I say something. Maybe a lot of people disagree with me, but I'm OK with that. I still intend to stand up for, and speak out about, what I believe in.
The only difference for those 'above 38' and white supremacist is target of discrimination! The only solution is to lobby laws that prohibit such behaviour!! WE NEED CONSTITUTION REFORM NOW!!!
He was an employee but he was probably bored at work one day and put that in there, the other guys thought it was pretty cool but didn't want the boss to see it so they disabled it so no one would know (unless they hacked it, which is what they had to do to enable Hot Coffee).
www.linuxpenguin.net
What? I've had a severe unipolar depression for 11 years, I play very dark doom-metal, and I listen to depressive music all the time. (Try Avrigus for a taste.)
I never hurt myself because of music...
Making laws based on opinions that stem up from false informations leads to witch hunts.
Maybe you'd feel cheerier if you listened to happier music? Come on, lets sing the Mario theme together! Do do do, do do do do, do do do-do-do-do-do do do do...