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Sex, Violence, Tension & Video Games
simoniker writes "Gamasutra has just posted an interview with author Gerard Jones, subtitled 'Sex, Violence, Tension and Comic Books,' in which the writer of 'Killing Monsters' talks about violence and games eloquently. When asked: 'What do you think it is in your work that resonates with the gaming community?', Jones comments: 'Video games have been so much under attack recently, that I think there's a certain nervousness. Most people in this business are very pleasant and non-confrontational and the fact that they are being reviled as the causes of crime, causes of violence, is disturbing. On the one hand, I think people want to know how to respond to those criticisms. But on the other hand, I think there's some genuine anxiety that maybe games have a bad side, maybe there is a problem, and how do we deal with any guilt or fear?' He goes on to suggest of attacks on gaming: "I would say now we're kind of at the tail end. If games continue to push boundaries, particular ones could come under attack. A lot of it's just the medium being around long enough that people have realized the world hasn't gone to hell.""
The thing that always leaps to my mind, and they touched on it in tfa, is the persecution of comics in the late 40's early 50's. they were blamed for everything, from making kids more violent, to promoting homosexuality (all those guys in their tights with their little boy sidekicks), to promoting Communism...Not that everything wasn't accused of promoting Communism right then, but that's beside the point. They had congressional hearings, they came up with standards for "decency", the works.
Flash forward to the 80's when comics started going really adult in this country for the first time. Really dark, gory, and real. Congressional hearings? No. New standards? No.
And why not? Because they were just comic books. The same people who had read them as kids were running the country, and blew off the concerns of the few as unwarranted. Comics had been around forever, and nobody'd seen any ill effects, so what was the big deal? Not worth getting in a flap over.
The biggest thing against games right now is how new they are. You get these hugely violent movies, above and beyond the pale, and no one cares. Why? Because people grew up with movies. You understand whats going on there, there is no mystery...You can flash back to all the risque crap you watched in your youth, and know that it didn't warp you forever.
In ten, twenty, thirty years at the outside, video games will be completely accepted, and no one will give a damn when the new super realistic holographic blood & guts game comes out...Till then though, we're just going to have to suck it up, because the old fogies are still running things and they lack clue.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
These are a few of my favorite things.
We've seen it with every ban in existance. It is either impossible or inhuman to exercise orrectly, and it never kills what it intends to ban. Instead the world evolves and the ban is ridiculed, along with those supporting it. Why? Because it is an artificial attempt to lead people into streets they want to break out of. And eventually they do.
This is of course no argument for/against the reasoning behind the ban. I'm all for more educational and more natural games that do not involve sex and gore, but I also want to give sex and gore it's rightfull place in our human existance. I think sex is educational, as it tells something about the boundaries of our perversities. I think gore is eductional, as it tells something about the boundaries of our fears. I think young people are looking for those boundaries and eventually, with our without help of their parents, will discover those in some way. Trying to hold these things back from them is keeping them from maturity in those fields. Declaring a ban is probably more distubing than anything else.
With great power comes great electricity bills.
I am quite certain that the depths of my imagination are far more disturbing than anything these graphic video games can portray.
Chopping, bludgeouning, burning, crushing, eating corpses, seducing/being seduced by succubi and nymphs, looting shops and killing shopkeepers and soldiers, summoning demons in hell, you name it.
Very little of this kind of stuff actually goes on in these graphic video games, and when it does, it is *never* anywhere near as violent as what goes on in my imagination when I am playing a game like Nethack. Video cannot even begin to represent this level of madness.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
"People have killed each other. People are killing eath other. People will continue to kill each other. Class dismissed."
A good history lesson indeed. Not sure if video games cause violence as much as humans simply being violent... like many carnivorous mammals. But maybe video games make people less violent. Perhaps I don't need to beat people up because I get my kicks watching red pixels. It's hard to tell which way things go, but none the less society needs something specific to blame when problems arise.
I am a bit different in that I don't like finding different scape goats for unproven problem sources. Instead I just blame president Bush for everything. Divorce? Bush. Migrains? Bush. Obese? Bush. Wow, this is much easier then speculating on who/what is the real culprit... since most people don't guess the usual correct answer - oneself.
Right now, the Nintendo Wii is wooing the very people who have for so long opposed video games, on whatever grounds. Soccer moms around the country are picking up Wii-motes, playing the games, and having incredible amounts of fun. Along with dad, grandpa, and grandma.
I have a friend whose retirement-age parents, who have never touched a video game before, were introduced to the Wii - and four hours later, it was my friend who had to call it quits because they tired him out. Soon the video game market will reach far beyond the young-single-male demographic and into the general population, at which point people will figure out that video games are no more or less harmful than movies, or even books. People may just finally realize that perhaps if they won't take 6 year old Johnny to see Silence of the Lambs, they probably shouldn't let him play Resident Evil either.
It won't be very long before the anti-video game nuts fade into oblivion.
When I was the lead tester for Backyard Baseball GameCube at Atari in 2003, I was accused by my roommate's mother of ruining the lives of kids who sit indoors to play a baseball video game instead of going outside to play the real thing. When I pointed out that my parents kicked my ass out the door even though I had an Atari 2600 and a baseball video game, and that it's the parents responsibility to raise their kids instead of the government or video games, she got mad. The next day she plucked all the petals off of my petunias in the front yard to make potpourri. Go figure.
In California, we have our governor, the Terminator, coming out against violent video games. Arnold does have his amusing moments.
But to really push the critic's buttons in the US, you have to have sex. No game publisher in the US would publish the stuff Illusion in Japan sells. "Battle Raper", "Sexy Beach", and "Artificial Girl".
Typical bugfix report: "Breast slider 1.5 download: With Ver1.0 was not possible, "it rubs", the chest and the nipple "it picks", "you play with the both hands", and so on colorful action was added. With adding these, expression conduct voice of the girl substantially power rise! The skill which thinks the girl and the breast you are shy please do freely. In addition, with Ver1.5 as been able to look at the girl to every nook and cranny, it reached the point where polygon of rear side of [bichimatsuto] [bichichiea] goes out."
Illusion apologizes for the delay in shipping the "Sexy Santa" module, which slipped to January 9, 2007. They're also having a contest - best sexy screenshot wins a microwave oven.
It's all so normal over there.
50 years ago when I was a kid, we had cap guns and air riffles. My brother, Mike, I and two American Indians, Danny and Harry, used to play cowboys and Indians. We had a one square block area with lots of building, trees and brush to hunt each other in. Anyone shot had to stay dead for a fifty count. Our parents bought us the quite realistic-looking toy guns (much better than what you find today). No one thought twice about this; it was just clean, wholesome fun. However, in most places today, if kids were to try this there would be a SWAT team dispatched and the parents would wind up in forced counsilling. And it is my generation doing this. Sad, but true.
I also like to point out that in the late 60's, when I was in High School, the rules regarding weapons were as follows: (1) All guns were to be checked in at the office before school and picked up after school except during hunting season when you were allowed to keep an unloaded rifle in your school locker. (2) Students were not allowed to carry switch blades longer than six inches or fixed-blade knives longer than twelve inches. There were no rules regarding pocket knives. In fact, you were more likey to get detention for carrying a squirt gun than a real one (but only if you squirted the Vice Principal after he squirted you).
How did we ever get into this sorry state?
HAHAHAHA, thanks for that.
Why?
From what I see, the media makes claims that games such as Bully and Grand Theft Auto are causing problems with society. Granted, the GTA is designed to promote immoral behaviour within the game, as most players expect it necessary to do some crimes to advance through the game (while at the same time, trying not to get five stars).
However, in most of the cases displayed by the media, the situation is usually:
- Overblown, such as the infamous "beating the hooker" in GTA - where such behaviour adds stars and very rarely is of use.
- An advertisement - 25 to Life was designed to parasitically exploit the media controversy.
- Moot, because the games in question are already rated for adults - no developer should have to tone their game designed to be rated 'M' just so that it can be played by teenagers.
- Inconsistant - people decry games at random for being violent, but none are as serious as Solder of Fortune which implements dismemberments, and various death animations (including hits to the neather region.) Likewise, 'R' rated films are given more leinant treatement.
- and/or Incorrect - Arlene wasn't named after a character in Doom.
If it weren't for the last two points, I would say something about Red-Pixel Syndrome.
The result is whenever I see an US state trying to pass a violent-video-game law, I immediatly treat it as a joke (especially when they know full well it won't survive the First.) This is in contrast to laws that were passed in Canada, which I agreed with since they brought video games on-par with other media.
...so lets legalize smoking ads aimed at kids. Afterall, if behaviour and personality aren't affected by what people see and hear, then who cares about advertising laws.
To the people who think video violence doesn't matter: how do you know this? I am not a psych expert, so I cannot say anything with authority, but intuitively it seems a steady diet of narcissitic, solitary, violence oriented activity might affect child personality development.
"parental action groups in America tend to worry more about sex, and about violence in films that look "innocent."
They are obviously not doing very well, as I haven't seen a movie aimed at kids in the theaters that did not have what most would consider inappropriate material in a very long time. Heck, in Shrek 2, they had a guy giving himself a hummer in the castle courtyard. Now, I'm all for blowjobs in movies, and I am pretty liberal about what I would allow my kid to watch, but many of the "kids" movies today are only a step below Porky's. My only problem with this is that they are slipping it in. If a kid sees sexual content in an movie aimed at adults, their parents are aware of it, and then choose how to address it. Either by talking, or not letting the kid watch those movies. In kids movies, most of the populous seems to think that for some reason kids do "get it" so just about anything goes.
If there is not the fear of being "killed" or "busted" then there is no rush. I agree violence can be more or less explicit, based upon the amount of graphic material, blood & guts, etc. but what we do we see on TV, in movies and in real life? How can we censor games when we don't censor the porno shop in the middle of town, suggestive late-night TV "phone sex line" ads or put all explicit magazines on lockdown? UFC, "50 best beat downs", "Top killing machines" etc. are shown on TV all the time. There are pictures of mass graves in our high-school text books. Games are just (generally) light-hearted, good-spirited fantasy and sport based on real life.
"Most people in this business are very pleasant and non-confrontational "
.... like those kids dont just download the games off the internet anyways.
talk to the people who got bought out by EA. or the people who work for vid card mfgrs. or people who work for gaming 'journals'. the industry is a very tough one, and people get treated badly all the time. this statement is nuts.
secondly, though, im quite tired of people crying abut the 'attack on games'. games are a huge industry. they are not oppressed. gamers have enough disposable income to throw down hundreds of bucks a year on entertainment - they are also not oppressed.
subjecting young children to hours and hours of simulated violence and/or sex is to be questioned by rational people. do studies on it. dont just dump it in kids laps and say everyone who questions it is a control freak nutjob.
if games didnt change the way we think, the military would not be using them to recruit people.
and i dont understand why its so 'controversial' to claim that your mental model of the world might be influenced by the models introduced in fiction, whether it is books, stories, movies, comic books, or video games.
the model of the world in most video games is that violence is a good way to solve problems. this doesnt mean youre gonna pick up a gun and go kill someone. but it might have something to do with penny arcade being pro-iraq-invasion and pro-bush. i dont know. someone should study it.
another thing i notice about intense gamers is they get really, really, really angry about anyone who even asks these sorts of questions. as if someone has ever even come close to 'taking away' their games. it hasnt happened, and its not going to happen. as time goes on, games get more and more violent, culminating with the simulated murder of prostitutes for money in GTA3. i mean, where is this mythical 'war on games' having won so many battles?
all people are asking for is a little research, asking a few questions, getting some honest answers from science. the only countries that ban certain games are australia and nazi germany
the whole 'persecution complex' of these upper middle class white people really scares me. you arent persecuted, and you arent under attack. you own and rule most of the wealth on this planet.
and yet anytime anyone wants to ask some basic questions about something like violence, video games, and children, you go off on some spittle filled rant about freedom and your rights.
its really nonsense. it makes you look like a bunch of nuts and extremists.
it makes me wonder if violent video games destroy a persons ability to consider alternate points of view to their own, and to step back and take perspective and apply reason and logic to problems instead of blunt instruments of mockery, screaming, and claiming oppression.
My parents wouldn't let me watch the "A-Team" or "Dukes of Hazzard" because they thought they were too violent and sexy. To this day, I have not turned out violent. Or particularly sexy, dammit.
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that allows kids 18 years old to be sent to areas they never heard of (Iraq) to fight and die and get mangled/permanently disabled for a cause that has little to do with self-defense (or anything rational, really).
But god forbid that they have any alcohol before they are 21. Or see a violent movie or play a violent game before they are 18 (and get a taste of the hell that is war/violence. Even if they think it is fun at the time).
I sometimes think our culture and priorities are schizophrenic. Sometimes I know it is.
No real point, just a rant, asides the fact that maybe we oughta see video games as the advanced pretend violence it replaces - playing cowboys and indians with replica guns, and later GI Joes or comics. Maybe it is bad, but don't make a medium the culprit with something that has been ingrained in us for a long time. I have to laugh when the crappy 11 o-clock news reporter with his/her seriousness put on the for the camera earnestly "reports" about the dreaded violence in these games, just after the same channel showed blood/guts/gore on CSI or some cops show.
I don't get why these anti-video_game forces get the powerful voice they do, other than the TV channels themselves hating videogames since it is conditioning a generation of kids to prefer active entertainment over passive entertainment, or so my theory goes.
But then, internet > games in this arena (as far as time consumed per average person), and maybe that is why there are the number of TV news scares about the internet is far higher than on games lately.
Hello all, I decided to finally write this down in response to some people asking me why I enjoy immeasurably violent video games and movies. This explanation is written using the game "Manhunt" as it's primary example, mainly because of it's subject matter (which can best be described as a "snuff video game"). PLEASE read it in it's entirety before responding, it's easy to think i'm making an uninformed point without reading the whole thing; I explain EVERY viewpoint I express.
Think about this, folks.
This "game" is not about sneakin' around, trying to see what the biggest mess you can make is. It's about much more than that. This game is in direct relation to the JTHM (Johnny the Homicidal Maniac by Jhonen Vasquez, for the uninitiated...) in all of us, the little black beast that we keep to ourselves.
Ever say "I wish he were dead", or "he makes me so angry I want to kill him"? Of course you have. Everyone has. This game is the digital manifestation of those thoughts. It's not about suffocating some guy, or creating the pink mist... This game does one thing and one thing only: it asks you a question. A very simple question to state, and frankly a very simple question to answer:
Is your black beast fictional or real?
Do you have a little playground for the demon inside of you, someplace it can go and harmlessly let out it's frustrations and rage? Or are you so jaded and blind that you cannot discern the difference between reality and fantasy?
Frankly, if you enjoy this game (along with ANY violent video game or movie, regardless of it's subject or presentation) you are not sick. You are normal. You are provided an outlet for the most primal emotions that you, as a human, have. Your most carnal instincts. If you don't like this game because the graphics suck, or the control is wonky, fine. BUT. If you despise this game because you say it's "too violent" and "unneccessary", and "too realistic", and whatever else, guess what: YOU are the sick one. That's not to say that you can't see it as being gross, or that you don't like it because you supposidly don't like violence (then why do you slow down to look at car accidents, hmm?) What it means is that if you say that violent things such as this push sane and "normal" people into being murderers in real life...well, I'm sorry, but you are wrong.
The first step anyone takes to becomming a murderer in real life is not being able to tell the difference between reality and fantasy. Manhunt is fantasy. Does that mean something similar has not happend/could not happen? No. But your experience and memories of it happening are. It's a video game. It is designed to be a playground for your little black beast.
If you take it as being anything more serious than that...well, turn yourself in now.
You have to allow the little monster to come out every now and then and release it's frustrations. If you don't, you risk becomming a quivering mass of nervous and dangerous flesh. What better place to do this than in a simulated environment with simulated violence where the only things harmed are your eyes for staring at the screen?
Living With a Nerd
I'd highly recommend Bring Back the A-Team. Here's the first part.
There are many tongues to talk, and but few heads to think. -Victor Hugo
From my experience, sex and violence RELIEVES tension.
This whole games are too violent thing is absurd. Parents who demonize games like this need to work on their parenting skills instead of wasting their time trying to censor things. Im a product of divorced parents, grew up playing all sorts of violent video games and watching movies like full metal jacket, colors, basic instinct etc. and i turned out ok, i got my education and now have a great job and working on a family of my own. i not a thief, or a murderer or any sort of psycho / felon. Why? Easy my parents did their job. My father may have been a little nuts taking me to see "Colors" when i was 10 years old but he did teach me that those are bad things that happen in real life. What difference does it make to play GTA and steal some cars and do horrible things in the game when in the news you hear of people killing kids just to steal their video game console, or of how many people died in some war? If you dont want kids to play violent video games then thats your decision, nobody is making you buy your kids anything. Besides it will be a loooooooooong time before video games can produce the type of violence us humans can make in real life. Should 8 year olds be playing GTA? Probably not, but its the parents responsibility, after all its your kid. And think of this, what do you prefer; for some stressed out guy to go shoot it out in some online session of halo so he can vent? or should he bring his rifle to the post office and vent there...?
A game is supposed to be fun, and yes, an escape from reality, but I see no need to portray sex or out and out murder, even in a game. This is not pushing the limits, it is trying to see how stupid a game maker can be. Keep it up, and the day will come when none of us can play.
Ad Astra Per Asper
Reading the posts it seems that most every one here is in favor of sex and graphic violence in video games. Personally I don't really have a problem with this content being in games. As a sociology graduate, I am familiar with the research on this topic and it basically says that sex and violence on TV has no discernable impact on one's behaviour. (I'm not aware of any good research on video games, or violence of an interactive nature, but I'm willing to give it the benefit of the doubt.) That being said, I don't play games with overly graphic depictions of violence or gore, nor do I often play games where the sole object is indiscriminate violence like FPS. The only exception I make is when my friends set up a LAN game. Even then I don't get invited too often because then we generally end up playing Starcraft (hopefully CIV4 one day). I guess you could say that I have a personal philosophical objection to overly graphic or violent games. Frankly, I feel that if you wouldn't play the game without it, you're getting something from it and I just don't like the idea of getting something from violence. S.
The common argument for video games is that they do no harm in the long term; that "sex and violence" are nothing new, and looking back, they haven'' really warped our minds. Perhaps, but is there a line that goes too far? For instance, in the article, Gerard Jones brings up the analogy of porn, claiming that it is a safe release of tension. But then people get squirmy when bondage is introduced. Can the same be said of video games? If sex and gore are "harmless," then in theory, game developers could develop games detailing the most horrific and disturbing acts ever conjured by the mind, and in turn, gamers would be 100% "unaffected" by the most extreme violent one could conjure up. Would gamers still defend this extreme violence as "innocent" or is there truly a line which should not be crossed?
I tend to agree that most games out there are for the most part harmless and don't create psychopaths, but I don't think that's the real concern of anti-gamers. I think the real concern is the shaping of the mind on an imperceptible level that intern will affect society negatively. I don't think that anti-gamers are worried about creating a society of blood-thirsty killers, I just think that they are concerned about creating a society that is more and more prone to accept "normal" violence in reality if they can accept "extreme" violence in their games? If fantasy violence is tolerated and accepted, would street violence, domestic violence, or war violence be more accepted because it's accepted in games?
So, my question to gamers is, is there a line that goes too far? Can games be TOO violent? If so, where is that line, and would you defend government action to protect society/kids/us from such extremes?
Health Insurance Quotes
You know what it comes down to? Kids just want to win. Hell, grown ups just want to win. And most video games now, the only way to win is to destroy your opponent.
I've suffered a couple GMs that couldn't escape this philosophy in pen & paper D&D. Our party would come up with an ingenious way around some npc/encounter/boss, and the GM would basically "cheat" so that we'd have to fight it anyways. So in the end, you had to combat the big gahuna to win. This mentality causes the underdeveloped mind to associate the euphoria of winning with killing, violence, and destruction, because it's the only way to win.
Make a game like zuma as deeply involving and fun as something like world of warcraft, and you'll see video games receive a different light. But most just jump on the bandwagon. Sword + shield + evil troll = $$. Add a couple trees and publish.
You can get 15 minutes of fame, but you can go down in history for infamy.
Agreed.