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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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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...?