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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.
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.