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The Most Violent Video Games of All Time
adeelarshad82 writes "Switzerland and Australia already feel that violent video games are an issue, and in June the US Supreme Court will also take matters in its own hands. Revisiting some of the most violent video games made over the last couple of decades shows exactly why this is such a huge concern." Warning: this slideshow contains imaginary violence.
Violent video games make ME uncomfortable. Therefore, nobody should be allowed to make or play them.
Most laws that forbid civil liberties are based on this thought process, though they all have completely different ostensible justifications.
I want a mod of Half Life where instead of killing zombies, you are curing them and sending them to safe zones. Then Mercy Hospital would make a lot more sense.
Video games are among the best ways yet invented for keeping children from using the television to watch the news, an action which exposes them to a seamy world of corruption, pestilence, brutal exploitation, slavery, lust, violence, and savage, inevitable, death.
The idyllic gameworld, on the other hand, offers a few PG-13 "situations", some morally unambiguous violence, and a world were death is a temporary setback.
Video games are protecting the children!
Personally, I'd rather people with issues do their beating, raping and killing in video games rather than in real life.
-- $G
The scary thing is that you are probably right. Just about every form of media has been banned censored at some point; from the Catholic Church's removal of genitalia from countless statues, destruction of paintings depicting nudity, through the censorship of books, comics, music, films and more recently video games for being too graphic/suggestive violent. There have already been (mostly voluntary) attempts to get websites to rate their content for target audience ages, so I'm pretty sure it's just a matter of time before it becomes a legal requirement somewhere in the world. Right now, I think it's going to be a toss-up between Australia and the USA who gets there first.
This post rated PG for use of sexually orientated wording.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
Pacman has had no influence or side effects on people whatsoever. If it did, then people playing it in the 80s would now be moving around in black rooms, listening to monotonous electronic music, swallowing white pills, wouldn't they?
Sometimes violence can be a learning experience.
When I watched the videos of Russian soldiers having their heads cut off, Jews being burned in furnaces, cats being set on fire "for fun", and a Ukranian man having his face bashed in by two teen boys, it taught me the world is a violent and disgusting place filled with dark, deranged people.
Had these videos been censored, I'd still naively think everyone is good.
Information wants to be expensive AND wants to be free. So you have Value vs. Cheap distribution fighting each other.
i got a flashback to Demolition Man just then...
"spicy food is bad for you and hence it is illegal"
Aggression or Frustration?
They are very similar when it comes to gaming, but neither make you a murderer, unless you have the capacity to murder.
Losing your job is frustrating. People have murdered their boss or taken it out on someone. Shall we make firing people illegal?
ALL competitive sports, which are GAMES.... are both frustrating and generate aggression.
Games arent always fun. It shows a lack of intelligence by anyone to think that a challenging form of entertainment will be blissful. A challenge is frustrating at times.
Perhaps the problem is the human condition, and not the stimuli that we chose to blame this week.
Cancer is frustrating. It will make you angry.
A broken car can make you angry. Injustice can make you angry... Republicans can make you angry, and Democrats can make you lose hope in politics.
I have never understood people that believe they must impose there beliefs and supposed morals on others.
Largely because they, themselves, gained their belief system by having it imposed on them, often with cruelty, and despite their innate belief that what they were being taught was wrong. If they don't impose their belief on others, then they have to admit that what was done to them was wrong, and then they have to deal with all that pain.
Spirituality is not the problem. Belief in a God who wants us to follow a path ("Torah") as part of our relationship with What Is, is not the problem. Religion often is. Religion is the belief in men who somehow know more about what God wants than you do or what He can communicate with you directly. Religion, at its foundation, is therefore idolatry and forbidden by the cardinal rule of Torah.
But then the spoiled rotten "what about me?" generation might actually have to...oh I don't know...RAISE THEIR OWN DAMNED KIDS instead of handing them over to mommy government! Gasp! they might actually have to get involved and shit instead of just plopping them in front of electronic babysitters! The horror!
Sadly I wish that was a fricking joke, but it ain't, as I have seen waaaaaay too many of my boys little school chums being raised by electronic babysitters. No books in the home, no real meaningful interaction, just plop them in front of (insert DVD, X360,PC,etc) and let it "keep them out of my hair".
When my sister was struck down by MS and her husband decided that "taking care of a sick wife and two kids ain't for me" and skipped town I took it upon myself to be the best damned parent I could be despite deciding years ago not to have kids, and by God that is what I did, even when my back was so messed up from a car wreck they had to climb on a table just to get a hug or picked up.
I didn't care about them playing violent games because I sat down and educated them by showing how what they saw was created on screen**, how scripting created the illusion of AI, how DOOM wads (dating myself here) could be edited to stick pictures of them in the game. I also didn't just stick them in front of a damned screen, even though many nights the pain in my back was terrible. I sat there and actually engaged their growing minds by reading Asimov to them (just like mom did to me when I was little) or watching Nova with them and teaching them how to research answers on the net when I didn't know the answer to one of their questions.
TLDR? PARENTING IS HARD! And if you aren't willing to step up to the plate then don't fricking have kids! they ain't dolls, or little vanities for your ego, they are little human beings that need plenty of love and attention if they are gonna have a decent shot at a future. Now the oldest is started his first year of premed I'm proud to say, and the youngest still hasn't decided whether he wants to become a chef or do graphic arts. It has been damned hard but worth every second.
**-This had a funny and unintended "side effect" whereas my boys have a unique method of "cursing" at a game, such as "Who made this thing? Look at all the tearing! What is this 1997? And what idiot wrote the AI routines for this thing? DUCK YOU STUPID ENEMY!!!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
My favorite video game back in the day was Galaga, which came out in 1981. I still play it via MAME and whenever I run across the original game or the anniversary re-release. Every level is a fucking massacre. You kill at least 40 aliens and potentially more: if you're really good at killing aliens especially quickly, the game slips in some extras to satisfy your lust for xenocide. Every fourth level, in fact, is a "challenging stage" in which the aliens are completely defenseless and you get bonus points for killing them to the last man. I'm not an especially good player, but I can reliably get to at least the 25th level, which takes about fifteen minutes and during which I must kill at least 1,000 aliens. Nor is Galaga an extreme case. By the late 80's and early 90's, there was a whole slew of Japanese shoot-em-up scrollers where the screen was positively jammed with enemies that could only be overcome by acquiring more and more powerful weapons, next to which Galaga is like the most boring of UN peacekeeping missions.
The body count in hours of gameplay with the current first-person shooters doesn't even merit comparison with three minutes of gameplay in any number of arcade classics from twenty or thirty years ago. What has changed is that the mayhem is more realistic -- and then only if you accept a rather loose reading of "realistic" that actually means "resembling the comic-book violence of action movies".
To make matters worse, the violent crime rate has been mostly declining during all this time, during which ownership of computers and game consoles has gone from a relatively small market to being nearly universal, especially in the age groups that are most likely to be involved in violent crime. If one was compelled to draw a causal connection between violent video games and real-world violence, one would have to conclude that they are actually reducing the level of real-world violence. There is actually some evidence to that effect -- but the balance of the actual scientific data, as opposed to the hyperventilation of people like Jack Thompson, strongly suggests that if there is any connection between video games and real violence, it is too insignificant to be measured even with relatively large samples.
At the end of the day, we'd probably hear less of this hysterical crap if y'all would just stay of those nice people's lawns. Now, if you'll pardon me, I have a sudden urge to fire up MAME and take another pass at getting to the 30th level in Galaga.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
Actually, most laws that forbid civil liberties are based on third person effects. For example: *I* haven't been too adversely affected by violent media, but other less educated and less mature people are. Why else is there an epidemic in violence?
There isn't.
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