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Senior Game Designer Talks About Game Violence, Real Violence, and Lead (Video)
William Volk may not be the world's oldest game designer, but he's up there. He started out as a play tester for Avalon Hill in 1979, and since then has worked for Activision and other major players in the game space. His current job is with PlayScreen, where he's working on their Word Carnivale iOS game, which is not violent at all. But over the years Volk has worked on slightly violent video games and has watched public outcries over video game violence since 1976. He's also tracked how much less violence we've seen since lead was removed from gasoline. (Editorial interjection: Aren't most remaining pockets of massive gun violence in cities where many poor kids grow up in apartments that have lead paint?) Due to technical problems during the interview, some of the conversation is missing, primarily about the recent spate of multiple murders. It seems, for instance, that Newtown shooter Adam Lanza was heavily into violent video games, which is sure to spark plenty of new discussion about how they affect players. But then again, as Volk reminded me in an email, "If people were influenced by video games, a majority of Facebook users would be farmers by now," a meme that has been floating around Facebook since last year, if not earlier.
It's abortions and stronger morals that have allowed this reduction in violence.
If video games affected kids, then they would all be running around a dark room eating pills and listening to electronic music.
Unfortunately though, that happened. It was called the rave scene.
I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
They're LEAD FARMERS, motharfucka!
Actually, this explains why lead farmers seem to be so violent, as well.
Everyone knows it's not the violent video games, it's that evil Jazz music corrupting our youth!