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Valve Slammed Over 'Horrendous' Steam School-Shooting Game (eurogamer.net)
Several readers have shared an EuroGamer report: Just a week after the Santa Fe High School shooting in Texas that saw 10 people fatally shot and 13 others were wounded, Valve has come under fire for a Steam school-shooting game that encourages you to "hunt and destroy" children. Active Shooter, which at the time of publication is live on Steam and due for release on 6th June, is described by its developer as "a dynamic S.W.A.T. simulator." The idea is you're sent in to deal with a shooter at a school, but you can also play as the actual shooter, gunning down school children.
Now, an anti-gun violence charity has called on Valve to pull the game from Steam. The developer of Active Shooter is called Revived Games, the publisher Acid. Revived Games' credits include White Power: Pure Voltage and Dab, Dance & Twerk. "Acid", who plans to add a survival mode in which you play as a civilian and have to "escape or perform a heroic action such as fight against the shooter itself," took to Active Shooter's Steam page to defend the game. "First of all, this game does not promote any sort of violence, especially any soft [sic] of a mass shooting," Acid said.
Now, an anti-gun violence charity has called on Valve to pull the game from Steam. The developer of Active Shooter is called Revived Games, the publisher Acid. Revived Games' credits include White Power: Pure Voltage and Dab, Dance & Twerk. "Acid", who plans to add a survival mode in which you play as a civilian and have to "escape or perform a heroic action such as fight against the shooter itself," took to Active Shooter's Steam page to defend the game. "First of all, this game does not promote any sort of violence, especially any soft [sic] of a mass shooting," Acid said.
Anyone remember when Postal came out?
I kind of giggle at stuff like this. I understand it offends but mocking current state of affairs actually helps relieve tension about it. I can even picture the pick your Avatar screens where you swipe between random socially dysfunctional white males. I say this after having a school shooting 2 miles from me and being genuinely worried and horrified for every child involved. You can have both laughter and absolute anger/disgust towards something. It's two entirely separate parts of you that each come from (at least in normal healthy people).
A buddy of mine used a WAD maker/editor to make a very good rendition of our high school in the 90's. Of course, DOOM was made of monsters and folks enjoyed it and took it for what it was. (this was in the 90's). I shudder to think of what would happen to us now if we were in high school and did this. Probably end up in federal....prison.
Anyone for "common sense" speech controls? You're not against "common sense" are you?
What kind of speech-nuts or speech-extremists would argue against common sense limitations on a Constitutional right? They didn't have computers when the US Constitution was written, after all.
I might suggest looking to Australia for examples we can use, regarding gun turn-in or buy-back programs. Maybe a start would be to further limit the kinds of guns that most people can buy. The vast majority of the public, for example, does not require a semi-automatic rifle of any kind. Every time any member of my family in Texas has gone hunting, the rifle was bolt-action. There are very niche use cases for semi-automatic rifles where special permits could be issued, but there's no reason they need to be generally available.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
The idea is you're sent in to deal with a shooter at a school, ...
How many points do you get for staying outside and hiding behind a dumpster?
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Let's play cops and robbers! But everyone has to be cops because robbers are bad!
Circumcision is child abuse.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/866890/Active_Shooter/
This sig is false.
It's not that they don't care (well, some don't, obs) but most of them realize that school shootings are statistical rarities. That ain't what's gonna kill yer kid.
What's gonna kill 'em? The car you drove her to school in. Dogs. Cancer. Suicide (big one, esp for teens). Homicides outside the school from people they know, mostly their own parents. Non-automobile accidents of all sorts. But not school shootings. Those aren't worth bothering with as far as actual risk goes (as opposed to fear... they're great for causing fear).
About 300 kids have been killed in school shootings in the last 35 years, or about 8 or 9 per year. 8 or 9 kids will die in automobile accidents today. The rate of school shootings has been slowly declining since the 1990s.
The whole point of simulation is to imagine the full scenario, explore all the angles that can be systematically imagined.
If you're playing Sim City - while imagining power grids, water flow models, traffic patterns, and industrial/commercial is all fascinating to see it all play out as a model - most folks will end up throwing in a horrible disaster or two, just to see how those systems will react, falter, fail, and sometimes recover.
And it does help to see those things play out - to see these enormously important things break - to know that they are big, but still fragile in their own ways, when they're seen in a neutral mathematical and simulation background.
That said - that's not really how lots of these games really play around with those subjects. Yeah - when the games are just trying to push the buttons of the players and audience, rile up a reaction - then it's just bad writing.
Even that said though - the game Dungeon Keeper is still a favorite of mine. It's a game that places you as spectral force digging out exactly the kinds of grid-based dungeons that old RPG games would have you exploring. As such, your tools were largely gathering monsters, feeding them, readying them for combat, expanding territory, then using various kinds of harm on adventurers you defeated (jailing, torture, killing) for various benefits. It really held to that perspective with its mechanics - complete with dread-voices narrator of events - in a narratively interesting way. It was genuinely good writing - while being about unethical characters and outcomes.
But no one generally became more cruel through playing Dungeon Keeper - if anything, it taught me about the family of motivations you have to follow to 'justify' torturing your enemies as a valid tactic - and why none of them add up to a good idea in any way. The game wasn't pushing the buttons on the audience, so much as it fairly deconstructed how our 'regular' stories were also pushing our buttons, in its own over-the-top way.
Kids see bullies winning the perennial getting-away-with-it game every day. Every one of them knows they could 'win' by fighting more violently using tools. Imagining only the glory of that outcome, and not the full scenario is the core flaw... well, in most crime, not just school violence.
I say the better answer is a more rigorous exploration of that space - a simulation that goes full circle - that shows that this violence only results in scenarios where bullies at large get away with more, because even with complete surveillance, folks will only bother to look back in broken circumstances - and it will still tend to only result in innocent people getting punished meaningfully, since punishments tend to mean almost nothing to bullies, and the process only entrenches them in that path. At least with the logic of school rule enforcement here in the US.
You don't even need guns to explore that space. Just avoid cheaply pushing buttons with your narrative.
Ryan Fenton
of school shootings. Particularly one that might lead to stronger gun laws. This is also why the CDC can't, by law, do any research on gun violence.
A better question is why the NRA is so vehemently opposed to gun laws. You don't see the Auto makers campaigning against driver's licenses and insurance. My guess is they're worried stronger laws would bite into impulse buys. A coworker the other day went to buy a pistol for target shooting and home defense and go excited and walked out with an AR-15 and several boxes of ammo. His wife was pissed. If he'd had 7 days to think it over he'd have cancelled the order and settled for the $400 pistol over the $1000 AR-15.
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You shouldn't care about school shootings either. There have been about 250 deaths in school shootings over 18 years (non-gang, non-suicide), or about 14 per year. Since there are approximately 51 million K-12 students in the U.S., a student's chances of being killed in a non-gang, non-suicide school shooting in any given year are about (51 million students) / (14 deaths/year) = 1 in 3.6 million.
You're more likely to be killed by a deer. About 120 Americans are killed by deer every year. (325.7 million Americans) / (120 deaths/year) = 1 in 2.7 million chance of being killed by a deer each year. Do you wring your hands over the possibility of being killed by a deer, and hold marches to demanding the deer population be controlled?
The U.S. causes of death statistics are readily available from the CDC website. For 2015, the leading causes of death for the 15-19 year old demographic were:
3,919 deaths - Accidents (mostly automobile accidents and drug overdoses)
2.061 deaths - Suicide
1,587 deaths - Homicide (mostly outside school, and gang related)
583 deaths - Malignant neoplasms (cancer)
306 deaths - Heart disease
195 deaths - Birth defects
72 deaths - Influenza (the flu)
63 deaths - Chronic lower respiratory diseases
61 deaths - Cerebrovascular diseases
52 deaths - Diabetes
41 deaths - Complications from pregnancy and childbirth
All of these represent a greater risk to students than the 14 deaths per year from school shootings.
Back in ancient times of game systems, in Seven Cities of Gold (I think) on the Atari, you could wantonly attack peaceful Indians ... or keep slaughtering ones that had stopped resisting.
They went into some kind of weird tribal dance of utter despair that really freaked me out and made me never want to try that again. Brrr.
But my point is you could do it.
Granted, they were so pixilated and cartoonish that I don't think even those who believe video games inspire violence could really think that game would ... so it;s not quite the same thing.
You want to help stop more school shootings? The Press needs to stop publicizing them. All they're doing is turning these shooters into celebrities, which in turn is emboldening the would-be school shooters, and so on, and so on.
is not research. That said, as of this year you're right. See here.
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Anyone remember when Postal came out?
Yeah, and don't forget Bully, NightTrap and the whole host of other controversial games that have been released over the years. The best was Doom, slammed for satanic and violent content when it was new. I'm sure that John Carmac is still crying in his Cheerios over all the money he lost out on because he made a game that was controversial.
This sort of thing is always an exercise in futility. I am all for reducing gun violence, but censorship isn't the answer. This game looks to be in pretty poor taste, given the current epidemic of gun violence, but it isn't going to help or hurt the issue by banning it. In fact, it seems pretty stupid to even waste time talking about it since it is distracting from the main issue of keeping guns out of the hands of dangerous people.
If society thinks this game is a bad idea, it will not sell very well, problem solved. Valve isn't even really involved in the development of it, so don't go dragging them into the conversation.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Two reasons: Because 14 deaths a year is a trivially small price to pay for the right to defend yourself,
Tell that to the family of one of those 14, I dare you.
Get a dog. It will make you safer than owning a gun will, and won't make you more likely to commit suicide or kill a family member.
If you have a dog, that home intruder won't even try to come into your house. Bad guys avoid dogs, but they look to steal guns
A gun in the house increases the risk to your family.
https://academic.oup.com/aje/a...
https://www.scientificamerican...
https://www.vox.com/cards/gun-...
You are welcome on my lawn.
. So the ban is still in effect.
You admit you were wrong yet still claim you are right. No. There was never a ban and you are lying. The "ban" is that the CDC cannot advocate against the rights of citizens. Should any other government agency advocate the removal of your rights? Can the FCC use its funds to promote and advocate regulating an ISP under Title 2? Can the FCC, if successful, advocate for restricting obscene content on the internet because ISP is regulated under Title 2? Should the FBI use its funds to promote an end to encryption anywhere subject to their jurisdiction? If either of those are "no", then why is it okay in your mind for the CDC to do effectively the same for the right of arms?
the wording of that amendment is effectively a ban, right?
No. If you can't leave your politics out of your research then you don't deserve to be doing research. Especially when it comes to the rights of citizens. Period. End of discussion. Any research from any agency is under the same conditions when it comes to the government. Take any research topic and if you start advocating or promoting one set of political solutions or positions is the moment you lose credibility. "Gun control" is a purely political thing. A federal bureaucracy doesn't have the right to decide on what rights any citizen has and cannot advocate or promote the degradation of any right. Period.
You can research the "why" of gun violence without advocating "ban guns". If you can't separate "your solution" from what you are researching then you are a bad researcher.
If you don't understand that "gun violence" is a loaded term then you are too ignorant to understand the issue.
> "well regulated militia"
That's the whole of the people. Regulated in this sense probably means well supplied. In any event, nothing about the second amendment's actual writing, nor its intention from those who wrote it, imply that being in a militia (and CERTAINLY not being in an army- the second amendment doesn't suddenly switch from detailing individual rights to detailing that the government should be able to raise armies, a detail covered in the main body of the constitution) has anything to do with the right of the people to keep and bear arms.
There was a time in law when the fiction about the second amendment somehow jumping about nimbly-bimbly and declaring the national guard to be a thing, and also that government troops are allowed to have weapons, was in fashion amongst revisionists. This has been pretty well thrown out all over the place, but there's still a few vanguards holding to a fiction.
As someone living in Great Britain I seem to have missed these multiple murders.
Could you perhaps provide references, as well as better explain who 'they' are?
>Except the US.
And many others!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
France, Canada both allow gun ownership.
And why does the USA have the most guns? It's fucking simple--well, only if facts are allowed in this discussion: The USA has LUXARY GOODS because it's a super-high-GDP country. The rich in the USA buy nice China, nice cars, and nice guns. They buy nice guitar, nice, boats, nice TVs.... and more guns.
The people who own the MOST GUNS in the USA (3% of all citizens own 133M guns!)[1], are rich people, who aren't using a single gun to commit a single crime. (But then, we can't play the "guns == violence" card anymore. So let's ignore that.)
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us...
So the question is, if a few people own most of all guns... and aren't committing crimes with them. What's the actual crime rate of actual guns owned by the 97% of the rest of the population, and how does that compare with the rest of the world?
Because the UK has nil legal gun ownership, and they still have mass shootings. And as we all know, drug and alcohol prohibition worked great, so gun prohibition is a sure thing.