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Cities In India Ban 'PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds' Over Fears It Turns Children Into 'Psychopaths' (yahoo.com)
Player Unknown's Battlegrounds is facing a "ferocious" backlash in India, Bloomberg reports:
Nowhere has resistance to the game been quite like India. Multiple cities have banned PUBG, as it's known, and police in Western India arrested 10 university students for playing. The national child rights commission has recommended barring the game for its violent nature. One of India's largest Hindi newspapers declared PUBG an "epidemic" that turned children into "manorogi," or psychopaths. "There are dangerous consequences to this game," the Navbharat Times warned in a March 20 editorial. "Many children have lost their mental balance...."
What's different about India is the speed with which the country has landed in the strange digital world of no laws or morals. It skipped two decades of debate and adjustment, blowing into the modern gaming era in a matter of months. Rural communities that never had PCs or game consoles got smartphones in recent years -- and wireless service just became affordable for pretty much everyone after a price war last year. With half a billion internet users looking for entertainment, PUBG has set off a frenzy.
Over 250,000 students entered one recent PUBG competition, according to the article.
At least one local minister criticized the game as "the demon in every house."
What's different about India is the speed with which the country has landed in the strange digital world of no laws or morals. It skipped two decades of debate and adjustment, blowing into the modern gaming era in a matter of months. Rural communities that never had PCs or game consoles got smartphones in recent years -- and wireless service just became affordable for pretty much everyone after a price war last year. With half a billion internet users looking for entertainment, PUBG has set off a frenzy.
Over 250,000 students entered one recent PUBG competition, according to the article.
At least one local minister criticized the game as "the demon in every house."
I thought they were all dirt poor.
I don't think its the game turning people into psychopaths... it looks like power-tripping is doing a much better job of that, maybe they psychopaths in government like to be an inclusive club, no 3rd party imitations allowed?
What's different about India is the speed with which the country has landed in the strange digital world of no laws or morals. It skipped two decades of debate and adjustment, blowing into the modern gaming era in a matter of months.
The modern gaming era began long before 1999. Pong was one of the earliest video games. That came out in 1972. The modern gaming era is almost 50 years old.
I think the article is trying (poorly) and failing (badly) to imply that the "Modern Gaming Era" means online multiplayer and mobile-based gaming. So in that context, it's only really been a widespread part of gaming culture since around 2001 when Halo introduced the "Everyday Joe" to online 1st person shooters.
And to answer the inevitable response yes, I'm aware that there was online gaming prior to that, aware that Quake was the first massively popular online shooter, etc. but it was the Xbox and Halo that really catapulted gaming in general, and online gaming in particular, into the realm of "acceptability" to regular people. Prior to that, gamers were still widely regarded as "nerds and geeks and losers."
Anyhow, the point of the article is that for most of India, this sort of cultural shift has only recently came about, because most people simply didn't have access. And now they are, quite predictably, and somewhat unironically, attempting to "shoot the messenger." Failing to realize that the far more sinister gaming genre will be the endless parade of mindless "housewife" games which we got to first experience in the form of Flash-based Facebook 'games' and the army of shitty clones which infest the mobile App stores.
I think the article is trying (poorly) and failing (badly) to imply that the "Modern Gaming Era" means online multiplayer and mobile-based gaming. So in that context, it's only really been a widespread part of gaming culture since around 2001 when Halo introduced the "Everyday Joe" to online 1st person shooters.
And to answer the inevitable response yes, I'm aware that there was online gaming prior to that, aware that Quake was the first massively popular online shooter, etc. but it was the Xbox and Halo that really catapulted gaming in general, and online gaming in particular, into the realm of "acceptability" to regular people. Prior to that, gamers were still widely regarded as "nerds and geeks and losers."
Mobile-based gaming didn't really take off until smart phones came around 12 years old. That was long after the start of the "modern gaming era."
Between PC, Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft, the XBox is only a portion of the overall market. Halo meant nothing and continues to mean nothing to anyone who doesn't own an XBox. It didn't matter how "acceptable" it was to anyone else. Further that first came out in 2001, years after online multiplayer had already gone mainstream on PCs.
Quake was certainly the game that popularized online deathmatch starting in 1996. That I could see as the start of the widespread online multiplayer era.
You see, in India they have one big exam once a year in highschool that every 10th grader and 12th grader in the whole country writes that determines their future. As you can imagine, the competition is fierce and people get rejected from their program because their GPA was a fraction of a point too low. Now, imagine being the parent of an otherwise very intelligent kid who love playing video games. It is hard enough to not tell him to do something he loves when he's the only one doing it. But all of his pretty smart friends are also playing video games. But your kid isn't competing against just his friends for the coveted spots in a reputable university - he's competing against the whole country. So, as you can imagine, it is very easy for all the parents in a town or city to want a ban on videogames during the month leading up to these exams.
It is easy to sit in a Western country where you get many, many chances to recover. In India (and China), the reality is that every fuck-up costs massively. So, as you can imagine, people are very much on edge when it comes to opening doors for their kids.
Does a dog know the difference between play fighting and real fighting? Yes. If any dog in the park crosses that line they all know basically simultaneously. Do you really think children are less perceptive of the difference between real and play? If not that kid has a problem and video games have nothing to do with it.
They weren't popular in 1978, they were niche. "Modern gaming" is some large % of kids. Most people didn't even have computers in 78. Now ~everyone has a gaming phone. Why is this so hard for you old farts?
I'm not sure you comprehend how many kids then had regular access to an Atari, Odyssey 2, Amiga, Apple II, or regularly hung out at the local mall's arcade. Videogames have been extremely popular with kids for several generations now. The first generation are now in their forties and fifties, and mostly understand the appeal, and as such aren't as scared shitless by the way kids get sucked into these games.
Previous generations of adults freaked out about Mortal Combat and the terrible influence it was having on our youth. Before that, I guess it was D&D that promoted devil worship. Hell, even Pokemon has been banned in some countries. Fortnite and PUBG are just popular right now - nothing more, so become targets. This is nothing new. Just the latest in a long line of reactive old farts being busybodies, trying to protect everyone from themselves.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Manorogi does not mean a psychopath.
Mano = of the Mind
Rogi = Diseased
Manorog is a general term for any mental illness.
Indians generally have a very poor concept of mental illness. It is held as a taboo and not openly discussed. Politicians are typically ill advised and are no better than public. The only thing mental that Indians talk about is meditation, not things like depression, dependency or mania.
This is probably just India's delayed reaction to the same gaming addiction that China was handling in its own way. I am not saying it is proper, but everyone is confused on what to do when their kids become zombies before the screens, stop studying and ignore their family for the screen.
Just think about it. What if, you were minding your own business, and then suddenly a wave of relatively inexpensive, highly portable VR headsets that covered all the six senses emerged from Dubai. The kids and young adults got hooked in, arabic became the coolest language in town and suddenly you also find out that they are having huge tournaments playing jihad wargames. How would you react?
Granted, parts of the example might be over the top - but it's important to realize how these sudden social, economical and cultural changes are affecting emerging countries. As someone here already mentioned, they've never had the time to gradually adapt like we did (and even then, for us it went pretty fast -- and we still have a lot of ethic/moral concerns yet to be addressed). I can only imagine how it must be to be a parent, watching my kids yearn after something so extremely different and unknown. Seeing them adapting foreign cultural norms (that might totally crash with my own upbringing) and experiencing the feeling of having absolutely no control. Is it really that strange they're going nuts about it?