Slashdot Mirror
Game Ratings; Are Combat Sims Worse Than FPSs?
Two separate articles on violent games today. The Toad pointed out a
New York Times AP story
on how AOL will start rating games; conflicting signals on whether "adults-only" games will be kept. And atomJack mentioned a
metamute article which "compares how 1st person shooters have taken a lot of flak, yet sim games seem to be fine with everyone. The article argues that the sims are so realistic they are basically training kids for war and in fact some are used by the military for reference." Personally, I think the Mortal Kombat-style games are worst of all - but maybe that's because I don't play them.
Turns out that dictators and slave traders are backed by the video game companies. Go figure.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
I'm not going to bother parroting everyone else, about how playing games can help you unwind after a long day's work. I'd just like to ask where Pike gets the audacity to tell me that I'm spending my free time incorrectly. I'm just coming off of three weeks of mid-terms, and wouldn't mind sitting down and playing a few games on my computer. Yes, I read for enjoyment (which doesn't help the GNP anymore than playing video games) but I also can sit down and enjoy a bit of senseless buffoonery every now and then. I'd like to know how Pike optimizes his/her time to be at peak efficiency. And guess what, if I want to selfishly indulge myself and do something that I think is fun, that's MY choice. I have no problem with Pike having an opinion about video games. Heck, I agree that I you could be doing better things than playing them. In fact, I will defend Pike's First Ammendment right to voice that opinion. The line is drawn, however, at the point where you try to force your opinion on others. And you can contend that there's no real force in saying that we're using our time inefficiently, but Pike has no prerogative to tell me that my playing video games is wrong. Pike, unless you have a signed note from God saying that your OPINION is Canaan, don't assume that it should be applied to others. Anyone out there agree with me? Or even better, anyone out there disagree?
"I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member" - Groucho Marx
Offtopic, but next time I post (or anyone else posts for that matter) I/they should remember that whitespace between paragraphs is a Good Thing(TM).
be sure to apply this to the real world.
...
.... or i ever feel the need to go blow some people away
lesson #1 :
do not sit/stand still run around like a chicken with your head cut off and strafe left to right while jumping and ducking while also firing like mad.... do not stop to reload keep moving while reloading your weapon
lesson #2 : always aim for the head . but be sure to keep moving always fire you weapon in to possible sniper holes or nest just in case...
lesson #3: be sure to cary heavy explosives on you at all times and toss them around all corners or possible places where the enenmy may be lying in wait...
lesson #4: always shoot first and ask questions later.. the time it takes for you to determine freind or foe is just enough for the target to blow your head off..
lesson #5 : always take risks the rewards always out weigh the the possiblity of losing a life . besides you will respawn next time.
lesson #6 : almost always rush the opposing force .
i think that these few lessons in life will get me real far if there is ever a war
who needs millitary and or police training when we have sims that install these fine qualities in to those that play them...
music the paint
dancefloor the canvas
Music the Paint dancefloor the canvas your body the brush
I know at least one friend who did in fact play hardcore sims as a child. That doesn't change much though. Very very few kids are going to sit down and spend hours reading about radar systems, control systems, infrared cameras. How many children are going to read a chapter about the nuances of lift in the Apache Longbow helicopter. That is what is required to really play a Jane's simulation. Kids aren't even close to the target audience of Jane's games.
Have you ever played a Jane's game? Playing legos or reading or programming computers are done by children because they enjoy it and it is stimulating. I really don't believe that many of those kids are willing to take on the learning curve of a Jane's games. It is a very steep learning curve.
That's not to say no child would be willing to do it and be successful. I would argue that s/he should be encouraged if s/he were interested.
Anyway, Jane's sims are hardly a bad influence on children, but they are hardly directed at children either.
I know, let's invade Poland. cph
That's all well and good, but you've gotta watch those psi storms.
Crackle...crackle...
Splat!
Shut up. Your wrong. Deal with it.
I went to a rifle range for the first time in my life today. I got to hold a winchester rifle that shot these little short bullets, I think 22-caliber or whatever. Anyway, once you get hold of a gun, it is suprisingly easy to shoot it. You'd think that it would be really different from, say, clicking a mouse button, but in fact, the trigger gives about as much resistance. The gives you a little kick, and you have a hole in the paper you're shooting at. I had a hard time believing that what I was holding could very easily injure, or even kill a person, if aimed just right (which is kind of tricky -- you got to hold pretty still to get a good aim). Anyway, I think it may be quite difficult to realize for a kid that has access to a gun but hasn't been taught properly by his parents that a person holding a gun can actually kill somebody. This is why I think that rating games is a good idea to help parents teach their children correctly, but the burden of raising non-murderous children still remains on the parents. I am a firm supporter of NOT giving children access to firearms, and if firearms are kept, they ought to have locks on them that children do NOT know the combination to. Under those conditions, I think it's safe for a kid to play any kind of game, even if the kid has problems dealing with whatever bugs him.
On a different issue, a teenager is not going to have access to an F-15 stocked with bombs and air-to-air missiles, so those games are ok no matter what.
-S
two words: Land Warrior
I'm exhausted after playing an hour of quake.
Weenie! Now that q3 has bots, I can play for hours training to kill kill kill. It's hard to find an internet game with a lot of good players. But man... once I spend all night training, I can really lay it down on my hallmates during the day. Oh yeah, and there are classes.
-S
5 Year Plan is by Mao
-- Note: These Comments are Generated by ME! Not You! ME!
.. Is why there is such a general lack of common sense in the world. Why we have lawyers. It is also why we have a goverment(US) with a president that coddles China(Evil).
First of all, the advertisers are sending the money to the charities (WHO UNICEF...) via a direct check - no money even reachs my hand. You think the companies there would allow me to lie in front of their banner? If you are truly interested in findingh out if this site is a scam, I would suggest that you call the companies and ask about their sponsorship of this site. I can provide contact information (phone numbers) upon request. thanks
Please visit http://www.freedonation.com and save a life for free every day!
Even if your site is not the scam that I think it is (because who knows if you're really giving the banner ad revenue to charity), your posts are about as offtopic as Canter & Seigel's old USENET posts on how to get a green card.
AOL is like Nintendo. Right now, AOL is saying "Oh, how horrible. These violent games are harming our children. Oh, for shame... the horror, the horror." If their rating or banning of games leads people to jump ship from their accursed network in large numbers, the way Nintendo's censorship of the original Mortal Kombat (a shallow game, but sort of funny in a Pythonesque way, I thought at the time. Of course, I've only played it one/two times, tops...) caused people to jump ship to Sega, they will give the customers what they want. Hence, just as Mortal Kombat II was just as gruesome on Nintendo as it was on Sega, AOL won't let everybody quit them so they can play Half-Life over on Microsoft Network. :) ;)
As to the sims issue: Just about any useful knowledge can be applied to war in some way. Sims are used by police and the military (my Dad participated in a sim which was overseen by some CIA types in case the sixties riots turned into a full scale revolution), which was run between two rooms using an intercom system, a map and a board with markers representing police, rioters and civilians. Of course, my Dad was a police captain in a large Northeastern city, so it may have been useful for him... he had to run the police all the time. (Though it was only a 2 day seminar... in CA of all places, at least he got a trip out of it). I may like sims (well, I like some though not many) but they aren't very useful to me because I have no troops
However, it must be said that all this stuff about games being "killing simulators" started because of a man Lt. Col. David Grossman, whose wacky ideas involve American soldiers being brainwashed into zombie killing machines by eeevil games like Doom, but its OK because the troops are controlled by their superior officers. (An idea I find insulting to the soldiers of the US armed forces, both in its lack of truthfulness and the malevolence of its content if such an absurd idea were true.) However, when the evil profiteers at id (or wherever, they like to pick on id in particular) release these games on civilian children, it turns them into mindless uncontrolled killing machines. Unfortunately, the ravings of this lunatic have been picked up with an uncritical eye by much of the press, but we need to consider the original source.
The article on sims? Typical of a myopic political point of view that probably doesn't understand that a true lover of sims might enjoy playing as Vietnam during the Vietnam war, not because of sympathy for the Viet Cong but for the intellectual exercise of winning a war with a presumably weaker force that was fighting on its own turf. I think most sim gamers are interested in both sides of a conflict from a tactical perspective, and leave Gung Ho jingoism for when they play FPS's like Duke Nukem 3D. If this is left out of sim games, then maybe it is to prevent an outcry from ignorant US journalists who will say, "Look, it's a game where you get to play as Nazi Germany. This is a pro-Nazi game!" (or, if you prefer "Oh look, you get to play as Vietnam, they're trying to brainwash our kids into being godless commies!"), rather than a reflection of the desires of either the sim makers or their customers. Of course, sim games had their origins on sandtables and tabletops, and required two players (or creative solitare rules) so in the original "Battle of the Bulge" type games, one player had to be the Nazi's and one the Allies. I would imagine that for online sims, the same thing would have to be true. Any online sim gamers with comments? (My experience of war sims is limited to games like Shining Force... I'm afraid
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
it is simple - the advertiser would have spent the money anyway for eyeballs. On this site, I leverage that money and channel it into a good work. If you do not believe me, I suggest that you call the companies who are sponsoring the donations and ask about their sponsorship of FreeDonation.com. I can provide phone numbers and contact information upon request. thanks ps If I can prove to you this is true, would you help me out by spreading the word?
Please visit http://www.freedonation.com and save a life for free every day!
I'm actualy growing an overmind in a fishtank in my basement.
Prety soon it'll be ready to build my first hive.
I'm inspired. I was going to take a few days off next month to go to Yosemite. Instead I think I'll mow some lawns. Oh, and while I'm taking your advice mowing lawns, maybe you'll take my advice and take a trip to Bali, head down to a beach, take some halucinogenic drugs and have non-procreative sex--just for fun. cph
see above.
You know, the Orks have a highly evolved culture, which is covered up by that bigot Tolkien.
Think about it...when was the last time you saw an ad in the paper or a catalog, showing a photo of an adolescent in underwear? The trend among retailers seems to be to either have a drawing of a model, use adult models for misses/junior fashions or just photos of the clothing items alone. I think that this informal "ban" has been going on for a while. Not that I've really noticed. ;-)
(way way offtopic) Jeez man. If you're going to be that offtopic, at least turn off your karmic bonus (keep it at 1, not 2). Offtopic posts shouldn't get past a filter of 1, let alone 2.
(posted as AC, because I'M offtopic. and not subjecting those browsing at score > 1 to it.)
Believe it or not, in many countries of the world it is prohibited to play such games. Travellers to Saudi Arabia are advised not to take chess boards with them, as they will be confiscated upon arrival. Ditto for cards, dice, and probably computer games as well. I take it the Arabic version of Windows 98 does not include FreeCell and Solitarie...
Regards,
Don't worry about it. Whenever you post to a story that you've moderated in, all of your moderations are undone to make sure that you keep at least a semblance of impartiality. Since you posted that comment, it's all gone.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
Hmm, most parents here in the US don't seem to draw quite so strict a line when it comes to pro wrestling, where kids actually believe the violence is real.
I love mortal kombat! Games should not be censored or rated! :)
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If the simulation is sufficiently accurate then it is much closer to reality than shooting demons and monsters
The problems people have had with first person shooters is that it desensitizes people from violence. In a flight sim, you shoot down and blow up objects. You are not getting desensitized from killing living creatures but just destroying objects.
You can't use a copy of Half-Life to go on a shooting spree. Somehow I don't think 3d accelerators are the technology we should be worried about our kids being involved with...
Starcraft isn't a simulation. It is a game.
The "combat sims" are probably more things like TacOps, which are realistic to the point of insanity. In fact, the US Marines and some branch of the Canadian armed forces both use TacOps in their training, just because it simulates modern tactical-level warfare so well.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
First Person Shooters might prepare you for war ( ie, point and shoot, and some simple sniper tactics, etc. etc. ) but Sims ( ie, WarCraft, StarCraft, etc. etc. ) can perpare you for Revolution. Personaly, i'd rather play Revolution then War ;)
Though you die
La Resistance' lives on
Part of the Human Condition is the need to kick back once in a while in order to be able to do your best for the rest of the day.
Right, but playing games, especially computer games isn't the type of rest you need. I'm exhausted after playing an hour of quake. Going for a walk, staring at the ocea, or a small run or bike ride is actually much more restfull than any game *I* can think of. But, hey, I still convince myself i'm taking a good break when I play quake at work, I'm just stupid. -WG
"America, I smoke marijuana every chance I get."
Before it was video games, it was movies.
Before it was movies, it was books.
Before it was books, it was people's own imagination.
Before it was assault weapons, it was handguns.
Before it was handguns, it was knives.
And before it was knives, it was people's own two hands.
Technology advances, but there will always be nutcases in society who can't be trusted with it. They cause damage. The people are the problem, not the technology.
I like the AP for general world news, but it is articles like this that irk me.
AOL supports its own games, including titles that are quite violent, such as Starship Troopers and Air Warrior III (a combat sim). These games in themselves are quite violent yet are supported by "family orientated" AOL.
All of the violent online games I know of are commercial games, i.e. they have already have ratings. Most of the java and other online based games I see are card playing / board games... there is no need to moderate those.
Why AP is wasting its international taskforce of reporters working on crumby articles like this puzzles me. (WARNING: THIS PUZZLE IS PG-13!) Anyway.
On a side note, of all the people I know who get adult e-mail ads, most of them are on AOL. Good old family orientated.
my 22 Turkish Tugriks.
FPS games "train" you how to fight and kill. Sims "train" you how to direct others to fight and kill. You still need a crazy or two under your command to do the wet work.
Still, I do not understand those that believe FPS games teach people to be homicidal.
My cousin was really wowed when Win95 came out, and quickly got addicted to Minesweeper. Then he went to North Korea and tried to stick a flag on a mine. It was difficuly IDing him even with the dental records. It was quite sad, but that's what he gets for buying Windows.
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There are too many different types of FPS games. You have the ultimate bloodbath type games like Quake 1,2,3 , Unreal , Blood 1,2 , ... Then you have realistic strategy games like the halflife addon "Counter Strike". Although the bloodiness of quake can desensitize children to violence, I feel that Counter Strike desensitizes you killing actual people. I am not saying we should ban these games (I play them all myself), but they should not be in the hands of 8 yearolds.
Violence with no blood (ie consequences) is worse than violence with blood because subtly changes the user to equate violence with fun when it should be equated with pain and suffering. FPS wouldn't be a problem if people weren't first exposed to "fun cartoon violence". It's the cartoon violence that numbs people to the real violence. What would make real sense would be to require anybody participating in ANY sort of violence related entertainment to also be hooked up to electrodes so they can get zapped during the violent climaxes. That way we can get rid of all ratings systems and allow children to play all games with no worries about them getting desensitized (however I would think they would still get nightmares, which I think is most parents main concern, but I wouldn't know, I don't have kids and I don't really know any parents but my own, and they've forgotten everything about small children).
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But I think they're out of line, saying it distorts my view point.
Ooh, look at the time, 16:38, time to fire up the Panzerkampfwagen and begin an orderly maneuver to ArmeeGruppe Haupt, to prepare for Operation Wochenende.
George
be sure to apply this to the real world. lesson #1 : do not sit/stand still run around like a chicken with your head cut off [...] Good advice. Probably useful to know if some crazed gunman is ever firing at you. Might save your life (I've never been in such a situation, so I'm just speculating). lesson #2 : always aim for the head . but be sure to keep moving always fire you weapon in to possible sniper holes or nest just in case... No. Aim for the middle. That way you're more likely to hit the target (or with a rocket launcher, aim for floors/walls and get the target with splash damage). lesson #3: be sure to cary heavy explosives on you at all times and toss them around all corners or possible places where the enenmy may be lying in wait... lesson #4: always shoot first and ask questions later.. the time it takes for you to determine freind or foe is just enough for the target to blow your head off.. What about friendly fire and killing civillians? A bad thing in both games and real life. lesson #5 : always take risks the rewards always out weigh the the possiblity of losing a life . besides you will respawn next time. If you die, even if you respawn, you lose time and ammo. lesson #6 : almost always rush the opposing force . Except if they are retreating and firing. i think that these few lessons in life will get me real far if there is ever a war .... Possibly. I'd do something about the friendly fire if I were you. or i ever feel the need to go blow some people away who needs millitary and or police training when we have sims that install these fine qualities in to those that play them... ??? I would hope that police forces are well trained at least.
You should see the artillery I have in my back yard.
Thanks, but I've already got $100 bucks. I earned it at my job, where I do productive work for 8 hours a day. I think I'll donate $50 to the Libertarian party (to prevent people like you from making their "suggestions" into laws) and spend the other half on Half-Life: Opposing Force.
People who read books are wasting time + resources (trees and massive rooms to store their books)=money. If you aren't interested enough in books to be doing something useful with them, then go up on someone's roof and clean the rotting leaves out of their gutters for a buck, or play a shareware computer game on a legacy computer not connected to a network (there are some fun ones made with the text based Adventure Game Toolkit).
Of course unlike you and Mr. Gradgrind (um.. Charles Dickens' Hard Times in case you find fiction to be a waste of time) I find the call of "productivity, always productivity" to be the creed of tyrants. So tonight, I think I'll read some De Camp or Heinlein, who always understood blustering fools fairly well....
Oh! And the most productive way to spend time is to help people without expecting compensation for it, like when I sold candy for charity this summer... but then, that's probably lost on someone as socially myopic as you.
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
I previewed my post above and it came out correctly; but now all of the HTML tags have been stripped. What's going on here?
I notice that an earlier poster experienced the same thing. Has this happened to anyone else, or did I just press a wrong button? Or did I use bad HTML and wasn't informed by the software?
- Allowing parents/those who opened up the accounts create a 'list' of screen names that can only access certain ratings. For instance, an 8-year old might only be given access to games rated appropriate, but denied access to others. Insofar as rating is acceptable at all, I think allowing parents to use it in this manner is acceptable.
What I don't think would be acceptable is:The article's not to clear on exactly what AOL intends to do with the ratings - whether it's just going to show them and not restrict access at all, or if it's going to use another scheme altogether. Here's to hoping that if they decide to enforce the ratings, they do it wisely.
-Denor
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My point is not wether the organization is trying to help someone or not, but rather that such a plan as you have implimented is only feasible in america. (which, btw, is a rather generic phrase. of course it's not feasible only in the US, but only most probable.) If you want to give something, just give it! This is just one more step in the direction started by corporations that give money just so they can advertise that they gave. For instance, does anyone believe for an instant that Shell really cares about the environment? If they did, they would spend all their profits in developing alternatives to polluting substances such as oil. Shell has only one meaning for it's existance, to sell oil. Yet it claims to want to clean up the environment. Yeah right.
My point, if these companies that are supporting your project are truely doing it because they care, why arn't they just giving the money without having someone intervine (ie: click)?? Scrap the middleman, just give the stuff.
-----
Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
Do yourself a favor. Spend your every moment doing something productive. You will discover what real achievement is. Your leisure time will be that much sweeter. When you stop wasting time in front of the console and give yourself a mission in RL, you discover what real fun is.
/.
What leisure time? Supposedly I am supposed to spend all time time doing something productive. I have alot of things I do in my spare time. Some are productive. Some are not. The ones that are not waste huge amounts of energy and time, no matter how you look at it. Some are outside. Some are inside. Some involve computers.
You frighten me. You have the most closed mind I have ever seen, even on
People who play games on their computers are wasting time + resources (storage & cpu cycles) = money
Is tweaking my window manager productive? Recompiling a kernel? It helps nobody. It gives me pleasure. How is that different from playing a computer game?
People like you who post on slashdot are wasting time + resources + air that i could be breathing. Do yourself a favor. Save your sermon about what kind of entertainment I'm allowed to have for somebody who is as narrow minded as yourself.
Personally, I think the Mortal Kombat-style games are worst of all - but maybe that's because I don't play them.
Of course that's because you don't play them. 2D Beat-Em-Ups have a community of their own just like 3D Shoot-Em-Ups. Mortal Kombat is just one of them, known for its violence, but there are others. For an outsider they often look like stupid games where all you have to do is punch some buttons to beat your opponent. But that's only at first glance and as wrong as claiming Quake is only about clicking your mouse. There's more to it as everybody who got seriously involved with these games knows.
But the real problem with your statement is not this misunderstanding because of a lack of knowledge of what you judge, although judgement without knowing all the facts IS a problem, personally I'm disturbed about the putting down of others who should be part of the same community. No matter if you're a Simmer, Quaker, Fighter - you're a gamer. We're all gamers. Part of the gaming community. The worst thing we could do when the media or other propaganda groups blame games for violence is to claim our subcommunity is okay but blame the others. Think about it, if you say "Our games are right, theirs are wrong" you're helping the ones who are against ALL games. And if those can get rid of one part, the other parts will be weakened. So don't put down any other gaming groups just because you prefer another one, games are games, we're all gamers. Let's act united in favor of all games instead of splitting up and weakening the whole community.
That's also valid for blaming other different groups like the movies, music, whatever. You might not like it, you can prevent your children to get it (if you're a good parent you should be in control and supervision), but don't try to take it away from others by blaming it. If you blame something else, so can they blame your stuff, so better act with united strength by supporting each other.
-- Eavy (: Linux Is Not UniX
Almost every article recently, 90% of the comments have been in agreement. IT seems to defeat the purpose of discussion if everyone is in agreement. Also, the subject matter seems to be continually regurgitated, such as this converstation is basically exactly the same as any of the otehr video game discussions. Anyway, its good to know that everyone on /. can think for 'themselves' and harshly disagrees with the 'mainstream'.
Oh, I completely agrre... just saying that young, impressionable kids can get the wrong idea. I have heard, however, that by age 10 you basically are who you will be and any impressions that will be made on you are already made so age 10+ I think its fine for *some* games... REALLY don't want to see my kid (when, if I have one) to rip people's heads off until 15 I think. Maybe 14. DOOM is ok for 13-14 since its cartoonish :)
If you think you know what the hell is really going on you're probably full of shit.
If you think you know what the hell is really going on you're probably full of shit.
jdube is who I am.
Intolerance has no political bias -- both sides are equally intolerant, but of different things.
Intolerant cultural conservatives generally don't care about violence, they care about sex (unless glorified violence is directed at U.S. institutions/authority figures). Intolerant cultural liberals are the ones worried about violence, but they don't care about sex (except insofar as they believe a specific depiction is degrading to women and thus a no-no.)
To tell the difference: Intolerant cultural conservatives didn't like the fact that the hero's wife was a stripper in Independence Day, but thought that heroic combat was okay. The intolerant cultural liberals criticized Bob Dole for praising such a violent movie, but generally had no problem with the wife's profession.
> That article could have been written by a Green
> or a staff writer for the "Militant" (a local
> socialist rag) for all its ramblings about
> Western "hegemony" and military force.
No kidding. Pretty hard to describe the Nazis, Soviets or even the North Vietnamese Commies as anything other than Evil, and the Bad Guys.
Reminds me of all the lefties getting upset when Reagan called the Soviets "The Evil Empire". They were certainly an Empire, and how many 10's of millions of people to you need to kill to be deemed Evil?
The plot elements are as bizarre as they always are in Cronenberg films (the man with the orifice fetechism), so you can't take that as proof that "oh yeah, now they are obviously back in the VR world". In fact, your observation that extreme bizarre violence might be confused for fiction is used in the film. At one point one character takes up a gun and blows out the brains of an old man because she thinks he is boring. "Come on, lighten up, its just a game...." While we, the real (I hope) audince is sitting there wondering which option is the worst one from the viewpoints both of ethics and entertainment.
A) That the characters are so confused they believe the real world is VR and the movie just got preachy, or
B) that the whole thing will end with "Ta-da, fooled you, everything is ok, it was just VR all along. Hope you enjoyed all the violence, wink wink."
If you haven't seen it, I can recommend it.
************************************************ ***
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
> I'll send you $100.
./ed.
Hope you don't get
I have a roommate who has decided to "train" himself to only get seven hours of sleep. Is this consistent with your goal of constant productivity. My roommate thinks his plan is great, now he has a free hour to study and work. What's my point? I don't know...
Ha, if you look too crazy for the Army, they send ya to the Corps. Seriously, I doubt there are very many people who would confuse C & C with real life. And most of them would probably wash out in Basic Training.
Ever see "Full Metal Jacket"? My cousin was a Marine. They made him a "minister of death, praying for war".
Those games however, may be useful to a few officers to teach resource management and such.
Doesn't it seem strange that the author of the MetaMute article's e-mail address is at Electronic Arts?
It's this kind of shit that makes we want to write my own tactical simulations, designed to piss off the militant patriotic yahoos for which these things seem to be marketted. My favorite idea is a slave uprising in the American South, in an alternate history were the South won the Civil War, played in a sort of resource maanagement/tactical simulation engine.
I like the idea of using violent games to teach the concept that there are multiple sides to most stories. My brother wants to produce a two-part FPS: In the first part you're the wise and benevolent leader of a small nation, trying to accumulate weapons and traps to fend off a psychotic terrorist fanatic who's coming after you with a two-by-four with a nail in it. In the second part, you're a brave freedom-fighting guerrilla warrior trying to assassinate the mad dictator who is strangling your nation by hitting him with a two-by-four with a nail in it...
- Michael
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Go ahead, blame me... I voted for Nader!
Espcially with games like Rainbow 6, where agression will just alert all the terrorists and perhaps get hostages killed. Or in games like Nam, where running around with guns blazing is a sure way to get KIA.
I've become proficient in firearm lingo from playing Jagged Alliance 2. I'm not necessarily psychotic enough to run around shooting people, but I do know more about guns. Nothing wrong with that of course.
Buy him a "Civilisation" type of game,
try Freeciv.
Its fun and informative.
You get to choose your location, type of country (third world, industrial, oil rich), and best of all, get to choose the American President you go against! In the beginner level you go against Carter. Reagan would probably be the advanced level because of the unpredictibility factors.
In my honest opinion, Mortal Kombat type games are the worst, for they represent nothing but senseless violence. Some argue they represent a sport, but looking at MK's "Fatality" feature, it certainly doesn't.
On the other hand, Combat sims such as flight sims, tank sims are not that bad in that aspect. I play those types of game, because I like technology not the Combat. This is especially. true of Flight Sims, where all you see is a machine, a miracle of technology, which can fly at speeds faster then sound, and not a person. You don't also see any blood etc... it's purely the technology that fascinates a player and by seeing the might of these machines, you get to appreciate that you are in peace, not at war and avoid the destructive power of those machines. My 1000 Belarussian rubles (about 2 cents). Oh yes, if you're looking for a good open source flight sim, check out sabre at http://sabre.cobite.com (Korean War / Late WWII aircraft).
I personally don't think FPS games make people into murderers. I play Tribes, Unreal Tournament, and the Quake games... But I can't imagine ever actually pulling a gun (or similarly lethal weapon) on someone and blowing them away. Basically, if a person goes on a murderous rampage because of a game, they probably already had one or two screws loose. And it certainly doesn't help that a lot of parents these days largely ignore their kids. They don't help them see that the violence portrayed in these games should be confined TO THE GAMES, and not acted upon.
Its probably true that flight sims are "worse" than first person shooters with regards to training people to be able to kill, however i dont see how this is relevant...
the thing is, your average kid can't just go and find an F-15 to run riot with. your average kid shouldn't be able to just go and find a handgun to shoot people with either..
there are terms for people who are unable to tell fantasy from reality - nutcase, lunatic, etc. they are usually locked up.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
To a degree. But there's still a lot of deviation, like how you get full information about everything your units can see, instantaneously; how units are always identifiable; how marines never run out of ammo; how you can't do something like give attack plans to groups of units (e.g. at clock tick N, the Wraiths should cloak and head for the Pylons, then attack. Simultaneously, the siege tanks open up on perimiter defenses, while a ghost cloaks, takes a certain path, and prepares a nuclear strike. When the nuclear strike starts, the Wraiths are to head elsewhere while a set of transports picks up marines/Goliaths and attacks the units harvesting crystals -- and let this plan be, and shift focus elsewhere while all this takes place). This clicks with the rule that you can't order more than 12 units at once...
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
Considering that there are some 4 million acres devoted to rice production in the US, "rice paddy" works just fine...
Jeff
Sure it does, depending on the reason.
Remember that MacArthur proposed escalating the Korean conflict dramatically into an all-out war on Communism, by targetting the PRC with nuclear weapons and lacing the Yalu when Co-60?
It wasn't good for his career, or his popularity.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
An unstable person might learn that you have to aim a little ahead of your target when shooting people. [snip] How they use it determines if they make the evening news.
Of course, a really unstable person may be thinking to himself how laggy the server is and lead his targets even more than normal:
Todays shooting spree downtown could have been one of the worst shootings ever. A lone gunman opened fire on crowds of people as they arrived to work. Fortunately on this day, tragedy was averted. Everyone was saved because the gunman aimed 10 feet in front of everyone while screaming "Die you high ping bastards." The one casualty was caused by a SWAT team member armed with a rocket launcher. Sadly, he didnt come all of the way around a corner before firing. Psycologists brought in to counsel his son were heard saying, "No Billy, Daddy isnt going to respawn." In other news, a madman from Boise tried to take over the entire state of Idaho with tank divisions assembled in his back yard...
-BW
Card playing and dice are illegal at
my High School.. are they trying to prevent us
from thinking logicaly? Probably.
God forbid we draw outside the lines...
Jeff Roberts (Optik9@hotmail.com)
[http://poetry.w3.to]
ANd i'm sur ethey became familar w/these terms long before they played any video games
AOL is not banning all games with a rating higher than Pansy, they are banning games labeled Adult. Last time I checked your favorite FPS games were labeled Mature. I find this sort of inevitable in any case, AOL is trying to police their networks so when the next kid goes and shoots up a school people can't go point the finger at AOL for providing the content or arena for their Adult class game. It's a cover-your-ass tactic that we're going to see with increased frequency as more and more blame is put on computer networks for the world's woes. If you're wondering why this is happening watch the morning or nightly news and count the number of times they use the word "blame".
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
I think the problem lies with delusional people who cannot tell a game from reality....In that case TIC TAC TOE becomes dangerous....
its for real friend FreeDonation.com gogogogo for every 2.6 seconds a child dies go check it out, its not a fraud
Also, Don't worry about keeping quiet. All guards, solders and undead will remain at thier post until shot-at.
I strongly agree. I happen to be in the military and through basic training which was a while back we learned to shoot with simulators before we actually got to fire a weapon. Using the M16-A2 simulator (which runs linux) We learned how to shoot the weapon and control our breathing, aim, steadiness and trigger pulls. There were alot of people coming in with the impression that just because they've played Quake/Doom millions of times that they'd have no problems and those were the head ones that couldn't hit a single target. IMHO I believe that we shouldn't blame the games but rather place blame on the interaction of these children with their parents. Children just don't play quake and become obssessed with shooting someone. If that was the case then humans could easily be controlled by impulse; Its the parents and the time that is spent with the child. You can easily look at all these incidents and call out one factor. These kids spent egregious amounts of time playing the game. They weren't receiving any other stimuli for the most part. Very little human interaction and then the parents want to blame the game? No; sir/ma`am. We need to stop blaming what isn't there. Kids don't turn into cold blooded killers overnight people. Its a process. Thats in general my two cents.
I play games alot of the time in my week, i don't think there's anything wrong w/it. It helps me relax, and kills time. And its actually pretty socail...me and my roommates talk etc while playing starcraft, and the best quake games are when you stop now and then and talk to the people you're gibbing :)
The text may not be intentionally racist, but it is divisive in that it subtly reinforces stereotypes. The author of the article loses credibility as he rants on, but that doesn't invalidate his concerns that the game may promote racism in some people.
/.. Most of us, while we sometimes employ stereotypes, do not classify people primarily with generalizations. On the other hand, there are many people who do engage in groupthinking, people who identify themselves and others primarily by race, nationality, religion, or operating system. They are not what you would call xenophobic or racist, but they are generally going to be more impressionable than those of us who have evolved beyond this. This mentality is prevalent among the young (pre-high school), especially if they have been not been exposed to other races or cultures yet. A game like this is not going to turn kids into racists, but it can have a negative effect. I see nothing wrong with bringing this to light.
The at-risk segment of society does not include most members of
This is true, but I think that if the game had been designed with that high a level of detail the playability would really start to take a dive. Remember that plans like you described are hashed out by teams of specialists in real war situations. The StarCraft game is intended for one to four player teams, and each player usually controls on her own units. Still, good points you made there.
Happy computing
A friend's brother is a hardcore gamer. I don't know what your definition of hardcore gamer is but he is what I think of by the term. His parents only let him use the internet on weekends... for good reason. He spends 12 or more hours a day playing computer games. I know I can never call during the weekend because he is tieing up the phones.
He is definetly wasting his time. The fact is that games are easy - no one gets hurt. You don't get sore. You barely use any energy by sitting on your ass all day.
And to top it off: you don't have to think about it. It is all knee-jerk reactions. No wonder the gaming industry makes so much money.
***Beginning*of*Signiture***
Linux? That's GNU/Linux to you mister!
I hate to break it to you all, but GAMES ARE NOT THE PROBLEM. Parents, religious leaders, politicians, and heck, even some of us are more than happy to pin the blame for various social phenomena (including an escalating crime rate among teenagers) on computer games, but it seems to me that they are looking for a convenient scapegoat without really considering the problem.
True, many computer games involve violence. True, this may have a tendency to rub-off on an individual. But only a person who is mentally unstable will be unable to differentiate between what is happening on the computer screen and what happens in Real Life. Most computer games I know of (whether they be FPSs or sims) involve a keyboard, a mouse and/or a joystick. The gamer sits behind his computer manipulating these devices, while viewing a bunch of coloured dots on his monitor. Should he/she be 'slain', he/she will return with a click of the mouse to play on. Last time I checked, the Real World isn't perceived through a monitor, and I don't control objects through a keyboard-mouse interface. And I don't make annoying noises when I jump (ala the Quake guy) and run at 90+ mph.
I play computer games, and as someone (who shall remain anonymous because I can't remember his name, sorry) pointed out, I still don't know how to operate a rifle. I haven't even held one, let alone pulled the trigger. And I, like everyone else I know, understand that once you die, you're dead. No coming back. For me and countless others, the difference between computers and Real Life is clear and inviolable. I can walk away from a nice Quake deathmatch and not feel any inexplicable urges to gib someone, and I strongly suspect that 98% percent of gamers are the same.
Although computer games are not the problem, they may be a symptom of the problem. I tend to agree with TheFitz when he suggests that the lack of attention (and guidance) from parents is, at least partially, responsible for the situation.
Many people will point to the horrible events that transpired at various schools (you all know the ones) and to the clearly deranged youths who perpetrated them. They will go to great lengths to emphasize the connection between said youths and computer games (which most teenagers, and many adults I have met frequently play). They will go to equal, if not greater pains to conceal the fact that the shooters are part of a negligible minority of society that suffers from certain mental difficulties. But they will conveniently avoid examining the deeper, and more important issues. If, as they would have us believe, the idea of violence was derived from games and movies, why did this idea ever cease to be a mere idea, and how did they achieve the means to effect this idea? Where did the weapons necessary for the brutal attack come from? Why were the parents so completely ignorant of the preparations being made by their children? Why were school officials (hehehe... I know a LOT of /.ers will have strong opinions about THIS) oblivious to the fact that some of their students were experiencing difficulties, and why weren't the parents alerted to this fact?
Computer games are not to blame in this, and countless other situations. Their parents, and to a certain extent, Society in general, are responsible.
I am sorry to disappoint you, ladies and gentlemen, but violence does not stem from computer games. I will likely be moderated down for this, but we, as a society, have all but turned our collective back on things like morals (I'm not talking about religion... just MORALS... you know, things like COURTESY, HONESTY, etc.). It's no wonder that violence is rampant. If, as befits their responsibility, the parents were to inculcate said virtues into their children, we'd be complaining less about violence among children, then, say, their grades ;-) Stop blaming games for a problem YOU have created, and open your proverbial eyes to the reality of the situation. Games are nothing but a physical manifestation of the dilemma. Start teaching the children what it means to be just, to be trustworthy and see what happens. Take away the firearms and weapons and see what happens. Start talking with YOUR children about the problems they may be having (and not just, "oh... how was your day?" type of thing, but a deep, sincere discussion that shows you care) and, who knows, we may not have to worry about this again.
And for those who care, I'm a high school student, and I'm sorry for the long-winded post.
He who laughs last thinks slowest.
I got a kick out of Pike's post, and I've also enjoyed seeing /. tear him a new one for his presumption.
IMO, games generally are a waste of time, but the premise that wasting time is automatically wrong is itself wrong; humans need leisure as well as recreation and work. And games of course can teach skills, foster cooperation and just plain amuse. Because of their singular focus on weapons, targets, and reflexes, though, I find FPS's to be be more cathartic than instructive. (Though that doesn't stop me from playing Marathon 10+ hours a week. After a long stressful week, some catharsis is welcome.)
Where I think Pike has a point is that highly cerebral recreations like computer games produce "narrower" human beings than more traditional recreations when practiced to the exclusion of other forms. Forget how badass you are with a rocket launcher--can you get your first serve in? Can you bring down a tree without killing yourself or destroying your neighbor's house? Can you even stand on one foot for more than a minute without falling over? Mens sana in corpore sano (sound mind in sound body) is not just a bit of highfalutin' Latin; it's a bit of truth, and I think Pike was making a plea for a bit more balance in our activities between the cerebral and the somatic.
It's not that tennis is morally superior to Quake; I make no explicit moral argument here at all. I just think that being able to make your body perform even remotely as nimbly as one's character does in an FPS is a source of great satisfaction, and, importantly, it's a satisfaction that is available to anybody, not just "athletes." Many of us spend our work and our play sitting on our asses clicking and scrolling. What we're missing by that is not only improved physical health but [personal philosophy] fuller realization as human beings, which is not just an abstract good but a tonic for the soul, leading to happiness and longevity. [/philosophy]
No doubt many, many people reading this do strive for and to varying degrees achieve such balance, (and the effort is as important as the success) but Pike and I worry a bit about the number of kids and adults who don't even try.
OK, I'm putting on my aluminized asbestos pants now.
First off, while combat sims (assuming you're talking about RTS games.) might give you an upper-hand in tactical skills, most of these games work so that the rushers find the cheapest unit, and overwhelm you with it. That doesn't win wars, people. Even if it did, do you really think some video game junkie's going to garner enough respect from his military peers to ever make it to a position where he can command armies? Unlikely...unless they have a "mouse-clicking finger strength test."
.45. If it's your first time, I guarantee that you will completely miss whatever you're shooting at. Here's the plain and simple physics behind it all, you're going to have recoil. And while the machine gun's longer barrel and high rate of fire make it a more effective killing weapon, you didn't really need to play Quake III to know that, now did you?
As for the other combat sims, i.e. air combat, tank combat, submarine combat, how many people do you know who have actually in real life, seen a tank, submarine, or F-15? And, of those how many have piloted them with live ordnance? Really, I mean, the chances of someone getting "trained" well enough with anything computer based to cause a threat to structuralized society in the RTS area is really next to nothing.
As for FPS games, all those people who claim that becuase you run and shoot in a video game, you've developed your reflexes well enough, you're trained enough to kill with a gun have obviously never gone out and actually fired a gun, and have just seen enough TV and movie violence to think what the screen shows is actually how easy it is. Just for the learning experience, go to a supervised, official shooting range, and try shooting a
The hard truth of this whole situation with kids and violence is that nobody is to blame, except the parents. And they don't want that blame. Just look at the 70s and 80s. That's where all this business corruption started from. The generation that these kids parents grew up in is one of carefree, responsibility shirkers. They don't want to know that the reason their kids grow up violent is becuase they leave them in front of a TV from 6 months onward. That the responses to violence that they've had pumped into their minds since they could walk have been ones of retaliation. Here's an open challenge to anyone who truly believes video game violence will train someone to become violent and give them the ability to wield complicated machinery:
You create for me, the most in-depth, highly accurate 3D real-time rendered model of the human brain, and develop a game on how to operate on it. I'll play the game for 3 months. (Standard interest span for the best games out there today.) Then you let me operate on your brain. That'll put this training thing to rest once and for all. Any takers?
------------------------------------------------
"All beer and no TV make Homer something something." "Go crazy?!" "Don't mind if I do!"
Sad but true. Local kid kept hurting himself and others trying to emulate moves from a Mortal Kombat style game. He once had his console removed for a month and normalised. It was pretty obvious that this kid should have limited exposure to some types of games.
What is the take home message? Are these kinds of video games bad? Ofcourse not. But the claim that they are harmless is false, and some kids should not be playing them.
It all comes back to parents being responsible.
Every action people take isn't a question of pure moral will. You can put people under stress and get them to behave differently than if they were "at their best".
if this continues for while it turns into burnout, then depression, and depending on whether the person is an internalizer or externalizer, they can destroy themselves or others. if they have mixed feelings, maybe both.
I think that disenfranchisement is a bigger problem in regards to abherrant behavior than video games. No, it's not the only reason, but noone seems to talk about it.
>we do it in the game than in real life, and taking out our stresses in game makes for a smoother friendship in real life.
Looks like taking that Peace & Conflict Studies course is actually coming in handy...
The problem with this idea is that it relies on the idea of "catharsis" or "getting it out of your system". The classic example is taking your frustration out on a punching bag, thereby making yourself less likely to perform the same actions on the human *source* of your frustration. The idea that catharsis is real and works the way it is supposed to is basically taken for granted in "common knowledge", but the study of social science raises some questions. Actual scientific studies on the subject have had pretty mixed results. In general, catharsis works in the short term (you are less likely to punch out your roommate right now), but in the long term it *may* make you a more violent person, and so more likely to be violent in the future (the next time your roommate annoys you).
The big problem is that there are way too many factors in individual levels of aggression and violence to just say "FPS or sim games make the player [less|more] violent in real life". So restricting or rating violent games of whatever type will always be a divisive issue because we just don't know _for_sure_ what effects they have. How long have computer FPS games been around? Not long enough to do studies on what Wolfenstein 3D addicts are like 20 years after they started playing!
I guess the point here is that neither side can be absolutely right about the "facts" of children playing violent games. People who say "sim games made be a smart, quick-thinking, non-violent person" can never be sure that anyone else would react the same way, and people who blame school shootings and such on violent games can never know for sure if they were right.
I would agree that it should ultimately be up to the parents, because they are at least in the best position to predict what effect a game will have on their children. Some children are mature enough to separate fantasy from reality, but some are...less stable. Non-enforced ratings may be useful to the parents to make their decisions, so I don't have a problem with them.
PC3
Well wait a minute, you're not doing anything productive reading a book. Thats just entertainment too. Therefore a waste of time. While i agree that helping people out is well worth the effort, i don't think its correct to say all games are a waste of time. They can be "productive" as well, just in different ways.
The article should be glossed like this:
I find it pretty disappointing that people here don't get it, and have just launched into a completely off the point "sims don't make people violent" diatribe.
---
With an adult, I agree with you. Any adult person (in a common definition) who can't figure out the clear difference between a FPS game and reality needs to be weeded out of the gene pool asap. But kids who still believe in Santa (who they only hear about from other people) are in no position to discriminate FPS games (which they can see, hear, and control) from reality. Where that maturity line is is anyone's guess.
So I have to disagree when we're talking about kids. There used to be a clear and simple difference between games and reality. No one ever got so into Zork that they tried to off cop thinking he was a monster. But FPS games are becoming more advanced and dependent on long-term assumption of a role, learning game/combat-specific skills, and immersion in a visual, semi-realistic environment. In such a situation, it becomes harder for the less-mature to decide where the game leaves off and reality begins.
The typical reply to this would be that reality begins when you get up from the computer and go outside. But think about this -- modern FPS games are visual representations of non-computer environments. You can pick real-world locations in which to do battle. Many of the storylines and scenarios are tied into real-world things -- governmental agencies, police, and fictionalization of real-world events -- that kids see or hear about in the real world. Here's a test. Take two five year old boys and put them outside in the summer with no toys. I'd wager a chunk-o-money that not an hour would go by before one of them picks up a stick, pretends it's a gun, and plays out a scenario that they saw on tv. And that's just by being a passive observer. With FPS games they *have* to respond and participate, or the experience ends. A problem arises when the kid gets so into the FPS scenario (this is the information vs. experience thing) that they begin to identify with the experience, rather than just observe it.
Here's the thing -- I'm not so terrified that every kid is going to grab a gun and start blowing people away (although we've seen this with increasing frequency). What I'm really afraid of is that the experiences that shape the ethics of a lot of kids are being slowly displaced by fictionalized experiences & environments. That's a lot more subtle, and IMHO a lot more damaging to human culture. Is it a reason for me to go on a jihad against FPS games? Nah. But from a parental evaluation, they sure don't fit in the same category as same-topic movies or books.
I think not...(*poof*)
These can be used in a very racist manner. Overall, I'd agree with you that these, in and of by themselves, are not racist.
However, it is quite interesting that you pass up the truly offensive bits of what you quote:
Think of these. Especially of the second one. It carries the assumption that the "you" (the US pilot) is more deserving of life than his/her vietnamese counterpart "him".
And that, my friend, is racist.
---
How very budist of you. And i agree. "Walk the middle path."
why would the military be even looking at starcraft and total annihilation and command and conquer as any kind of reference tool?
[recruiter]: Why do you want to join the US Army?
[moron]: I've played 8000 hours of Starcraft and I am ranked #1 on BattleNet! I can whup any enemy!
[recruiter]: Hmmmmm. I see. Well I think you have potential. See that man with the white jacket at the door?...
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
You should take the argument to its logical conclusion. If there's nothing wrong with labelling aggressors as such, why are not the US armed forces as aggressors and supporters of aggression all over the globe?
Either this is done, or there is a double standard at work.
---
However, I think there is more to the article than you point out. It's not the desensitization towards victims of military aggression the point of the article-- it is the implicit, unquestioned and ideologically charged world view behind the sims. Placing the US as the "good guys" who act to save the world against the "bad guys" who go around doing bad things.
The real world is more complicated than a shoot'em up scenario. The reasons why the US has attacked other countries, the ways the US has attacked other countries, the effects these attacks had on these countries, and such, are far more complicated than a shoot'em up scenario. And they should not be accepted uncritically, contrary to what the games promote.
---
And you thought things were bad now, with kids bringing knives and guns to school - can you imagine the chaos if kids are allowed to play these violent simulators? Do YOU want every kid in your neighborhood to know how to fly an F-16 or an A-10? Schools today hardly have the budget for teachers and books, let alone anti-aircraft artillery. 'It's not a problem in MY neighborhood,' you might say, but then EVERYONE thinks that until a Mk-82 takes out the library or some punk takes aim at a school bus with a Maverick. BAN THE SIMS!
>...this web site was constructed to let people to use 20 seconds of their time every day to make a big impact using ... If so you should redesign it, so that its one can actually find out how to do it in 20 seconds! As it is now it seems to be a bewildering mass of information (which is probably very relevant) - but if you want to grab more people, have a link on the front page which says "Here is what you" or something like that, and then explain the procedure in few simple steps.
What I get out of playing either is dependent on me and what I learn out of it is limited by my person. One can say, FPS's tend to make more violent children because more children gain traits that reflect violence.
I'm sorry, but this issue isn't black or white.
---
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
The kids responsible for the worst of the killing sprees, Jonesboro, Columbine, and others were proficient in the use of fire arms. This is an especially relevant point when you think about these situations even more carefully, the "kids" who shot up Columbine were actually young men of 17 or 18 years of age (one of them had recently been rejected by the US marines because of his psychological problems.) I therefore don't see Columbine as any different than the string of shooting sprees over this summer by adult men who were influenced by some of the same things as the Columbine murderers. (I'm thinking of that day trader who shot up his place of business and a guy in Hawaii who shot up a Xerox office.)
Jonesboro is more complicated, because the killers were so young. I do indeed think that the Jonesboro killers were too young to fully understand the consequences of their actions, I think all kids of that age are. However, the fact is that firearms should be kept away from children in this age group. I don't say that because most will go on killing sprees, a more common danger will be the one who tries to twirl the gun like a movie cowboy and ends up shooting himself. If the kids in the Jonesboro murders hadn't been incredible proficient at all aspects of firearms and their effective use, the massacre wouldn't have happened. It actually amazes me that those kids were as calculating and efficient as they were, to pick off school children from a safe distance using a high powered rifle with a telescopic site. I would expect a kid who was influenced by the idea he was going to play a real life video game to run into the school, guns blazing... the two at Jonesboro were just trying to be efficient murderers, not recreate Doom. It's like that movie, The Bad Seed brought to life.
When I was a kid, I had an active imagination. I never slept with the lights out because I was scared of the dark. I loved my Atari 800 and the games for it, like the original Castle Wolfenstien.
Sometimes I would even imagine being able to get back at people who picked on me at school, (I think every kid does.) But that was as far as it went (well, that and a few fist fights, I'll admit). I never took my Dad's police revolver (I never even imagined doing it. I mostly imagined things like robot armies and aliens. :) to school. I was afraid to even touch it, because my parents had instilled a healthy fear of the weapon in me. I guess what I'm trying to say is, if you give a kid a gun somebody may die, no matter what the other details of his life are.
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
Reminds me of a story I read about the guy who invented television. (Phil something.. anyone wanna help me out?). Anyway, the most memorable part of it was that he refused to let his own children watch TV because he thought it was filled with crap. He actually said something to the effect of "If I had known thats what they were going to use it for, I would have never invented it!" He must be doing sumercircles in his grave right now over the FOX network alone (excluding the Simpsons, of course). Reminds me of a similar parrallel, a quote from Tim Berners-Lee, about his invention, "It's not supposed to be glorified television!"
Vote Technocratic! Government by killer robots!
Kasparov must be locked up right now. Chess and card games and such were the original sims. They were used to teach strategy and analytical thinking to children and to keep adult's skills sharp in peacetime. Now all of sudden this is a bad thing? Are these the same people who argue against Harry Potter on the grounds that he encourages that great evil: Literacy?
Do yourself a favor. Spend your every moment doing something productive.
/.?
Does that include reading
--
"L'IT c'est moi!"
It looks like a cheap rip-off of the Hunger Site.
I know how to move my mouse and click a button.
.30 cal rifle.
Yet, for some reason, I have no idea of how to determine which ammo a given rifle uses, let alone how to load it, cock it, or disengage the safety. If it jams, I'm screwed. How do I adjust it if the sights are off? And I still have no idea where the mouse port is on my Mauser rifle.
One thing I certainly am not prepared for is the sore shoulder after firing a few dozen rounds from a
How is everyone training for war and honing their weapons skills and accuracy (by playing Rainbow Six) except me?
8-bit monkeys, 4-bit ducks
The military uses First-person shooters to train their soldiers.. yes... to train them in TEAMWORK.
They don't use it to prepare them to kill, or to desensitize them.. they do it to train them how to work as a team.
This may be a little late, but I am here to post my say in this. First of all, yes, parents do plop their children in front of a computer or tv. That is just wrong. I mean with the new mini-vans coming out with tv/vcr installed in them. What next? I also played D&D when I was growing up. It didn't make me go out and start being violent. It helped me develope a better sense of Imagination. I heard somewhere that a parent spends on average of only 12 minutes a day or less with their kids. Come on....Why not just kick them out of the house, and let them learn on their own. The kids these days don't know the right morals and that, I think is the parent's fault. Now back to the games... Computer Games, especially violent ones, are a fall-back for parents to blame their children's violence on. If parents spent more time and not putting the kids in front of the tube, the world would have better morals and there probably won't be as many debates like this one going on! Those are just my thoughts on the subject.
"I have lost my way in life, because I have lost my mind. I would go and search for it, but I'm afraid of what I'd find
As much as I despise AOL, this is good customer service for a family-oriented service provider. I am nauseated by the thought that many believe that it's a specific game's fault for producing rotten kids (ala those Columbine idiots); however, simply providing a rating as a tool for parents to use is a Good Thing.
Zed's dead baby. Zed's dead.
Didn't you know...some sickos out there would use childrens underwear in a sexual way, perhaps we should ban childrens underwear.
I mean, some weirdos use 'first person shooter' games like quake to try to enact their sick fantasies, and everyone's for banning that, right?
Strange, I do the same thing, only with aircraft, I have a nice collection of B52's in my basement, now just to get some B61's to stick in the B52's, then fly to redman washington and drop......
http://www.freebsd.org
Yes, we have to be careful that kids aren't encapsulated; they need to understand that game violence does not has only limited inherited attributes from the real world. We also need to be cautious about sending them mixed messages; if we overload them, they might be confused by our polymorphism.
Gates' Law: Every 18 months, the speed of software halves.
I agree with most of the posts here, regurgitationg whats been said a billion times before on /., video games don't kill people, people kill people. However, I think it is ridiculous to say that video games have no effect on a person. Anything you do for extended periods of time is bound to have some effects on you. I think desensitization is a real side effect of excessive violence in video games and general media. We all know video games dont kill people, a billion psychiatrists have told us this already, the real question imnsho is what are the effects of desensitization caused by excess violence?
I feel like Ian McClelland (the writer of the metamute article) makes some good points about the overlooked violence in sim war games, but I think that he takes the wrong overall approach to the issue. The article reads like a distraction to the rabid cultural conservatives who attack video games, "Don't attack FPS's, go after the the sim's instead." If you really believe that blaming video games for the destructive things that people do is a dodge, and a poor attempt at moral responsibility (and I do), say so upfront. No video game, realistic or not, Sim or FPS, is going to *cause* or *incite* violence in anyone not predisposed to that violence.
"The horse leech's daughter is a closed system. Her quantum of wantum does not vary."
I think Rainbow Six is much more violent than Quake. Quake's violence isn't very realistic. Rocket launchers? Rail guns? I remember watching my roommate play Rainbow Six. In one mission he burst into a room to see a woman on her knees crying with her hands folded behind her head. The terrorist shoots her once in the head and she falls to floor, dead. This scene is much more disturbing than gibs.
Ryan
I should hope that most people that tend to be stable should, in the first place, quite clearly understand the boundary between real life and a computer game. If you can't even tell the difference between a game and life, then there's probably something pretty messed up that won't change if computer games didn't exist.
Take, for example, the case in Columbine. (only because it was so widely quoted as a result of computer game violence) Do you honestly think that those two kids would not have ended up killing people if FPS/sims/video game violence did not exist? I personally am inclined to believe that it is easier to blame violence in computer games than to face the fact that some people are biased towards violence. It is like bias towards alcoholism... it's just something that happens to be part of everyone, and it's something that we refuse to deal with. There is an idea that everyone is equal, and yet we are not homogenous; instead everyone is unique.
There's also the issue of parenting... kids' parents have the duty and obligation to teach their children the difference between reality and fiction, and what is acceptable and what is not. Moral values are built up over time, so that as a result of their upbringing, people recognize immediately, almost instinctually, that killing people is bad and unacceptable. Blaming skewed moral values that allows people to walk into a room and mow down innocent people on computer games is simply irrational. If someone is able to do something like that, I think that it's clear that there is something deeper wrong with the person than prolonged exposure to video games.
Jonathan Wang
---
Here is a link to a ZDNet article on Yahoo! News. The New York Times' "AP Breaking News" link appears to be down already.
Stupid job ads, weird spam, occasional insight at
*grin*
Suddenly, all of my 10th grade history teacher's ranting lectures about the Protestant ethic and its tremendous influence on American and European culture are starting to make sense. I feel a strange compulsion to rake leaves, despite the fact that it's 10:15 PM here in Wisconsin and my backyard is a FOREST.
But, as my Unitarian ethic suggests that I resist mindlessly conforming to the majority and choose my own path, I'm off to watch Monty Python videos and see if the Chee-tos have gone stale yet.
Marissa
The US Army is looking to forge links to the entertainment industry, to do a better job at this. I worked with UCLA; in the attempt to entice them to build a center there. It turns out that they went to USC, instead.
It's amazing to see how many different fields are affected by PC games. Graphics hardware, CPU development, and home high-speed networks are driven primarily by games, and now the military is being driven by them too.
We live in interesting times.
thad
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
> recently released F15 and USNF produced by
Jane's just seem to get
> away with it, passing the pundits unchecked.
If playing flight sims can give you sufficient clue, motivation, and discipline to pass the tests required in order for your nation's Air Force to trust you with a $50-100+M piece of machinery, to say nothing of the millions invested in your flight training, and the countless hours of support and maintenance and training for the ground crews that support your aircraft...
Although I strongly disagree with the whole "violence in video games engenders violent behavior in real life" premise, if I did accept the premise, I'd much rather see the kids playing flight sims and real-time strategy games than first-person shooters.
Given the (again, IMHO bogus) premise that "children become what they play", a nation of aviators and people who can think quickly under stress sounds like a lot more fun place to live than a nation of people trained in house-clearing tactics :-)
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'nuff said.
-----
Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
It was "cute" when the two kids in Mars Attacks! used their 'obvious' skills at shoot-em-up arcade games to blow away aliens with their own ray guns; this is still merely a movie story, neatly separated from reality.
I suspect that we may be getting a confusing combination of:
- Games where graphics are, at least in some ways, so "realistic" that they may be increasingly confused for the real world, and
- Unusual, but well-publicized, cases of extreme violence that are so bizarre that they would normally be confused for fiction.
Concern comes in if this "breaks the abstraction barrier," and leaves kids having a hard time telling the difference between reality and fantasy.If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
I don't buy many games. My son downloaded
a demo version of Red Alert a couple of years ago.
I really enjoyed watching him play. He had to
"think" about what he was going to do. I got
hooked myself. We got a copy of Tiberiun (sp?)
Sun.
It's great! Have to manage resources, setup
defenses and coordinate weapon systems to win.
Not that alone - there are many out there who actually agree with me!)
The question is not how violent are the various games kids play, but why in the world do they waste so much time on them? It would seem like they have nothing to do. Why in the world do parents waste money on games for their kids??
People who live for entertainment and fun end up with empty minds, empty souls and empty pockets.
Do yourself a favor. Spend your every moment doing something productive. You will discover what real achievement is. Your leisure time will be that much sweeter. When you stop wasting time in front of the console and give yourself a mission in RL, you discover what real fun is.
People who play games on their computers are wasting time + resources (storage & cpu cycles) = money. If you aren't interested enough in computers to be doing something useful with them, then get outside, read a book, or earn a buck raking someone's lawn. Make it your point in life to use every ounce of your energy to help people out, and if after five years you hate yourself for it, I'll send you $100.
I don't really think that one genre can be singled out as worse that the other, though there are several games that I believe just don't belong on a 10 year old's desktop. But that's the parents' decision, not mine, yours, or any silly ratings.
Personally I prefer combat sims because I think they require more thought and strategy; like chess with tanks. Shooters are more for stress relief to me. I'm a college kid, so whenever I've just finished a large project I fire up Quake 2 and kill my roommate a few times. Better that we do it in the game than in real life, and taking out our stresses in game makes for a smoother friendship in real life.
~Caliban
...that I don't know which I like more or which is worse for you. In the "worse for you" (even though it hasn't been proven) I'd say the FPS as it looks as though YOU, not someone else, is doing the killing. A person (probably a child) with already-unstable behavior patterns may get more innappropriate ideas from that. Strategy is just that, strategy. You think out a problem, sometimes those particular games show that you can't solve everything with violence (although Half Life does that too). I don't know if anyone can ever say for sure because many people will respond in many different ays so mapping one person's behavior will probably not be accurate for everyone else. I'd just like to state: Quake3, Unreal Tournament, and Myth2 are all DAMN fine games. Play 'em! :)
If you think you know what the hell is really going on you're probably full of shit.
If you think you know what the hell is really going on you're probably full of shit.
jdube is who I am.
i think by sim's he/she meant Simulatoins, as in flight, not real time strategy. The only games i really play are FPSes and arcade fighting games, and i play both not to become a seasoned killer, i play for the competition... The whole purpose of arcade fighters is competing against another player...they're as boring single player as Quake is. I really don't think anyone has ever gone psycho and murdered a bunch of people because he plays fighting games, if anything they form social skills, at least more so then reading slashdot by yourself (but thats what comments are for, i guess)
/actor/ that portrays Johnny Cage in mortal kombat doesn't really go around knocking off peoples heads, and that it's not a nice thing to do, and i bet you have no problems)
Anyway, to sum up, censorship is always more evil then whatever it is censoring people from, and video games dont make people go looney, bad/no parenting does. (hey parents tell little johny and little cindy that the
Ooh, look at the time, 16:38, time to fire up the Panzerkampfwagen and begin an orderly maneuver to ArmeeGruppe Haupt, to prepare for Operation Wochenende.
Heißt...
Ooh, look at the time, 16:38, time to fire up the (tank) combat cars and begin an orderly maneuver to the primary army group, to prepare for Operation Weekend.
-----
Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
If so, XConquer, Empire and Gnu Chess are more "harmful" than Moral Kombat, Barbarian II and Doom?
*COUGH!!* Whilst I am willing to accept that there can be a degree of social conditioning from games, I think that it would be seriously pushing it to claim that chess (a game with a genuinely long & bloody history) was damaging kids.
(It reminds me of the argument a few years back that roleplaying games encouraged people to become violent criminals. My counter-argument was that if bank robbers started waving loaded D6's instead of 0.45's, we could do with a few D&D criminals.)
Maybe it's action combat sims that are the problem! Games like Command & Conquer, XTank, Space Invaders...
Yes, even that old classic depicts a bloody war. How many sensible, calm, rational people have gone into penny arcades, or the local pub, and come out violent, moronic sociopaths? Now, how many of those became rational when their alchohol level dropped? Maybe it wasn't the game, then, that had the effect.
Now, I have -nothing- against ratings. It's a good idea to provide a potential audience with clear indicators as to what to expect, and to allow parents or other caretakers to make rational, considered decisions.
Personally, though, I think a linear ratings system is useless. How do you quantify sex vs violence vs screen flicker, etc? IMHO, if you had an independent scale for EACH AND EVERY FACTOR that you wanted to measure, then people would have USEFUL information to go on.
(Screen flicker can trigger epileptic fits, and may have adverse effects on manic depressives and people with other electrical or chemical imbalances. Knowing if a game is going to screw you up for real or not is probably more useful than knowing that, out of the population at large, assuming absolute normalicy in every respect for everyone, the game would be considered suitable for XYZ year olds.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Where is the dividing line between FPS and Sim? Look at Rainbow Six/Rogue Spear. These games are FPS that also have elements of real swat tactic (sim). It is seen as constructive because you play the good guy (government agent) killing the bad guy (terrorist). There seems to be a point to the killing in games like this (a distincly American/Eurpoean point.) Lets imagine a sim where you play the Iraqi Army. You get to kill Kuwaitis and Americans. Do you think there wouldn't be a bit of outcry about this? I do, especially by the American media.
I think with games, the defining line between "good" games and "bad" games, be they sims, FPS or whatever is the American Media's view of what is good and bad. (Most game companies are American, and most of the criticism comes from the American media. I'm not trying to country motivated.)
The American media sees value in simulations of WWII battles because they are part of history. It sees value in Rainbow Six because it teaches kids how to become good SWAT team members. *snicker* Whereas Quake, Blood, etc are games that graphically depict violence for _no_ sociological beneficial reason. They are there for killing alone. They do not sustain the lifestyle and innocence of the American people that the press so wants to keep.
If it protrays intentions that are dangerous to the current (supposed) American way of life then it is "bad". If not then it is "ok". It is all media propaganda. Why won't they let us change?
Gotta run to the "electric mind society"
Random Task
"I can hoist a Jack. I can lay a track. I can pick and shovel too. I'll do anything you hire me to." - John Cash "Legen
FWIW, the U.S. Air Force uses Flight Simulator. That the military uses a piece of software doesn't instantly mean that it is harmful or dangerous to kids--it just happens that Flight Simulator these days comes with very accurate representations of approaches and facilities at lots of airports around the world. If you're a junior pilot flying Air Mobility missions Flight Sim can be a help--a three-dimensional prep course for reading the Jeppeson charts you'll use to fly into the field.
My brother's a senior officer in the Air Force. When they fly relief supplies into who-knows-where they're usually not going to a U.S. military base. Oftentimes they're just showing up with little advance prep--using a sim game gives the pilots just a little bit more understanding of where they're going.
So, yeah--Flight Simulator could make your 12-year-old better prepared to fly C-17s for the Air Force. But it still isn't nearly as violent a game as Quake or any of the others.
This is what the article describes as 'blatant racism':
I don't see how references to Ho Chi Minh and rice are racist. Ho was a leader of Vietnamese, rice is a staple of the Viet diet, then and now. There are many rice paddies in Vietnam. Vietnam is known for being humid.
Not one thing in the quoted text maligns the Viet people or culture. That and the incredibly strained logic attempting to link Jane's with 'Western hegemony' makes me think this is all one giant troll. Looking at it that way, it's actually pretty funny.
-- Jeff Paulsen
a little thing called "strategy" ?
btw. why would the army be interested in physicists and chemists? Heck, geeks can't shoot worth crap ya know!
-----
Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
what we need is
If you can't tell what I am trying to say then read it again. If you still can't tell, go watch the 11 oclock news and pay attention to the ads.
Just read in the paper that deaths due to shooting are way down, at their lowest level in 20 years. It's funny: When something like Columbine happens, lots of experts are quick to blame video games. But could the opposite be true, that gun violence is dropping because people are taking out their aggression on virtual targets instead of real ones?
Yep.
As soon as I figure out how to use my mouse to project a crosshair on a real target with my real gun I'll be a killing machine.
Hey, has anyone got that keyboard/Glock interface working yet?
You never really know how close to the edge you can go until you fall off.
Just because these games can (and will) be in the hands of 8 year olds doesn't mean anything. I started playing Wolfenstein when I was 7, and I have been addicted to first person shooters ever since. I play for one to two hours every day! And yet, even though I was 7, I am a pacifist today. I have never been in a fight, I have never been the aggressor. Generalizations shouldn't be made at all. Sims are the same - they shouldn't be taking any blame. They are just games... and it all comes down to the parenting. Kids can watch violent movies. They just need to be told to discern from reality and fantasy... The information isn't harmful. The people who use it are, and that's something the media (and AOL) should figure out.
It's just an example of the fact that people in our culture need a conveniant scapegoat for societal ills. God forbid people take any kind of responsibility for themselves and their children, someone else is always at fault. In this case FPS and Sims are being blamed for violent behavior. In this case, if it's not FPS games, it's Sims. A game will only inspire violent behavior if a person is unstable and prone to violence to begin with. For me FPS games are more of a release of pent up aggression then anything else, an aspect of them that shouldn't be overlooked. If a teenager is unable to handle it, their parents should be dealing with it.
"If you give a man a fire he's warm for a day, but if you set him on fire he's warm for the rest of his life."
ALL VIOLENT GAMES ARE SPAWNS OF SATAN AND SHOULD BE BANNED! THEY ARE THE CAUSE OF ALL THAT IS BAD IN OUR SOCIETY TODAY! Wait... this isn't alt.crazies.placeblame, is it?
"There are more important things than stopping terrorism. Upholding the Constitution is one of them." - Ars Forumer.
but they do understand "kick" and "punch" and "dead".
-----
Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
Anything that will make a child think, instead of glom onto the TV and watch more crap, is fine by me. If it comes in the form of a FPS, fine. If it comes in the form of a sim, fine. I wish the media moguls would wake up and realize that THINKING, contrary to popular belief, is GOOD, and TV doesn't make you think... especially not two-bit sitcoms.
:/
Why don't these momos go after the WWF/WCW/whatever? I see more kids trying to bodyslam/armdrop/etc. each other than I see conducting authentic military maneuvers in their backyards... hmm... and worse, the kids aren't pros and don't know how to NOT get hurt.
Sheesh.
Replace "make war" with "make love".
Just don't forget to include some contraceptive code, though, or else...
Should invading one's peaceful neighbours be opposed, or rewarded with trade deals?
The reaction to FPS games by this "moral minority" most commonly fixes on the possibility of what I've heard called "enactment fantasies". The idea is that the deed follows the emotional exciting dramatizations of these game actions: that adversity is solved by mortal violence and mental re-enactment is a hero fantasy.
Then it continues with props. The tools are variations of firearms and accessible. With a gun, your child has all he or she needs to sink sweetly into this vicarious psychosis.
Not really different from the objection to Dungeons & Dragons which I credit a great deal to my interest in reading at an early age. (Fortunately, I didn't have intellectual wardens but good appropriately caring parents.)
With sims, you don't have readily available props. It's more difficult to hijack an air-superiority fighter and ace a few airliners. It's also impersonal. You destroy mecha usually without thinking of the implied human meat inside.
How many members of this "moral minority" are pacifists? How many would be ashamed to have their child in active duty military service? The Christian Broadcast Network talking heads would approve of many of Jane's sims; you don't fly for the U.N. if I remember correctly.
Have you seen that ridiculous TV commercial for the Marines with the CGI demon slayed with a sword in an arena of fire?
What do you mean by your phrase "only in america?"
Well, let me clarify my post.
I do not support games that portray senseless violence and crulety, but a game such as Mortal Kombat is "beyond" realistic. Take Quake, you actually have a gun that you use to kill people. In Mortal Kombat, you use fireballs => people would not try to emulate what goes on in the latter in real life. But Quake (in general FPSs) could potentially encourage many real life imitators. So I guess what I meant to say was that games that could potentially be dangerous (imitable) should be rated (but not censored) but games that obviously are beyond reality should not be as strictly rated or restricted.
Sorry for the simple-minded comment in the first post. (That was my FIRST ever first post - So I guess I just wrote the first thing that came into my head! - Now that I look back at it, it was pretty dumb)
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The metamute articles cites as racist text that says Vietnam is humid and has rice paddies. Can anyone explain to me what is racists about that?
I don't know if this has been done before, but those of you who don't want to go through the hassle of the free registration, use this login/password combination:
l/p: wwwslashdotorg (login and pass the same)
hope this helps someone..
I've noticed this trend, and I just want to know if anyone out there agrees with me:
Parents are looking for something to blame kids violence on.
That said, I don't consider violent games the problem, or even violent movies the problem. I consider the problem the fact that parents are not spending enough time with their kids. Parents want to plop their child in front of a computer or T.V. and forgot about it. If parents are so worried, why don't they spend some time with their child instead of letting him play those games and watch those movies? I've played violent games all my life, I even played games called demonic like AD&D. However, my father spent a lot of time with me, and those games were exactly what they were meant to be, games. I didn't look up to them as parenting figures. The only thing that came out of my time playing MUDS and other stuff like that was I learned a lot about computers.
Well, enough rambling, that's my two cents.
"Out, OUT! You demons of STUPIDITY!" - Dogbert
I tend to use fast moving games like Quake and Doom as an outlet for aggression, especially when playing multiplayer. Doesn't really mean I want to go outside and let someone have it with a BFG9000.
:-)].
Games like flight sims take a little more thought [quite a lot more thought in some cases] and outright aggression doesn't pay.
Strategy games and sims I tend to play when I've got a lot of time to kill [waiting for a kernel build on a 386DX33
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
(from metamute): "Fantasy games, although more graphically gory, do not conceal any implicit political agenda."
I don't know, after playing Age of Kings if I ever see a high-ranking Teuton walking down the street, I'm going to use my portable trebuchet on them:
http://www.iinet.net.au/~rmine/cheese.html
That is if they'd just stay still while I do some calculations.
Disclaimer: I don't really own a trebuchet. It's some guy's on the other side of the planet.
Esteem isn't a zero sum game
This tears the hell outta me.
On one hand, I'm a flag-waving 'merikin who thinks that the government -- at any level -- should not be able to control what I see, read, or internalize by any method. One of the roles of government, IMHO, is to make sure that any of the resultant actions I may take do not harm another person or group/entity. But I have a vehement distaste for censorship in pretty much any form, and have a rather low opinion of those who put informational input controls into law.
On the other hand, I have a 6 month old boy of whom I'm quite protective. I'm not so sure I want him to be able to play a FPS game in the near future. Reading a book or seeing a movie with a sci-fi/killer/combat/monster/slaughter theme is something that I would prefer to influence as a parent, but philosophically I would never want to be in the position to tell my kid he's not allowed to internalize a specific collection of information -- fictional or not, canned or interactive, in a game, movie, or document. However, when he wants to express outward activities tht include borrowing a 9mm to hunt the neighborhood dogs or build a fuel-air bomb out of my lawnmower, I have no qualms about doing my best to quash such behavior.
However, FPS games are getting to the point where it's not so much an interactive story or glorified logic puzzle. It's becoming a full-blown participatory experience rather than an input of information. To me, the line between the input of information (like reading a book on a combat situation) and resultant actions (participating in a combat scenario) is getting increasingly fuzzy.
I'm not sure what to do about it -- and I have to do something about it, especially for this little guy who depends on me for a great deal of his learning and input. Barring someone else's great ideas, I think I have to treat FPS games as having crossed the line into experience rather than information input, which means that I have to consider a FPS game in the same light as whether I want my kid trained to shoot other people.
I think not...(*poof*)
When I first saw that Marines commercial with the idiotic fiery-sword-and-demona motif, all I could think was, "Great. The Armed Forces are trying to attract geeks."
Fuck Slashdot
Heh. Wanna talk about strategy? Try Risk. Or any SSI board game. That's strategy. Even if it is turn based, it is still superior. Heck, try SSI online and look up their simulations, those whip the tar out of anything Blizzard and Westwood have done. I prefer Panzer General over Command and Conquer any day.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
If the game had said, "Say goodbye to Ho Chi Minh. The MiG-17 bids farewell to your F-8 Crusader over a rice paddy." and "Welcome to America, plenty of desert and all the hamburgers you can eat." would that be racism?
Of course not. Why not? Because some poor little activist trying to defend to the rights of those who couldn't care less if you say 'rice' and 'humid' would have trouble making a case that americans are being descriminated against. If they say something about us, it normal. If we say something about them it's discrimination.
I'm sick of it.
-----
Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
I don't think it would be wise to make generalizations that game type #1 or game type #2 is worse on childrens' mindsets. It is just to complicated and each game should be rated on an individual basis by the child's parents.
<sarcasm>But this would require that parents be responsible for their own children, and we all know that the various governments of the world are responsible for raising children.</sarcasm>
If a parent thinks that a game is too violent for their child, don't let that child have the game. It's really that simple. Parents who whine about how hard or impossible it is to raise children in one breath and then give those same children obnoxios and irresponsible leeway in the other just need to be spanked themselves!
Happy computing
Janes does not make games for kids. They do not market their games for kids.
Furthermore, what kid would want to play a Jane's simulation? A buddy of mine is a huge sim fan. He's gotten me to try a couple of Jane's games. They require a long attention span and lots of attention to detail. What kid is going to play that kind of video game? How many kids would sit down and read through a manual that is over a hundred(!) pages long? This is just plain stupidity. Truthfully we shouldn't even care, I doubt Janes does. Janes doesn't make sims for kids.
i need to use preview more often.
-----
Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
...in the Metamute article.
That article could have been written by a Green or a staff writer for the "Militant" (a local socialist rag) for all its ramblings about Western "hegemony" and military force.
It does raise an interesting question, though. Military sims on the desktop are generally *not* exactly complete training programs; even those that *try* to a degree (e.g. games that attract grognards) do not model things like communications issues, intelligence (down to profiles of leaders...), logistics (not that many games have the concept of moving ammunition, fuel, or food), delegation (generals did NOT have to order infantry sergeants to get their men to seek cover if, say, an MG42 starts firing towards their lines), and so forth.
What they *might* *possibly* suggest is the usefulness of warfare as a useful tool. Frankly, that's one that I firmly believe should stay in the toolbox; remember that one logical consequence of civil disobedience / pacifism is martyrdom...
That, and the fact that there *are* often sides that can arguably be considered "bad", despite what some would have us believe. It's hard to argue that, say, the Armed Islamic Group in Algeria -- known for raiding villages and brutally murdering / mutilating civillians by the scores -- is *not* in the wrong; nor, arguably, were the Flying Tigers on as low a moral level as the SS Totenkopf on the other front. There's nothing wrong with labelling an aggressor as such...
There's also nothing wrong with pointing out the nature of the land. Vietnam's territory includes a decent number of rice paddies -- and if you're going to fight there, you'd better know about that. It's no more "racist" to note this, than it would be to suggest that the Khyber Pass is a salient feature in its locality, or that should one attempt to attack Washington, D.C., that the Potomac is wide enough that throwing a coin across it would be tricky for most of us...
As for balance, examine existing games. Consider, for instance, MS/Atomic's "Close Combat" series, which allows you to play as either side (German Wehrmacht/SS, and the Allies (British/Polish/US/USSR) on the other. CC1 and CC2, at least (I've never tried CC3) don't particularly issue judgements on either side, with the possible exception that it seems that playing Germany in CC1, you *have* to let the Allies take St. Lo in order to end the game; you can defend it all you want but as long as you do, it'll continue. CC2 lets you *win* as either (as the Germans, by, say, eliminating the paratroopers and blocking the British XXX Corps at Son Town for the duration of the game; the Allies, by linking XXX Corps with the besieged paratroopers and securing all bridges). Anything wrong with that?
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
I was talking about your .sig, not your post. Only in america (well, the organization is american anyway) can you make a donation without actually giving something. God are we lazy.
Violent games are sold and enjoyed everywhere. I'm in germany right now (as an exchange student) and the students i know play quake and half life more than my friends in america. LAN parties are everywhere. (of course, this is germany... so the fun is greatly improved with alcohol)
-----
Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
I agree completely. The moral minority should be called the "ethical minority". The concern is a concern in strict context.
Now, I didn't look at the box when I hit submit, but I'm pretty sure it was on HTML, and the preview looked okay to me...
Personally, I think the Mortal Kombat-style games are worst of all - but maybe that's because I don't play them.
...
I play them all the time.
I used to play them with my girlfriend
until she beat me at Mortal Kombat one day.
i ripped her spine out, ate her heart, and then shot balls of fire out my ass until she exploded all over the lving room floor.
yeah, those games make me real violent.
--
-- ken williams
The NYT link is already dead; try going the long way through wire.ap.org, pick one of the wire subscribers, look under the "tech" tab.
I think that the real problem here is that society doesn't have a problem with generals that order to kill millions, only with people that kill a few.
"Kill one and your a murderer, kill one million and your an king, kill everybody and you're god."
... so I can play Age of Kings after a hard day at work.
Seriously though (sort of), might I suggest one of the books you productively read be by Henry David Thoureau. It may shift your point of view a little.
You don't have to be productive all the time. Moderation (no!, not slashdot moderation - geez) in this too is good.
Esteem isn't a zero sum game
As a parent of a 5-year-old with a VERY active imagination, I've begun to worry about this issue a little.
My son has a very difficult time understanding the difference between what he imagines and what is "real". As such, I carefully monitor the content of what he sees/watches/plays. As he begins to grasp this distinction better, I probably will have less concerns.
All this is an aside to another point: It seems like this "imagination" ability is really stressed by teachers & pre-schools. Really. It's what Barney's all about for instance (I mean, the show is essentially about making stuff up, so's Rugrats also).... I wonder if this deliberate cultivation of "suspension" is causing more problems than the violent content itself.
Maybe this answers why most people play ultra-violent videogames and watch lots of violent TJ & movies and are never violent, and yet we have a few, spectacular incidents of very violent behavior in youngsters who seems oblivious to the "reality" of the event. Maybe were getting a higher percentage of these than before because of other factors, like the rise of "disconnection"? I don't know, just thinking out loud... what do you think?
DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
SimSlashdot:
You control a geeky computer user who browses the web while wasting time at work. The objective is for you to lose money faster than you can earn it. The game simulates the valuation of memes and your currency in the game is measured in karma. You need this karma to keep from crashing. The geekier you get the more likely your karma is to increase, but the more likely your salary will increase as well, making it difficult to effectively lose money by wasting time.
Dear Dale: :)) This site is FOR REAL.
Me and a group of university students have constructed this site (launched this week) to help those less fortunate. This site is not an American organization, the money is going to places such as the World Health Organization (WHO). This web site was not constructed to help some lazy people, this web site was constructed to let people to use 20 seconds of their time every day to make a big impact using MONEY THAT WAS ALREADY IN THE ADVERTISING ALLOWANCE BUDGETS. Please believe me. We created this web site in good faith of the people and we need all the help we can get. Tell your friends about it(we need a slashdotting
peace
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We all know that simulation games and 1st person shooting up games are all designed by the government to prepare America's young to fight in real war situations. Though there are some groups that don't realize this and have regulations passed and rating systems enacted. The government goes along with this so that the weak minded individuals who can't get around the rating systems are weeded out and the smarter ones obtain the "instructional" software. Why pay to have soldiers trained when the youth will pay to learn how to be desensitized to voilence and death. Watch TV, listen to the music, and play those video games so that we all can grow up to be desensitized killing androids.
TW
Television is dead. Long live That Weasel Television
GO RAKE A LAWN, DUDE!
While I admit that doom, etc. are rather gory, and some sims are a bit violent, that's no reason to ban them. Violence is a fact of life. In any group of people, some will be more violent than others, and the idealists in the group want to restrict their violence. This might be OK if the violent people were massacring (sp?) lots of others, but what we're talking about are video games. Have you ever seen a report that a video game directly, seriously harmed someone? Further, have you ever seen a study that says that a significant percentage of the violent game playing community turn into violent killers themselves? I thought not.
Why don't the people trying to restrict violent games put their energy into trying to stop RL violence? And if they say that the violent games are causing the RL violence, do they actually have any proof that violent games cause people who wouldn't be violent otherwise to be violent? Games kill no one. It's people who kill people.
--
Seeing is believing; You wouldn't have seen it if you didn't believe it.
Humans like to have fun (whatever that is...) Let's not forget that.
--
Shoot-em up. We all know this genre. Quake is probably the best known of them all. Usually first person although there are a few in the 3rd person.
Tactical shooter. I consider this an offshoot of the former. Games like Thief, and Rainbow Six fall into this category.
Head to head fighting. Street Fighter and descendants about sums it up.
Real-time strategy. This is a broad category. You might have past (Age of Empires), futuristic (Starcraft), or modern or fantasy. These games focus on resource management and tactical positioning.
Turn-based strategy. Games like Warlords drift in here. Also many of the old SSI type wargames fit this category.
War simulation. The best example I can think of here, would be the Harpoon games.
With that said, I don't really think there's a problem with ANY of these categories. It's the way each individual game is presented that should determine the rating.
I don't think anyone who has played Harpoon would argue that it is warping the minds of children. If anything, it is very educational with regard to naval operations.
Less remarkable: fighting games. But look at the difference. Street Fighter was hugely popular, and yet cartoonish. Mortal Kombat on the other hand glorified killing your opponent in the most gruesome way possible. So rate them separately.
I don't think that sims should be ignored, but the simple fact is that they don't usually glorify the things that will get you a mature rating.
Perhaps some video games lend to violent behavior, but this is just one small part of a greater problem in society. The games (and developers) take alot more heat than is deserved. Society just wants someone to blame when little Johnny snaps. For the majority of us, I think games are just a pastime, and a way to relax, nothing more.
Best regards,
SEAL
(Apology in advance, there is profanity in this message, but I feel that it was necessary to convey my opinions on the matter at hand.)
I'm sick of this assault on video games.
I've played video games since I coud walk over to them and put my money im, when I was a kid I wasn't learning how to be a ping-pong superstar I was just playing a game, I wasn't learning how to defend the planet against alien invasion or nuclear holocaust I was just playing a game.
This whole "These games are used by the military to teach people how to kill..." is utter bullshit. So what? Chess was designed to teach military strategy so that armies could go forth and KILL in a more efficient manner. So all of the wars of the past thousand years are because of chess, yeah that's it. Now I'm going to sue Parker Brothers because hundreds of millions of people have died in wars because of Chess and they are now profiting from this bloody game! This must be stopped.
I'm a hunter, I go out in the woods with a gun so that I can kill defenseless deer or rabbits or sqirrels or turkeys, so what? I've killed animals for sport, what does that prove? Does it mean that I'm any more likely to harm another human being without just cause? I say no. Why would a video game make someone more violent? The military uses a conditioned response to get people to kill, it doesn't matter how they do it. In the 1960s the US military used silhouettes of human forms popping up at various distances as a stimulus to provoke the response of aiming and firing without thinking. Let's ban silhouettes while we're at it. The fact that technology allows them to replace silhouettes with CGI doesn't mean that the computer is to blame. If these games were so great at teaching people how to shhot and kill, THEN WHY DOES THE US MILITARY STILL USE OLD FASHIONED FIRING RANGES?
Because you can't learn to shoot from playing a(modern) video game. You can't learn to deal with the noise and/or recoil of a real gun. You can't learn to compensate for breathing and your heartbeat from a video game. It take MONTHS to YEARS of practice with the REAL THING before you're good enough to go out and kill people. Video games don't cut it.
While we're at it let's go back to burning books in the old Nazi fashion. After all The Art of War by Sun Tzu is a manual on how to conduct a war. We must stop teaching our children about making war. Let's all play flower planting simulations and see who can come up with the best ideas for saving the rainfores.
The simple fact is this, some people CAN'T STAND the idea that there are people who enjoy doing different things than they do and by God someone must put a stop to it.
I enjoy a good game of Quake, Half-Life, Close Combat, and yes you guessed it Mortal Kombat. If I'm not bothering you...LEAVE ME THE FUCK ALONE!
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Gee, you think those potent psychoactive drugs (Luvox or whatever) the kids were on at the time, might have something to do with their violent behavior?
And there are always people that get hurt in sports accidentally.
And there are always going to be plane crashes.
And there are always going to be car crashes.
And out of 20000 postal workers, there will be one disgruntled one...
Does this mean we should stop playing sports, stop flying, driving, and using the post office?
In any activity there are always going to be some risks involved of the rare exception causing harm... It's just a statistic.
A good question, however, is to ask yourselves this: Are games really worth the rare exception? All they do is waste money, time, and intelligence.
Moo.
One of the arguments used by the "ban-the-games" crowd and the media covering Columbine is that first-person shooters somehow teach kids to be supersoldiers.
Wrong.
I am a shooter of some skill. I've been shooting for many years, including some competition, and I also play FPS-style games (off-topic: Half-Life is my favorite). I know what it takes to be a good shooter, and I know what it takes to be a good gamer. The two have almost NO overlap.
Being a good shooter requires a calm head (physical trembling, however small, can mean the difference between a hit and a miss at rifle ranges. Jerking the trigger will cause a miss even at close handgun ranges). Being a good shooter requires intelligence (what is your target? What is beyond it? When something suddenly appears, do I shoot or not?). Being a good shooter requires attention to detail, in the care of your firearm and thinking about the circumstances of your shooting.
This has what to do with first-person shooters?
When the military uses FPS-style simulators to train soldiers, the concepts being taught are to pay attention to your flanks and rear, and to familiarize entry teams with the layout of a specific place (example: the Marines are the ones in charge of embassy security. They have "levels" with the floor plans and layouts of all the US embassy installations, so a guard can receive familiarization with all the rooms of a building and all the likely places the "bad guys" would hide, without bursting in on the ambassador's quarters in the name of "training"). They teach *nothing* about shooting skills.
But then, if this were well-known, there'd be no sensationalist headlines for local media atempting to get national attention, would there?
--Lance
Don't be so sure that FPS don't adjust behavior. The other day, one of my cats jumped on the desk that my computer is on, during a 2 hour frag fest. I turned and looked at it, and attempted to launch the alt-fire flak cannon from Unreal at it. Needless to say, I clicked twice before I realized the cat wasn't bouncing off the desk as it would have if it were a bot. Needless to say, I exited unreal at that point and went and got some dinner.
I mean, I despise those slugs that actually seek out entertainment when they could actually be contriubting to the GDP. Such innefficiency is intolerable and drags down everyone.
DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
While I'm not in favor of censorship, I think people have to accept that the research clearly shows that children imitate violent media and specific violent acts that they view. Especially acts that are performed by adult models or simulated models that they identify with. Where to go from here is a bigger question. People see violence on tv and on the streets. There is no way around that. I just wish there were games that were not incredibly boring that taught people to fight for their rights and conflict resolution skills.
Sorry, that was moronic of me. I was made a moderator for the first time, and used your post to scroll through the list of desciptive terms that can be used, and carelessly left it on "redundant" when I scrolled down, found a post I liked (it was the last post on my list at the time) and hit the "moderate" button.
:)
I sincerely apologize. This is what happens whenever somebody gives me too much power.
I'm hardly a leftist, but I think that any game where you get to depose dictators (whoever backs 'em) and / or kill slave traders would be a hell of a lot of fun.
-- Jeff Paulsen
I think the point the author of that anti-sim article was trying to make is not that people who play sims will get in a jet and kill people. It's that we, as a country, will become desensitized to the fact that when a real jet shoots a real missle, a real person dies. When some other country thumbs is nose at the US, we get all angry and say "Let's go bomb the bastards", and they show us pictures on TV of a missle hitting an "enemy" plane or bunker, and while intellectually we know someone just died, we don't stop to really understand that a person who grew up, fell in love with a girl, likes the color blue, misses his family, and likes being alive just as much as you or I, is now dead, and everything he's ever dreamed of doing is gone. The pictures on TV look like a sim, and that's how we think of war, and so we call for war, it looks fun and clean and maybe somebody'll make a really good sim game of the fight. If every wargame looked more like the opening scene of "Saving Private Ryan", we'd probably think a lot longer before we yelled "Fuq Iraq- Bomb the Bastard of Bagdhad!"
Sometimes a fight is inevitable. But war shouldn't seem fun.
First person shooters do very little, if anything, to make kids more violent (sorry, no evidence to support this ;-).
FPS merely make it easier for parents to neglect their children. Just like TV did with the children of the past two generations.
If we want our children to be less violent, we should spend more time with them. We should teach them principles, morals, and ethics. These things are best taught by example.
Anything else seems to me to be an excuse for the parents, so that they can feel good about themselves.
--Be human.
The same group of shallow minded trolls who say shooters encourage violence are, by in large, the same people who let TV raise their children. They wonder why the school systems are not teaching values and then prohit value type lessons for fear of reprisals from anybody. Remember Dungeons & Dragons in the 80's, it was Demonic , et. al. Same people and there ignorance spouting off.
If parents would raise their children with a sense of pride in acomplishment and morality... thing would only getter better. But as long as people can lay the balame on something besides themselves... there will alway be a scape goat out in their pasture.
When I said 'games' I meant obsessive gaming. Sure, the occasional game is entertainment, but playing it for 14 hours straight everyday in hope of getting 4th in PGL is not entertainment. Face it, whenever someone is into gaming, they are into it obsessively... Sports promote physical fitness, museums educate, and amusement parks are just like games. Yet do we visit amusement parks every day and sit in them for 14 hours straight?
Wow. That metamute article was really a trip. I'd like some of whatever that guy's smoking...
But despite their proclaimed warlike verisimilitude,
What the heck is a verisimilitude?
'Accurate' combat simulations such as the recently released F15 and USNF
Navy Fighters is over 3 years old and nobody ever mistook it for accurate. Jane's F15 is going on two years old now... Just when was this article written? There's no date on it anywhere.
Rarely are they accused of playing the slightest part in the 'moral corruption of our children'.
Now we can start to see where he's going with this. It's all downhill from here...
Not that you'd guess it from the press releases, which foreground the realism of the simulations whilst giving hardly a mention to the violence implicit in the origination of the technologies they simulate:
What does this guy want?! All game press releases to run a disclaimer like the business wire stories that say stuff like "This press release includes forward looking statements..."?
Now all Combat oriented games have to say "This product may contain simulations of war and para-millitary activity. Wars are violent. In real life, people are injured and killed in war." Bollocks!
No-one stops to think about the downright awfulness of the worldview they portend. This view is often both politically and ethically unsound
Hello? It's only a game? It's a fantasy world! What's next, you're going to condemn books like Neuromancer and Snow Crash becuase you don't like the "worldview" they portend?
the simulations are predominantally US or NATO biased, with the the player very rarely (if ever) getting to play the part of the Axis or the Soviets (the 'Enemy'); when this is permitted players are made fully aware that they are taking the role of the 'Enemy' - that they are on the side of 'Wrong' and 'Evil'.
The reason they are US and NATO based is we have all the cool toys to simulate, and there is data available that allows developers to create reasonable facsimilies of them.
I have been flying combat sims since forever, and I have never been made to feel 'wrong' or 'evil' when I play the Red Team.
All of the 'campaigns' that one can fly here are based on US involvement in situations that are, to say the least, politically sensitive. Not that this stops Jane's: the ghost of 'Vietnam' looms frigteningly large, and along with the old Soviet Union it is the most popular 'theatre' of war within these games.
Either this article is a couple years old or this guy has no idea where the sim market is these days. There are many products now that cover non-US situations. Israeli Air Force, SU27 Flanker, EF 2000, etc.
The Vietnamese, likewise, are submitted to blatant racism: (snip...)
If that's the worst you can come up with for "blatant racism" you're stretching it. This section was covered by a previous post so I won't expand on it...
And what if the consumer is not interested in the politics, but is rather attracted by and interested in the technical brilliance of these games? Well this is really the big deal- that the ideology of war comes silently packaged with the technological simulation. 'Fire power', 'speed', 'targeting', 'strategy', 'logistics', 'reconnaissance', 'losses' and 'gains' - this is the language of the Combat Sim, and it is also the language of modern warfare. The horrific experience of war itself is never mentioned,
This is the passage I have the most problems with in the whole article.
The horrific experience of war is self-evident. Any enterprise that involves the intentional taking of lives is obviously horrific, we don't need a game to point that out to us.
Speaking for myself, I always have at the back of my mind the knowledge that what these products simulate is very serious and dangerous and violent. I have great respect for the people of the armed forces worldwide, and I know that no matter how "realistic" a sim may be, does not even begin to scratch the surface of what real armed forces do on a daily basis.
And what's wrong if I'm "not interested in the politics, but is rather attracted by and interested in the technical brilliance of these games?" Why is that a bad thing?
Fantasy games, although more graphically gory, do not conceal any implicit political agenda.
Neither do Combat sims. Sometime a Game is just a Game.
Ian McClelland was until recently a copywriter at Electronic Arts
Very interesting. EA is the publisher for most of the Jane's series. Is this guy a disgruntled former employee with an axe to grind?
Not to sound crazy or anything,but those would actually make good game titles...
Holiday in Cambodia the Video Game:
Depending on how it is worked out, a survivalist approach to keeping your tribe/village/town alive despite an occupation situation or external invasion operation while having to manage the townsfolk and keeping them alive with enough food and preventing injury would be excellent to prepare people mentally and emotionally for traumatizing situations where home invasion or kidnapping might be an issue.
Sim Concentration Camp:
I think this has actually been done, but from the perspective of the prisoner... you basically try to escape the camp and avoid detection as much as possible before your spirit is broken. You have to follow rules and regulations and basically survive the camp as long as you can, working on finding a way out.
Of course, the flip side would be to manage a concentration camp and that would mean expansion and the logistics of personnel relocation and handling.
Drug War 2000:
This would be a good game for youner teens to get into to help fight existing mentallity of younger people about drugs being "not so dangerous". By seeing the suffering, people can actually understand why their parents say "no". And why they themselves should say "no".
MS 5 year plan: Visual Stalin: The five year management cycle of a whole nation in order to improve or destroy it. What's so horrible about this? You have the choice of making your country into a dying cesspool or into a prosperous nation. It all depends on whether the person playing the game is focused on good or bad intentions.
Marshal Law: You're In Charge!:
Basically Sim City with more killing and management of people in the city against their will. Either to control violent situations or to control the people. There is quite a bit a person can learn about crisis management when a panic occurs in the town and marshal law is enforced. For both the individuals and the people in charge.
Faces of Death with DX7:
:|
Unless this is a history lesson, there is little useful need for a game like this. Showing people the faces of the dead or dying is hardly educational or useful in any strategic way except to traumatize or desensitize the player to it. Or gross them out.
If you meant playing the various "evil" figures of the world's history and doing the strategic planning by being them and managing their reign, then it effectively becomes another war sim with loads of micro-management. But would be limited in education value as the views may be biased.
Take it with a grain of salt. You cannot blame games for ruining childrens' lives if the people who are the childrens' parents do not make headway to look after their own childrens' well-being.
You wouldn't let a child walk the streets of a dark alley without a few friends and even then, suggest they take the long way. You spend hours lecturing them about not talking to strangers... but you can't take the time to teach children about the rights and wrongs of morality.
If your child views the games' morales as more important than the ones you are trying to teach, then that's a problem you need to deal with and work out.
A person with a strong mind will enjoy the games or not play them. But they will hardly be brainwashed by them. With children, it is a different story. Which is why adults and parents, especially, should be there to make sure that their children are not taking in experiences you feel would be hurtful to them.
Striking at the game manufacturers for this is like blaming the stories in a book you read to your children for teaching them the wrong principles in life to follow. You're an adult, you should act like one. Especially if you have children. Find the time. Put in the effort. But don't place blame... because that doesn't help your child one bit.
- Wing
- Reap the fires of the soul.
- Harvest the passion of life.
- Wing
- Reap the fires of the soul.
- Harvest the passion of life.
Both of those actually sound like a /lot/ of fun... If you ever do decide to write them, make sure to make it public. Something like that would be a great addition to the (admittidly bland) game market- games with an original idea, not just another shoot 'em up or starcraft clone.
Still not dead.
There was a rumour (during the Cold War) the
the Russions were buying up mailling address
lists of anybody that subscribed to war-game
magazines. The theory was that these would be
the people they would add to their immediate
arrest list upon taking over the USA. Because
these people (incl. myself) would be most likely
able to organize armed resistance and lead/direct
guerilla forces in action. While a person that
plays military sims doesnt really have the
real-life experience, they would have some
knowledge on how to conduct operations and would
be more likely to quickly learn how to apply
theory to practice (trial by fire) and survive
to become a threat.
Keep playing military sims, ya never know when
you might need a hobby skill in real life, kind
of like Linux....
Most of these crimes are commited with real weapons, how do I plug in my mouse to the ole shootin iron? They keep bitching about training people to shoot, like we are playing halflife with somthing other than a pointing device that is useless without a desk on which to rest it. "boy you assholes are going to be sorry tomorrow when I bring my mousepad to school.
I know i've played video games all my life, and i'm not some pyscho killer. As long as parents set a proper example and explani it (what goes on in this box is ok as long as you don't do it for real and you're not affecting something for real), the kid will be fine. Besides didn't we see an article here on /. a while ago saying most game players are adult males 25-45 or something? So why would it matter if the games are violent if its mostly adults that know better playing them. I think the problem is there parents don't want to take responsibility for raising thieir kids, they just want to sit them in front of the tv|internet|game|radio so they can rest after a hard day at work and not deal w/them. Just my opinion.
Now it would be REALLY freaky if the military made a network-based RTS under some other name... Run simulation for everybody down from the top-10... And then... Well...
Just a sorta half-paranoid thought... Ah, in this day-and-age, who knows, somebody will probably try it.
The US Army uses a *HUGE* network of Amigas that run a wargame scenario/sim. It's ran on a hexagon terrain layout imposed over actual maps, very similar to actual wargames such as "Squad Leader" or "Rise and Fall of the Third Reich".
The scenarios vary depending on the training objectives of the units. I've worked on Division (10,000 soldiers+) Sims. The computers provide the stimulus for the maneuver unit headquarters out in the field. The actual tanks and Bradleys stay home, just the HQ's and staff deploy. Supposedly, the computer stuff is transparent to the guys in the field. All the communications from the sim cells are via tactical communications (radio).
Every battlefield unit is represented in the sim, from flights of airplanes to tank companies to 3-man scout teams.
In all, it does its job. Mostly the play is focused on the planning of operations and the interaction between the top guys.
I do what the voices on my console tell me to do.
How many hours do you play a week? You must not be really into gaming... and that's what I meant. I am on a different level than you =) I am into gaming, and as much as I don't like it, and would like to stop, I play it obsessively... it's bad. If you play games 5-8 hours a week, you are not 'into' gaming in my opinion.
What's your opinion of the US Government death squads sent in to silence the researchers and guards at the Black Mesa Research facility in the game Half-Life? (The bad guys throughout most of the game.) Do you think if the members of the American media were capable of really understanding games that they would see Half-Life as evil, dangerously subversive, etc. for suggesting that the US government would be willing to use its armed forces against its citizens if it was necessary to keep its secrets? Oh... and what's your take on the mod, Opposing Force in which you play a member of the death squad? (Although as I understand it, Opposing Force has a complicated story which is more than just "Cool, I get to be one of the bad guys"... though that, of course, is what I thought when I first saw it...)
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
Here's a satire on a somewhat related topic I wrote for school a couple months back:
Not too long ago, as I sat in the kitchen perusing through various religious pamphlets I had received in the mail, I heard the unmistakable utterance of that vilest of words, "check," from my daughter's room. Fearing the worst, I rushed to her room, opened the door, and found the worst. I stared in horror as I saw my older daughter holding a figure of a horridly malformed horse chopped off at the neck. I stood petrified as I saw my daughter use this statuette, obviously of pagan-inspired origins, to knock over another piece, which I later learned to be termed a bishop, an obvious attempt of our immoral society to encourage the disrespect of our theocratic leaders. Finally taking action as a responsible parent, I swept all of the fetishes off the board and took the wicked "game" out of my children's sight. I immediately set the cursed work aflame--certain to have my children turn away for fear of any evil spirits locked within the hideous figurines.
After much research, I have discovered that this chess is not the only supposed plaything our decrepit and immoral society has used in order to turn our children away from the most narrow path of righteousness. One of these is "Monopoly", a devilish work which teaches those engaged in it to capitalistically subvert helpless peons through the soulless acquisition of real estate. "Hungry, Hungry Hippos", a game in which the players push on the backs of multi-colored beasts, thereby forcing them to consume small white capsules, serves as the possible cause for why many of our formerly innocent children have become involved with illicit drugs. In the killing-simulator "Trouble", participants must vigorously strike a die-containing hemisphere (Bearing a shocking resemblance to the top of a human skull!) every turn, obviously encouraging them through this repetition to attack their peers in a similar manner. The debauchery termed "Twister" requires no further comment.
Yet another example of a wretched attempt of our nonecclessiastic society to subvert our impressionable youth is a self-termed "classic game of battle field strategy" called "Stratego". Even the board of this game has been designed to look like that unholy place of death and destruction, the battlefield. In this game each player places several bomb,s obviously encouraging our playing children to plant explosives in the real world: I am certain that research would show that Timothy McVeigh had experiences in his childhood with this game, thus encouraging him to place, in a manner similar to that found in "Stratego", the bomb which killed so many in Oklahoma City.
Have we learned nothing from Columbine? It is our duty as responsible parents to stop these reprehensible encroachments from corrupting the minds of our impressionable youth. We must carry out this duty through any and all necessary means: by pushing Congress to restrict the sale and production of these games, by boycotting all establishments where such establishments are found. We must take action now, for if we do not, we will ultimately find ourselves plummeting into an abyss of immorality and destruction, the abominable horror of which we cannot even begin to imagine.
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That's it. While I'm thinking about my aching fingers, does anybody know how to cut and past from an eterm to a netscape window?
On another, note, at my high school this Monday, we're going to wasting 15-30 minutes of school-time by having a "European fire drill"--basically a huge overreaction to Columbine. When we hear the "beep...beep...beep" we have to turn off the lights, lock the doors, and not let anybody in. Even if they ask and we know them (if they're late of the like) we can't let them in, but have to tell them to go to the auditorium. Then we have to get under the desks, being sure to stay as far away from the windows as possible.
Personally, I'm going to be finishing my calculus homework using by watch light.
This might be insane, but instead of being subjective, it might behoove pen devils who like to debate this sort of thing to actually, you know, put some money into researching this, instead of pundit-ing their asses off.
As far as I've read, viewing violent scenarios does tip you towards violence. There's papers out there justifying this fact. However, they all occur in the short-term - there's not much evidence, mostly because of lack of easy experimental verifiability, for viewing violence having long-term effects on your psyche. It would be much better for all of this if someone did this study and shut the fuckers up one way or the other.
On another note, the effect of 'good parenting' which I noticed a lot of people like to tout is questionable - or being questioned, anyway. Read 'The Nurture Assumption' for the full foul on this subject - it claims peers are a bigger influence on kids' development/socialization than parents are. Credible? maybe not. But evolutionary psychology does a fairly good job of dissecting issues like this, and it's sort of irritating that none of these things show up in media articles about the relative merits of games.
If you're going to write like you're informed, it usually makes sense to inform yourself completely, instead of just faking it. Why do we bother debating articles written by people who have NO CLUE what they're talking about, and don't even investigate the facts?
SA