Panzer
December 6th, 2007, 01:56 PM
the point is that games are good and people should know it. researchers have said that with video games kids don't add stress the release it. and if a kid does kill over a game "they have more problems than just a game."
so for gamers everywhere lets hope the 2008 is a year for our generation.
links:
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/columnist/kevinmaney/2005-07-12-video-games_x.htm
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,303277,00.html
http://www.gamerevolution.com/features/violence_and_videogames
http://www.1up.com/do/blogEntry?publicUserId=5629740&bId=5179966
We'll start this blog off really simply. For those of you who don't know me - i went to columbine, i was friends with both killers and the killed, had reported the killers to the police, the cops did nothing, etc.
If you look up Brooks Brown on google, you'll learn a lot about me.
But there is another size to me besides simply being that kid. I'm now 25, i do video work, work on computers, and dear god, i play way too many videogames. Enough that i gave up putting a weekly allowance into my budget - i didn't budget food, and videogames really were just as important.
I've spent the last 6 years of my life trying to figure out why my friends brutally murdered other friends of mine and kids at school. In this process, i've gone through many personal changes - some good, many bad - and i've also gone down many avenues of thought. One of those avenues is pop culture. Granted, i was sure videogames and movies wouldn't be a causal factor in why kids do what they do - I play violent videogames all the time, i love violent music, and i love violent movies. And i'm a taoist. I'm a pacifist. It just didn't seem possible to me. But, i knew i had to figure it out - so i began my journey of learning exactly how videogames do effect you, and how violent imagery has an effect on the human mind.
The first thing i did was look at my favorite violent games. Although the list has changed over time, my personal favorites are the Hitman Series, Postal 2, and naturally GTA. Each of these games depicts incredibly violent acts - from using a emathook to kill a man all to taking over a town with a town to using a cat as a silencer for your shotgun. All these moments gave me enjoyment, whether it be a cheap laugh or one of those great '**** yeah' moments (you know what i mean).
The great part about those games was that i could do what i wanted. I no longer was bound by the rules of 'jump on mushroom guy here, run right, jump mushroom guy here, run right'. Instead, if i wanted, i could, in the case of hitman, choose my path, whether it be blast everyone in the level away, or find a way to infiltrate and kill only my mark. Granted, it took more skill and time - but it was worth it. The bloody way is fun too, if i'm looking for a quick thrill. The same is true of Grant Theft Auto. The first time i ****ed a hooker to restore my life, i laughed. When i killed her to get my money back, i was cracking up. When i took that money to buy a shotgun and went on a killing spree, i was rolling on the ground.
But here is where i realized that nobody was looking at these games right, not even me. Hitman isn't a game about going in balls-to-the-wall. It's about figuring out how to do things. It is, by nature, not a shooter, but a puzzle game. GTA isn't about ****ing hookers or killing cops. It's a story of a guy who got screwed trying to get back on top. It is, by nature, a story game. Postal 2 may let you kill anyone you want in bloody and disgusting ways - but that's not what it is about either. It is, by nature, a tech demo in the abilities of programmers and AI.
it is WE - the gamers - who change what the game is about and determine what happens. It is the person playing who determines what the game contains.
So i went to friends houses, to game stores, and i talked to people. Even went on a few message boards. And aside from a few ****heads who claimed they play GTA only to **** hookers and kill cops, the vast majority of people are like me. The novelty of that new experience wore off - instead, we play these games now, trying to play them perfectly. Whether that means finding every square inch of land in san andreas, or getting a perfect assassin rating on Hitman - the things in these games that are violent are only a secondary thing. i no longer turn on GTA to randomly kill and nobody turns it on anymore to **** hookers. I turn it on now to race around, find minigames, and that type of thing.
So, i wondered (like my parents, who i will get to in a bit) why the violence is necessary. The answer is simple - immersion. Allowing a person to have sex with a hooker and kill a cop makes the player the character, and vice versa. Granted, i love, and will always love kirby. But i certainly do not get pulled into caring about him the way i did with agent 47 in hitman. Play the game enough, i t no longer feels like you're controlling someone else, you feel like you're in the game. why? because you are free to do what you wish. Sure, i can kill anyone in a level, but i also can find items, take clothing for anyone, go in any room, ladders, windows, and talk with any NPC in the game. The allowance of violence, while it does play to our carnal nature, does suck us in.
Imagine this - playing GTA and not having the option to shoot cops or innocents. Games used to be like that. I remember them. And i certainly didn't enjoy them or get into them as much, and i'm sure many of you will say the same thing.
But the most amazing part of all of this? it's the gamers choice how violent these games get. That's why i enjoyed postal 2 so much. You COULD play the game 100% non-violently. you COULD. I didn't. but you could. So the gamer chose how violent it was - and it changed the games experience completely. Hitman? can choose the violence. GTA? you can choose the violence.
The fun part though? almost NOBODY does what they show on TV. Think back to the alst time you played GTA. did you only run around killing cops and kicking their dead body for hours? nope. you did other stuff to. You played the game as it was meant to be played - a fully immersive life simulation. And that's what makes it amazing.
But the terrifying thing? 11 year olds. Yup - if anyone is going to bring down our game world, it's you little bastards.
Before I did the show on tuesday, my parents came over to my house, and we went through a list of games they wanted to see. Of course, GTA and the like made it - but i also showed them Katamari, World of Warcraft, Battlefield 2, and of course, Halo 2. Our of every game in this post (including postal 2 and hitman), which one do you think my parents were most angry at?
Halo 2. My dad said it was the most disgusting thing he'd ever seen. His face was red. Seem like an overkill reaction? nah - you see, i was on xbox live and some little kid called me a ni**er jew who should be raped, burned, etc. he was ranting. (forgive the language - but if you've played halo 2 on live, you've heard worse). You all ahve seen it happen. a little kid who doesn't ahve his parents around decides to be big man and yell at everyone obscenities that make all of us embarrassed to be gamers.
This upset my parents more then anything. Because they realized that in these other games, the kids weren't pushed into doing bad things - they CHOSE it. My parents finally realized that parents suck. It's the parents fault. You don't get this - my PARENTS realized it's the PARENTS fault. That's amazing lol.
the final point can be said here (it's coming slowly). Games are become more free - allowing us to do what we want with them. This means that we will have the choice to do really ****ed up things or really good things. We can say hello to someone on halo, or we can tell them that we raped their mother. We can play taxi in GTA or we can kill cops. The choice is ours. And parents are terrified that their kid will make the wrong choice. And i can't blame them.
Truth is, games cannot effect someone lke they believe. it just does not happen. GTA does not force you to kill cops. POSTAL doesn't force you to set a parade on fire. Halo2 doesn't make your mouth turn into a ****-spewing crap factory. This is determined by the person playing the game. Just like anything else - it comes down to personal choice.
Columbine was not caused by violent videogames. Eric and Dylan (the shooters) were drawn to violent videogames because they were violent, ****ed up kids. I am drawn to these violen games becaue they offer more freedom. And, it may sound naive, but i believe the vast majority of gamers play these games for the same reason as me. Do you?
---
Thanks to the current media frenzy and barrage of lawsuits surrounding violent video games, I can't tell people what I do for a living without getting a lecture on the current plague of youth violence and the scourge that is Grand Theft Auto. I decided it was time for a rebuttal more effective than shrugging and saying, "Well, I think you're wrong."
So I sat down to write this article, and started doing some research. What I discovered startled me. I'm not sure I have the ability to write a totally serious piece - it is not in my nature to be serious, nor the nature of GR - but the issues are very serious indeed and the evidence is very real.
I am even going to use charts. With words on 'em. We spare no expense.
First off, I have absolute proof that video games are not the cause of this epidemic of youth violence in America. No, really, I do. Ready?
There is no epidemic of youth violence in America.
The whole concept is a lie manufactured, distributed and perpetuated by the media. Kids are not killing each other more frequently than they used to. In fact, it turns out the opposite is true.
Check out that ugly graph on the right. It doesn't take a genius to conclude that violent crime is at the lowest it has been in a good thirty years. For effect, I've also marked the release of the Playstation console, the first Grand Theft Auto game, the PS2 console, and the infamous GTA 3. Wow, look at those surges in violence!
Believe it or not, I got that graph - and all the others in this piece - directly from the U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Statistics. All I added was the video game timeline. This isn't some privately-funded poll or crazy game journalist defense mechanism - this is the actual, most recent government data on crime as used by the FBI. The fact that they all max out at 2003 is irritating, but this debate has raged much longer than the past few months.
Please understand that I'm not a conspiracy theorist. I don't think that there are any aliens at Area 51. I know that AIDS was not created in a secret government lab, I believe that men really landed on the moon, and I am 100% certain that Sasquatch shot JFK with the help of the Loch Ness monster. But something clearly isn't right here. The government and the media just can't go around making this stuff up, right?
Something must be missing. That first graph is the overall violent crime rate, and were talking about youth violence here. So I found the data sorted by age, and it turns out that through 2002, youth homicide actually dropped across the board, the only increase being among adults. If I may quote directly from the D.O.J. report, "Recently, the offending rates for 14-17 year-olds reached the lowest levels ever recorded."
The lowest levels ever recorded. In other words, the Playstation era has, in fact, produced the most non-violent kids ever. But I thought video games were training children to kill? I'm sure I read something like that here and here and here and here and here and here.
To be fair, there have been about 300 studies on the effects of violent media, about 30 of which have been about video games. Most have found little to no connection, although some studies found a small, casual correlation between aggressive people and violent media.
Even if true, this does not necessarily mean violent media has created aggressive people. It is more likely that aggressive people are attracted to violent media. Blaming violent media would be like going to the opera, noticing that most people there are rich, and concluding that opera makes people rich. (Classical opera, by the way, is chock full of lust, incest, murder, suicide, and revenge.)
In an analysis of the risk factors of youth violence by the Surgeon General of the United States of America, violent media is categorized as 'Small Effect Size.' In fact, there are 27 risk factors rated higher than exposure to violent media, like socioeconomic status, academic failure, poor parent-child relations, weak social ties, and being male. Quick! Ban all the males!
So is the media and the government flat out lying to us? Yes, and they have been doing so for years. As touched on in the rabble-rousing films of Michael Moore, fear sells. It's how you turn terrible tragedies like Columbine and the WTC Attack into election votes and must-see TV.
The media in particular loves to bash video games, making sure to point out any time there's an Xbox within 50 yards of a crime. This is because games are the new competition - every hour you spend interacting with a game is one hour less spent drooling in front of their fear-mongering programming.
And it's working. Sparked by Columbine, mainstream media routinely paints a picture of gamers as odd shut-ins dangerously close to the precipice of violent behavior, and almost unerringly misconstrue the games themselves without taking the time to fact check, as is the case in the very first sentence of this CBS News report. Points for killing cops in GTA? Do games still have points?
Gaming is also a new medium, one that has recently become wildly successful. Young people play them and old folks don't understand, so they must be bad. Don't forget that in the 1950's, rock and roll was linked to youth violence in the same way. The hedonistic, tribal rhythms were going to turn America's youth into a bunch of violent maniacs. Rock and roll was banned and censored all over the country. A bill was even put before Congress in 1955 to ban rock and roll altogether.
Something exactly like what is happening now. Sorry guys, I don't care what people say, rock and roll is here to stay.
Let me be perfectly clear: Grand Theft Auto is a best-selling adult game that should not be played by 12 year-olds. That's why it's rated "M" and you have to be 17 to buy it. However, most games are not like GTA. In 2004, 54% of games were rated "E" for Everyone, 33% were rated "T" for Teen, and only 12% were rated "M" for Mature. The vast majority of the best-selling titles every year are not rated "M." Compare that to the 55% of movies rated "R" and only 8% rated "G." The ESRB might not get it right all the time, but who does? (Sources: the ESRB and the NPD Group).
And after all, there's no problem with R-rated movies or mature rap lyrics or violent video games, because there is no problem with youth violence. The most disgusting thing to me is that some truly horrible high-school tragedies are being exploited by the media, and somehow, I'm part of the problem.
The truth is that these are the most non-violent kids we have ever had, and they all own Playstations. The government is so desperate to find some youth crime to crack down on that they're strip-searching kids for 10 bucks while locking up 11 year-old girls for throwing rocks and eating french fries. The most peaceful generation of Americans in recorded history is being shoved through metal detectors, having their civil rights violated on a daily basis, are the victims of unreasonable search and seizure, and are treated with constant suspicion.
All because of a media lie. If nothing else can incite them to violence, maybe that will.
---
“Imagine an alternate world identical to ours save one techno-historical change: videogames were invented and popularized before books. In this parallel universe, kids have been playing games for centuries—and then these page-bound texts come along and suddenly they’re all the rage. What would the teachers, and the parents, and the cultural authorities have to say about this frenzy of reading? I suspect it would sound something like this:
Reading books chronically under-stimulates the senses. Unlike the longstanding tradition of gameplaying—which engages the child in a vivid, three-dimensional world filled with moving images and musical soundscapes, navigated and controlled with complex muscular movements—books are simply a barren string of words on the page. Only a small portion of the brain devoted to processing written language is activated during reading, while games engage the full range of the sensory and motor cortices.
Books are also tragically isolating. While games have for many years engaged the young in complex social relationships with their peers, building and exploring worlds together, books force the child to sequester him or herself in a quiet space, shut off from interaction with other children. These new ‘libraries’ that have arisen in recent years to facilitate reading activities are a frightening sight: dozens of young children, normally so vivacious and socially interactive, sitting alone in cubicles, reading silently, oblivious to their peers.
Many children enjoy reading books, of course, and no doubt some of the flights of fancy conveyed by reading have their escapist merits. But for a sizable percentage of the population, books are downright discriminatory. The reading craze of recent years cruelly taunts the 10 million Americans who suffer from dyslexia—a condition didn’t even exist as a condition until printed text came along to stigmatize its sufferers.
But perhaps the most dangerous property of these books is the fact that they follow a fixed linear path. You can’t control their narratives in any fashion—you simply sit back and have the story dictated to you. For those of us raised on interactive narratives, this property may seem astonishing. Why would anyone want to embark on an adventure utterly choreographed by another person? But today’s generation embarks on such adventures millions of times a day. This risks instilling a general passivity in our children, making them feel as though they’re powerless to change their circumstances. Reading is not an active, participatory process; it’s a submissive one. The book readers of the younger generation are learning to ‘follow the plot’ instead of learning to lead.”
-----
a few i didn't post because my post got messed up but you can read them with the links given
so for gamers everywhere lets hope the 2008 is a year for our generation.
links:
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/columnist/kevinmaney/2005-07-12-video-games_x.htm
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,303277,00.html
http://www.gamerevolution.com/features/violence_and_videogames
http://www.1up.com/do/blogEntry?publicUserId=5629740&bId=5179966
We'll start this blog off really simply. For those of you who don't know me - i went to columbine, i was friends with both killers and the killed, had reported the killers to the police, the cops did nothing, etc.
If you look up Brooks Brown on google, you'll learn a lot about me.
But there is another size to me besides simply being that kid. I'm now 25, i do video work, work on computers, and dear god, i play way too many videogames. Enough that i gave up putting a weekly allowance into my budget - i didn't budget food, and videogames really were just as important.
I've spent the last 6 years of my life trying to figure out why my friends brutally murdered other friends of mine and kids at school. In this process, i've gone through many personal changes - some good, many bad - and i've also gone down many avenues of thought. One of those avenues is pop culture. Granted, i was sure videogames and movies wouldn't be a causal factor in why kids do what they do - I play violent videogames all the time, i love violent music, and i love violent movies. And i'm a taoist. I'm a pacifist. It just didn't seem possible to me. But, i knew i had to figure it out - so i began my journey of learning exactly how videogames do effect you, and how violent imagery has an effect on the human mind.
The first thing i did was look at my favorite violent games. Although the list has changed over time, my personal favorites are the Hitman Series, Postal 2, and naturally GTA. Each of these games depicts incredibly violent acts - from using a emathook to kill a man all to taking over a town with a town to using a cat as a silencer for your shotgun. All these moments gave me enjoyment, whether it be a cheap laugh or one of those great '**** yeah' moments (you know what i mean).
The great part about those games was that i could do what i wanted. I no longer was bound by the rules of 'jump on mushroom guy here, run right, jump mushroom guy here, run right'. Instead, if i wanted, i could, in the case of hitman, choose my path, whether it be blast everyone in the level away, or find a way to infiltrate and kill only my mark. Granted, it took more skill and time - but it was worth it. The bloody way is fun too, if i'm looking for a quick thrill. The same is true of Grant Theft Auto. The first time i ****ed a hooker to restore my life, i laughed. When i killed her to get my money back, i was cracking up. When i took that money to buy a shotgun and went on a killing spree, i was rolling on the ground.
But here is where i realized that nobody was looking at these games right, not even me. Hitman isn't a game about going in balls-to-the-wall. It's about figuring out how to do things. It is, by nature, not a shooter, but a puzzle game. GTA isn't about ****ing hookers or killing cops. It's a story of a guy who got screwed trying to get back on top. It is, by nature, a story game. Postal 2 may let you kill anyone you want in bloody and disgusting ways - but that's not what it is about either. It is, by nature, a tech demo in the abilities of programmers and AI.
it is WE - the gamers - who change what the game is about and determine what happens. It is the person playing who determines what the game contains.
So i went to friends houses, to game stores, and i talked to people. Even went on a few message boards. And aside from a few ****heads who claimed they play GTA only to **** hookers and kill cops, the vast majority of people are like me. The novelty of that new experience wore off - instead, we play these games now, trying to play them perfectly. Whether that means finding every square inch of land in san andreas, or getting a perfect assassin rating on Hitman - the things in these games that are violent are only a secondary thing. i no longer turn on GTA to randomly kill and nobody turns it on anymore to **** hookers. I turn it on now to race around, find minigames, and that type of thing.
So, i wondered (like my parents, who i will get to in a bit) why the violence is necessary. The answer is simple - immersion. Allowing a person to have sex with a hooker and kill a cop makes the player the character, and vice versa. Granted, i love, and will always love kirby. But i certainly do not get pulled into caring about him the way i did with agent 47 in hitman. Play the game enough, i t no longer feels like you're controlling someone else, you feel like you're in the game. why? because you are free to do what you wish. Sure, i can kill anyone in a level, but i also can find items, take clothing for anyone, go in any room, ladders, windows, and talk with any NPC in the game. The allowance of violence, while it does play to our carnal nature, does suck us in.
Imagine this - playing GTA and not having the option to shoot cops or innocents. Games used to be like that. I remember them. And i certainly didn't enjoy them or get into them as much, and i'm sure many of you will say the same thing.
But the most amazing part of all of this? it's the gamers choice how violent these games get. That's why i enjoyed postal 2 so much. You COULD play the game 100% non-violently. you COULD. I didn't. but you could. So the gamer chose how violent it was - and it changed the games experience completely. Hitman? can choose the violence. GTA? you can choose the violence.
The fun part though? almost NOBODY does what they show on TV. Think back to the alst time you played GTA. did you only run around killing cops and kicking their dead body for hours? nope. you did other stuff to. You played the game as it was meant to be played - a fully immersive life simulation. And that's what makes it amazing.
But the terrifying thing? 11 year olds. Yup - if anyone is going to bring down our game world, it's you little bastards.
Before I did the show on tuesday, my parents came over to my house, and we went through a list of games they wanted to see. Of course, GTA and the like made it - but i also showed them Katamari, World of Warcraft, Battlefield 2, and of course, Halo 2. Our of every game in this post (including postal 2 and hitman), which one do you think my parents were most angry at?
Halo 2. My dad said it was the most disgusting thing he'd ever seen. His face was red. Seem like an overkill reaction? nah - you see, i was on xbox live and some little kid called me a ni**er jew who should be raped, burned, etc. he was ranting. (forgive the language - but if you've played halo 2 on live, you've heard worse). You all ahve seen it happen. a little kid who doesn't ahve his parents around decides to be big man and yell at everyone obscenities that make all of us embarrassed to be gamers.
This upset my parents more then anything. Because they realized that in these other games, the kids weren't pushed into doing bad things - they CHOSE it. My parents finally realized that parents suck. It's the parents fault. You don't get this - my PARENTS realized it's the PARENTS fault. That's amazing lol.
the final point can be said here (it's coming slowly). Games are become more free - allowing us to do what we want with them. This means that we will have the choice to do really ****ed up things or really good things. We can say hello to someone on halo, or we can tell them that we raped their mother. We can play taxi in GTA or we can kill cops. The choice is ours. And parents are terrified that their kid will make the wrong choice. And i can't blame them.
Truth is, games cannot effect someone lke they believe. it just does not happen. GTA does not force you to kill cops. POSTAL doesn't force you to set a parade on fire. Halo2 doesn't make your mouth turn into a ****-spewing crap factory. This is determined by the person playing the game. Just like anything else - it comes down to personal choice.
Columbine was not caused by violent videogames. Eric and Dylan (the shooters) were drawn to violent videogames because they were violent, ****ed up kids. I am drawn to these violen games becaue they offer more freedom. And, it may sound naive, but i believe the vast majority of gamers play these games for the same reason as me. Do you?
---
Thanks to the current media frenzy and barrage of lawsuits surrounding violent video games, I can't tell people what I do for a living without getting a lecture on the current plague of youth violence and the scourge that is Grand Theft Auto. I decided it was time for a rebuttal more effective than shrugging and saying, "Well, I think you're wrong."
So I sat down to write this article, and started doing some research. What I discovered startled me. I'm not sure I have the ability to write a totally serious piece - it is not in my nature to be serious, nor the nature of GR - but the issues are very serious indeed and the evidence is very real.
I am even going to use charts. With words on 'em. We spare no expense.
First off, I have absolute proof that video games are not the cause of this epidemic of youth violence in America. No, really, I do. Ready?
There is no epidemic of youth violence in America.
The whole concept is a lie manufactured, distributed and perpetuated by the media. Kids are not killing each other more frequently than they used to. In fact, it turns out the opposite is true.
Check out that ugly graph on the right. It doesn't take a genius to conclude that violent crime is at the lowest it has been in a good thirty years. For effect, I've also marked the release of the Playstation console, the first Grand Theft Auto game, the PS2 console, and the infamous GTA 3. Wow, look at those surges in violence!
Believe it or not, I got that graph - and all the others in this piece - directly from the U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Statistics. All I added was the video game timeline. This isn't some privately-funded poll or crazy game journalist defense mechanism - this is the actual, most recent government data on crime as used by the FBI. The fact that they all max out at 2003 is irritating, but this debate has raged much longer than the past few months.
Please understand that I'm not a conspiracy theorist. I don't think that there are any aliens at Area 51. I know that AIDS was not created in a secret government lab, I believe that men really landed on the moon, and I am 100% certain that Sasquatch shot JFK with the help of the Loch Ness monster. But something clearly isn't right here. The government and the media just can't go around making this stuff up, right?
Something must be missing. That first graph is the overall violent crime rate, and were talking about youth violence here. So I found the data sorted by age, and it turns out that through 2002, youth homicide actually dropped across the board, the only increase being among adults. If I may quote directly from the D.O.J. report, "Recently, the offending rates for 14-17 year-olds reached the lowest levels ever recorded."
The lowest levels ever recorded. In other words, the Playstation era has, in fact, produced the most non-violent kids ever. But I thought video games were training children to kill? I'm sure I read something like that here and here and here and here and here and here.
To be fair, there have been about 300 studies on the effects of violent media, about 30 of which have been about video games. Most have found little to no connection, although some studies found a small, casual correlation between aggressive people and violent media.
Even if true, this does not necessarily mean violent media has created aggressive people. It is more likely that aggressive people are attracted to violent media. Blaming violent media would be like going to the opera, noticing that most people there are rich, and concluding that opera makes people rich. (Classical opera, by the way, is chock full of lust, incest, murder, suicide, and revenge.)
In an analysis of the risk factors of youth violence by the Surgeon General of the United States of America, violent media is categorized as 'Small Effect Size.' In fact, there are 27 risk factors rated higher than exposure to violent media, like socioeconomic status, academic failure, poor parent-child relations, weak social ties, and being male. Quick! Ban all the males!
So is the media and the government flat out lying to us? Yes, and they have been doing so for years. As touched on in the rabble-rousing films of Michael Moore, fear sells. It's how you turn terrible tragedies like Columbine and the WTC Attack into election votes and must-see TV.
The media in particular loves to bash video games, making sure to point out any time there's an Xbox within 50 yards of a crime. This is because games are the new competition - every hour you spend interacting with a game is one hour less spent drooling in front of their fear-mongering programming.
And it's working. Sparked by Columbine, mainstream media routinely paints a picture of gamers as odd shut-ins dangerously close to the precipice of violent behavior, and almost unerringly misconstrue the games themselves without taking the time to fact check, as is the case in the very first sentence of this CBS News report. Points for killing cops in GTA? Do games still have points?
Gaming is also a new medium, one that has recently become wildly successful. Young people play them and old folks don't understand, so they must be bad. Don't forget that in the 1950's, rock and roll was linked to youth violence in the same way. The hedonistic, tribal rhythms were going to turn America's youth into a bunch of violent maniacs. Rock and roll was banned and censored all over the country. A bill was even put before Congress in 1955 to ban rock and roll altogether.
Something exactly like what is happening now. Sorry guys, I don't care what people say, rock and roll is here to stay.
Let me be perfectly clear: Grand Theft Auto is a best-selling adult game that should not be played by 12 year-olds. That's why it's rated "M" and you have to be 17 to buy it. However, most games are not like GTA. In 2004, 54% of games were rated "E" for Everyone, 33% were rated "T" for Teen, and only 12% were rated "M" for Mature. The vast majority of the best-selling titles every year are not rated "M." Compare that to the 55% of movies rated "R" and only 8% rated "G." The ESRB might not get it right all the time, but who does? (Sources: the ESRB and the NPD Group).
And after all, there's no problem with R-rated movies or mature rap lyrics or violent video games, because there is no problem with youth violence. The most disgusting thing to me is that some truly horrible high-school tragedies are being exploited by the media, and somehow, I'm part of the problem.
The truth is that these are the most non-violent kids we have ever had, and they all own Playstations. The government is so desperate to find some youth crime to crack down on that they're strip-searching kids for 10 bucks while locking up 11 year-old girls for throwing rocks and eating french fries. The most peaceful generation of Americans in recorded history is being shoved through metal detectors, having their civil rights violated on a daily basis, are the victims of unreasonable search and seizure, and are treated with constant suspicion.
All because of a media lie. If nothing else can incite them to violence, maybe that will.
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“Imagine an alternate world identical to ours save one techno-historical change: videogames were invented and popularized before books. In this parallel universe, kids have been playing games for centuries—and then these page-bound texts come along and suddenly they’re all the rage. What would the teachers, and the parents, and the cultural authorities have to say about this frenzy of reading? I suspect it would sound something like this:
Reading books chronically under-stimulates the senses. Unlike the longstanding tradition of gameplaying—which engages the child in a vivid, three-dimensional world filled with moving images and musical soundscapes, navigated and controlled with complex muscular movements—books are simply a barren string of words on the page. Only a small portion of the brain devoted to processing written language is activated during reading, while games engage the full range of the sensory and motor cortices.
Books are also tragically isolating. While games have for many years engaged the young in complex social relationships with their peers, building and exploring worlds together, books force the child to sequester him or herself in a quiet space, shut off from interaction with other children. These new ‘libraries’ that have arisen in recent years to facilitate reading activities are a frightening sight: dozens of young children, normally so vivacious and socially interactive, sitting alone in cubicles, reading silently, oblivious to their peers.
Many children enjoy reading books, of course, and no doubt some of the flights of fancy conveyed by reading have their escapist merits. But for a sizable percentage of the population, books are downright discriminatory. The reading craze of recent years cruelly taunts the 10 million Americans who suffer from dyslexia—a condition didn’t even exist as a condition until printed text came along to stigmatize its sufferers.
But perhaps the most dangerous property of these books is the fact that they follow a fixed linear path. You can’t control their narratives in any fashion—you simply sit back and have the story dictated to you. For those of us raised on interactive narratives, this property may seem astonishing. Why would anyone want to embark on an adventure utterly choreographed by another person? But today’s generation embarks on such adventures millions of times a day. This risks instilling a general passivity in our children, making them feel as though they’re powerless to change their circumstances. Reading is not an active, participatory process; it’s a submissive one. The book readers of the younger generation are learning to ‘follow the plot’ instead of learning to lead.”
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a few i didn't post because my post got messed up but you can read them with the links given