Wirehead Studios

http://www.gamesarefun.com/news.php?newsid=4459 (http://www.gamesarefun.com/news.php?newsid=4459)


They're citing an example (from Grand Theft Auto, I would assume) of it being okay in a game to walk up to a police officer and hit him with a baseball bat, so the minor thinks it's okay to do that in real life. That's so obviously the game's fault. But hey, here are a few questions.

1) Hey MOM and DAD, why is your MINOR CHILD playing a M-rated game in the first place?
2) If there was no such thing as a baseball bat, then there would be no chance for this hypothetical situation to occur. Why not sue Major League Baseball and the companies that manufacture baseball bats?
3) If there was no such thing as a police officer, then they couldn't be assaulted at all. Why not sue the law enforcement agencies for existing?

:rolleyes:

4) If there were no mom and dad, or either had been (righfully) neutered to begin with, there would have been no moronic kid at all. I'll volunteer to do this retroactively.

Y'all might be interested in this link (http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/03/03/tech/gamecore/main677960.shtml).

It's an interview with Tim Buckley of Ctrl+Alt+Del (http://www.ctrlaltdel-online.com) online comic fame and tells us his views upon violence in comp games etc.

In any case, the moment the law legislators look at what the previous/other legislators have put into power (or themselves for matter) as far as rating systems and actually enforcing the law at the store level (Mr Buckley covers this briefly in the interview) then their wouldn't be an immediate problem.

Unfortunately, you'll still get those who think that a game is something along the lines of Ludo and/or Tiddly-Winks - this is just a lack of education and a copious amount of ignorance on their part.  Also, if any one of us decided to rally one another together and go on protests - if any violence occured then it'd be giving the media ammunition to shoot us with.

Kobayashi Maru.  I guess that's all there is to say.

Regards,

Yickle.

Guns cause crime, so lets ban guns and hold the manufacturers responsible for criminal misuse.
Games cause crime, so lets ban games and hold the manufacturers responsible for criminal acts of game players.

Hmm... noticing a pattern here?  Nobody's actually placing blame on the individual carrying out the act.  It's always "someone else" we have to blame.  It's nothing but an excuse to castrate the populace even further.  The Nanny State mentality hard at work.  I am so tired of "feel good" laws and the idiot politicians that peddle them.

Hey, I have a novel idea.  What if every video game player in the world decided to simultaneously start acting out their game of choice!  Wouldn't that give them some food for thought about what kind of problem video game violence really could be if things were the way they're pretending they are?  It might at least give them a serious reality check.  Now where did I leave that book of summoning for the "Ghosts of Quake past, present, and future" for old Scrooge here...

Pho, I've just given that a few moments thought and already I can see the following:-

It'll be International Dress Up As Your Favourite Game Character day, so you'll see lots of Lara, LeChuck, Threepwood, Nukem, classic style Doom marine, miscellaneous characters from the Warcraft/Starcraft/Diablo universes (delete as appropriate), some Cate Archer, JC Denton...all acting like the players would have them act in the game.

So there's Lara going under the knife for bigger breasts, LeChuck stumbling out of bars/pubs with foul zombie breath, lots of Threepwoods desperately wanting to be pirates...but are anyway...Duke kicking down doors (or at least alot of skinny weakling geeks trying too), Lil trying his best to get into a zergling suit, lots of men in drag wearing pseudo-60s fashions, lots of people wearing baggy coats to make them look bigger than they really are...and wondering why there ISN'T a ventilation shaft they can crawl through every 20 feet...

Now,  I am missing out a whole load here such as other characters, usage of weapons (BFG10k anyone?), Doom marines getting into right-handed-fist-only-fights and holding their neck as they die, people dressed up as Grim Reapers saying they are your travel agent in the afterlife handing out walking sticks with built-in compasses, a 6-foot canine and a rabbity thing driving around in a cartoony Desoto...

---

Now here's the sad bit.  I do sometimes wonder why there is not a ventilation shaft every 20 feet that I can crawl through, I do scan a new room for cameras and LAMs,  I do sometimes consider making my own Sam costume to wear outside in the public....

And I want a Doom marine style motorcycle helmet dammit!

Regards,

Yickle.

P.S. Forgot to mention that I want my own Bone Wagon!

So.. is there 'blame the anime' yet? Considering those conventions are WAY more scary than what you describe here...

Those "scary conventions" are actually quite a bit of fun, really. I've been to Anime Expo twice, and it's quite enjoyable. Most of those people are just ordinary men and women who decided to dress up as his or her favorite character. How is that scary, really?

Anyway, yes, there is 'blame the anime'. Although I couldn't locate the stories, there have been a few reports of children unintentionally being injured or committing suicide based on things seen in the cartoon based on Pokemon.

No offense ment to the dear lady on the following picture..

(http://www.tabun.nl/tmp/1ax020417.jpg)

But that is scary to me, and I do cherish San's character, believe me. Same goes for the people that demand to be called 'Commander of Starship So-and-So', because they've seen a little too much ST episodes.. :]

I think Forest Gump said it best when he said "Stupid is as stupid does."  Politicians are stupid.  Blaming third parties for people behaving badly is stupid.  Passing laws to criminalize said third parties is a stupid idea stemming from stupid people, and will only lead to more stupidity.

Tab:  I've seen scarier.

Just wait til ye see me in my Blues Bros costume...

Regards,

Yickle.

you mean I can wear a horned reaper costume ?

ya know what im gonna act like one of my game heros .
leisure suit larry here i come .

http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/wi...world-headlines (http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/wire/sns-ap-video-game-ban,0,2206888,print.story?coll=sns-ap-nationworld-headlines)
And here we go again... :thud:

Next thing you know, video game PLAYERS will be arrested as terrorists. -_-

Um, isn't that the reason the gaming industry puts the E-M ratings on the games in the first place? :huh:  :!:

Well yes, but let's find another way to shift the burden of responsibility away from the enduser and their parent(s) again.  Of course, if children were still raised by parents (plural) maybe we wouldn't have problems with parent(s) not knowing what their children are doing?

Not sure what your getting at there. I was raised by one one parent (mostly), and I didn't turn out as messed up in the head as some of the children comitting these insane crimes (then being blamed on games). Hell. like most of us here on these forums I grew up on games like Duke, DooM and Quake. I'm not saying that some parent's are to blame...I think that myself. But to blame movies and games for violent behavior in children and pass laws to ban them!? Come on. Thats insane in itself...

I don't see what all the fuss is about

Violent Games do not breed Violence

there has to be an element of violent behavior within the individual already

I Play quake a lot, in fact more than i speak to my parents anymore

In fact who are my parents O_o

honestly though

if games that feature violence, are sold to kids what do they expect,

That right there is what everyone seems to miss though.  As for parents, well, it used to be that you had two parents committed to each other - including raising their children - "to death do you part".  Well, people don't do that anymore.  They split up, kids are accidents and inconveniences, or one parent wants a kid, the other doesn't, etc...  The turbulence is unhealthy, but not necessarily the cause of bad behavior.  Lack of supervision and lack of any moral and ethical foundation does not help though, and anymore there is no such thing as morals and ethics because, well, who teaches it?  Certainly not the schools, unless you are wealthy enough to send your offspring to a private religious school, which most people are not.  Religion?  We're having trouble enough just keeping the clergy moral at this point.  That leaves parents, where the most responsibility should be in the first place.  Most households require two incomes now just to stay financially afloat, and even then people are drowning in debt, so when you have only one parent how much time can be devoted to paying attention to the kid, and how much must be devoted to working to keep the bills paid?  Add to that the number of selfish parents who - single or otherwise - are more concerned with what they want for themselves than for the good of anyone else, including their children.

See, having a moral compass doesn't mean you're a "goody little two-shoes", it just means you think actions like gunning down your classmates or coworkers is bad, and wrong, no matter how mean they are to you.  Having a firm grasp on consequence is also a good prevention mechanism, which is as simple as "I shoot person, person dies, I spend my life in prison as someone's sex toy."  This is where I can actually make a religious plug without (hopefully) people taking this off topic, because the last escape mechanism for that is "Well, I'll blow away (or knife, axe, whatever) the people I don't like, then I'll kill myself so they can't send me to prison.  My life sucks anyways, so who gives a spork."  Well, gee, if you have to answer to someone after you're dead, who has the power to deny you access to paradise and hence, send you to that other place, which I may add is far worse than anything you could imagine in life, that gives a person a strong reason to not want to do themselves in after doing something heinous, so you no longer have the "ultimate escape mechanism", as well as added accountability.  This means you have to answer for your bad behavior no matter what, so that too is a mechanism for "stop and think it out before doing something stupid."  If fear of death won't stop someone, and there's no God to be afraid of afterwards, then there's really nothing left to help keep the person from doing bad.  The responsibility for making that choice is ultimately theirs, but it's taking variables out of the equation that otherwise might change the person's mind.  It's awfully hard to put the bullets back in the gun once it's too late, and all the "I'm sorries" in the world, or bad feelings after the fact won't raise the dead.  Nor will a prison sentence.  Ask any person who has lost a relative like this if they'd rather see the bad guy roast in hell, or have their family members back, they'll usually say they want the family member back.  Life doesn't afford that luxury.

Look, I'm not saying any of this is a cure-all, only that in the past it has helped tremendously.  Respect, consequence of action, good behavior - they all start in the home, and the younger the better.  Just look around you and see how rude, pushy, selfish, arrogant, greedy, spiteful, and uncaring people have become.  There's a reason for that, and I think it's simply because nobody is teaching them any differently.  Everyone has the capacity for violence, and some are more prone to it than others, but everyone also has the capacity to control their own actions.  It's the part where someone teaches them that there are other ways to solve their problems that is sorely lacking right now.

Agreed. All the virtues of life are typically not learnt through peer interaction (more often, the opposite) - parents are not only a direct and uncompromisable example of how one can live, but they also have the power to add to that (do as I say, not as I do, etc).

There are many psychologists and philosophers that have made claims to whether or not humans are born with or without malicious intent 'baked in' (I'll leave religion out for a bit), but the truth is that no conclusive arguments for either 'side' have been found. What can be concluded is that all options are open, and taking unnescessary risks is nonsensical. Parents setting the right example, straying from using brute force (the solution is understanding and thought, not 'because I can') etc etc - and simply paying attention to the lives of their kids, are doing the best they can to prevent it all going amiss.

At the point where the kid becomes a responsible adult, he can look at the prospects of suicide and take on a more agnostic or logical view, too. There might be life after death, but what's the hurry in finding out? Where is the gain in blowing one's brains out? Why take vengeance on people when you're not going to be there to feel vindictive/sorry/anything about it?
Sadly, not many people think that far when they're going about their normal daily business - let alone when they're in a desparate state of mind.


The attraction to violent games (and even watching boxing on TV) is a very normal thing, and does not mean that one is being violent. There has always been a morbid fascination for flying intestines, snuff movies, animal sex (alright, not for you, and you, and you, but the rest of the world is curious) - it's like prodding a sore tooth. By nature we investigate the thrills and dangers. For males this comes more naturally, since there's a need for the (average) male to try and gain 'rank', to be 'hunter, not hunted' etc. Even so, nearly everyone slows down to 'get a closer look at that wrecked car with the mangled corpses inside'. It would be strange if boxing fans, wrestling maniacs and crash-tourists would be considered healthy and normal, while game afficidionado's are 'violent morbid freaks'.

Aye, but throw politics into the mix, and anything goes, especially when the politicians and activist lobbyists are more interested in finding scapegoats than solving problems.  As for suicide... well most cases the plain truth is the person overloads, burns out, has too much pain in their life, and can no longer cope nor see any other option.  That's entirely different from murder-suicide, which usually has a revenge motive underlying it.

That's sad. It's like arresting the CEO of McDonald's because someone had become deathly overwieght. People really got to be responsible for their own actions instead of pointing the belevolent finger of blame. I mean, Rockstar doen't invade peoples' houses, and make children play their video games by force. It is a choice, and there are conseqences for making bad choices.

omg , its little washu , how have you been , where where you all this time ?

study study study, working at McDonald's, save for collage.  :shifty:
Happy to be back!