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All men are born truthful and die liars - Marquis de Vauvenargues
Rabid press declares war on games
HER MADGE'S loyal press have been rushing to pillory violent video games in the wake of a report by Dr. Tanya Byron.
Since the report was released there has been a baying of blood from the press. TV presenter Anne Diamond appeared in a Daily Mail article last week, discussing the ‘chilling’ dangers of titles such as Resident Evil 4 and Scarface: The World Is Yours.
It also seems that an unnamed national newspaper has been offering hundreds of pounds to hard up actors to confess that violent games lead to a life of crime.
An advertisement appeared on an
'online
talent community’ site which promotes opportunities for aspiring actors and
models.
The advert promised hundreds of pounds to the right person. All they had to do
was write a few lines about how computer games turned you to crime and "if it's
something we like, we'll call you straight back".
This is all an indication that if the press is going to keep hammering on about violent games until it gets bored or there is a real news story.
The report should have been a catalyst by which law makers and everyone should run around and do something. However it seems that the hacks wrote many of their anti-gaming stories without actually reading the report.
Byron was shocked when her report was beaten into a coma by the tabloids who claimed she wanted tougher penalties for retailers who flogged the games. In fact she said that the laws were ok as they stood.
The law as it stands says you can’t sell games to anyone under the statutory age of a BBFC-rated product, and she thinks that is tough enough for all concerned.
Reading the
report one can't but be struck by its banality. The government could adopt
all its recommendations and no one would be any the wiser. Gamers certainly
would not care.
So why is the press so excited? Well her Majesty's loyal scandal mongers have a
hate relationship with games and gamers. It is the same thing they did in the
1970s over television. They are not interested in promoting facts, but are more
interested in a peddling a pre-packaged standard for which they don't need to
engage brain.
It is a fairly safe bet that no one will complain other than gamers and they are just geeks who don't read papers anyway.
Hacks know their readers. The target for the stories are the fearful British middle classes or slightly older parents who still have a degree of techno-fear. These are the types who drive their children to school in oversized SUVs because they fear that a sex pest is going to steal them away.
These people will wrap their child in bubble wrap at the slightest
provocation. Violent games are just another thing for them to take away and the
press will love them to do just that. µ
L'Inq
MCVUK
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Like religion, violent video games are no more, or no less likely to turn someone into a killer. The realism in games has improved greatly, but it doesn't take Einstein to see that on screen graphics are not to the point of complete realism, they still require some mind power and imagination to transcript what's on screen into real life, although granted, graphics have come a long way and even game play, language etc. It can be the simplest thing, the merest coincidence that can be the catalyst or trigger for a killer, to go from being benign to malignant. I've been playing violent video games, amongst others, for years and years, I've had one speeding fine, that's it. Use parent's discretion, by all means, bring your kids up well, decide when and if they should have access to certain things, but for the love of all that's still holy, pollies need to just calm down, just because the good ol' US is having a moral dilemma every day, doesn't mean the rest of the world needs to follow. War in Iraq, or war on pixels?

Excellent, that covers everything, religion, war, politics and racism, now, where's my axe and list of people that have upset me?

Paul
I love the criteria in that 'story wanted' thing:
Application criteria: Males & Females aged 0 to 60 from UK
Ages start at 0, so if you are say 4 you can tell you how your life of crime started with games.
And why is there no lower limit yet there is an upper limit? Wasn't there a law against age discrimination anyway in the UK?
You see what happened there? the games made them engage in the crime of age discrimination.
This isn't very unlike what happened to Comic Books in the US back in the 1950s. A bright young doctor was doing psychiatric evaluations of juvenile criminals and when he asked the kids what kind of books they liked to read, the vast majority of them answered that they read "Comic Books." Low and behold, the reason why juveniles became criminals was because of those darned comic books! Thus said doctor went to Congress, made a big hooplah about Comic Books being bad for children, it was all just practice for the McCarthy trials really, and as a result, the CCA was formed (Comics Code Authority) and nothing really changed except there was a list of things Comic Books couldn't have in their stories and a stamp of approval on the top of the issues which didn't mean anything really because publishers would sometimes go to print without the approval anyway.

Odds are the same thing is going to happen here in the States and over across the pond. After all this is said and done, the ESRB is actually going to have to do its job and consult with video game publishers to make sure their "content" isn't too "influential" as to have some poor sap get depressed and/or aggressive and go on a shooting spree at some school somewhere.

As a note to those not familiar with whats going on over in the US. Kids already can't buy any video games here from a store if it has an ESRB rating of, I believe, T or higher without an adult doing the job of an adult, and buying it for them. After all, don't you think it would be so much easier of the parent didn't have to actually be a parent and regulate what gets into the hands of their children?

-Joe
This lot must have played far to much Quake in their time. If Byron is to be believed, thats the only plausible expanation as to why we would invade foreign countries and blow everyone up on the premise of an ill founded hunch about some bad bloke with a big weapon...

Now, I would never have guessed that Gordon was a video game player.... imagine that...

--So all in all what kind of example are we setting for our kids - oh yes its the video games that made us do it...

Go and read "Correlation does not imply causation" on Wikipedia, says it all really...