Shoot to Thrill
There are rumours on the internets…
Yet another article regarding violence in games. Hillary Clinton is in on this one, talking about the one sound-byte she has heard regarding violence in games (the have-sex-with-hookers-then-drive-over-them spiel, and she said diss, clearly the girl is down with ‘it’), as is a ‘retired colonel’ Dave Grossman, who claims games are “murder simulators”. Rrrright. Someone really needs to stop retired colonels writing articles. Apparently, claims Lt. Col. Grossman, games lessen “the impact and shock value of real violence”. (By the way, this is the Dave Grossman who authored the text ‘On Killing‘, not the Dave Grossman who, ironically, was behind the creation of the SCUMM engine at LucasArts and as shining an example of intelligent, witty and almost entirely non-violent game development as you are likely to find)
If you are looking to challenge yourself, both mentally and physically, a career as a general service officer could be for you. Oh, and you could wind up dead.
I’m sorry, but maybe advertising the armed services as a ‘rewarding career‘ isn’t the greatest way to deal with the whole too-much-violence-in-the-world problem. That concept deals with the impact and shock of real violence nicely. Would you like to shoot people with that degree?
Maybe, just maybe, games as “murder simulators” are far better option than army training exercises (or, as I now like to refer to them, murder simulators) that I am sure the colonel would have no problem supporting.
“…much like the advent of rock’n'roll, comics, movies, cartoons and television before it”
Also quoted is the oft-used examples of kids shooting people after playing too many games. File that one in with suicides related to grunge music, satanism related to rock music (and jazz before that), social disorders caused by too much tv, assinations caused by high school text books, exhaustion deaths due to EverQuest, Jihads and Crusades due to someone’s idea of organised religion, the list goes on. For every action, someone/thing is attributed the blame. How was your relationship with your mother? I could argue that the afore-mentioned colonel chose his career as a result of playing too much cowboys and indians as a kid, but I won’t. You already get my drift.
“Pay attention, we’re putting ratings on there.” But do we have enough ratings?
Much better is the article’s reference to the call for an R18+ category for games, which I have touched on before. This makes so much sense, I’m not really going to go into it too much. Jack Sorensen, THQ ExecVP, makes the point that games are “held to a much higher standard than what film and television are”. While I don’t totally dig this, in many instances, it’s true. Graphics don’t come much more realistic than what you see as they disect a body or recreate a shotgun wound on CSI. Computer game graphics aren’t quite up to that standard yet.
Oh, and at the end of the SBS news, at 7pm, during prime time? Those burning bodies or gunned-down corpses?
They’re real.
Do something about that before you try to crack down on something as trivial as pop culture and entertainment.
edit: A link to this post was also sent to the IT online editor at The Age. Although I’m not expecting any, I will post any response I hear.
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