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I agree that such games should most certainly not be sold to young kids.. I'd say 18 is a bit old, but 15 or 16 seems reasonable. However... imagine you're a sales-person, and a 12 year-old wants to spend a few dozen bucks/pounds on that computer game... would you REALLY say no?
Of course they wouldn't say no. But this is rediclous, another game gets blamed for a murder, its so stupid.
video games don't cause people to kill, parents who never taught their children that it is just entertainment should be blamed, but being greedy they find something else to blame it on so they go go be free and happy with themselves, people like that make me sick.
Well, it's most certainly not the cause for murder (I hope no-one is stupid enough to claim that..), as the cause is the murderer's mental and emtional screwy-ness. However... such games do provide valuable information and skill, in the arts of killing. Shooters imporove your shooting abilities, not to mention all the information provided by these games (visual and verbal instructions, etc). It's like a military training software.
The kid must have been outta his mind anyways. I dont see any link with this and the video game, except maybe he stole and idea... i dont know what weapons are available in manhunt, so i dont know. Even if he did steal an idea, i dont think u can blame the rating board, or Rockstar entertainment, u must blame the person responsible which is the guy who murdered another human being.
The rating system is important for knowing what kind of game ur buying and what-not, but thats all its good for in my opinion. Do think the fact that they wont sell me Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, because i'm 18 is going to keep me from getting that game?
If u said yes, then ur sadly mistaken. I have friends over 18 who, if i provide them with the money will gladly buy it for me.
You know, in Japan video-games are more widely available than the US i'm sure, but there are a ton, less violent crimes in Japan and Canada, which both get the same kinda violent video games we get. So i think that we gotta stop blaming the video games.
There will always be psychos, thats just the way of the world. To say that if this game had never come out, then that boy would still be alive is total fallacy.
Also japan has a lot more risque games, yet because they know its just entertainment they do just fine
Just like guns, they don't kill people. PEOPLE KILL PEOPLE.
[offtopic] hey escobar what happened to your sig!!! its was so cool with the devil making pastries!!![/offtopic]
As for teh topic I stand firmly on my earlier beileif
They should treat those kinds of games like porn. Make it completely illegal for kids to buy them, and throw anyone in jail who sells or gives it to kids. But if an adult likes to murder people on a computer screen, he should be allowed. Children and teenagers often aren't mature enough to draw a solid line between reality and fantasy.
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Originally Posted by Dr Unne
I think teenagers are able to draw the solid line between fantasy and reality. All my friends play, violent shoot-um-up video games, but none of them including myself has ever killed/plotted to kill anyone(*I'm only 16*).
I think teens of today have a very clear distinction fantasy, and reality.
The rule of genetics/society/childhood-memories is the more people u have in the world the more psychos u have. Out of every how ever many 1000 people there are going to be 1-2 nuts mixed in there. Thats pretty much all there is to it. Some are born nuts, some go crazy, others lose it for a few crucial moments. We shouldnt blame societies short-comings on video games.
I think as a competent 15-16 yr old. in the U.S. today, u should have the capacity, to differenciate, fantasy from reality. And understand right/wrong and the consequences of ur actions. If u cant do it by then, then it'll be another 10-20 years before u start to get it!
I'd have to agree that the chance is slim that the game manhunt was the cause of the murder. However I don't think that we can ever be 100% sure of that. Many factors could have influenced it so I don't think it would be the only cause though. I guess what I'm getting at is that I see a lot where some people will steal quotes from movies or lyrics from songs and use them as there own. Does that have anything to do with copying the murders in a game? probably not. I just think that a lot of people's brains these days do not funtion correctly and are influenced too easily by a group or by media and such.
Its ridiculous to think that video games cause violence. I've played Doom and Wolfenstein etc. since I was 6, and I'm quite well adjusted, I'm a bit of a loner, but that's it, nothing further.
Anyway. About the game. I couldn't stand it. I nearly vomited when I saw the violence in it. :/
My friend Jeff loves the game. He plays it all day nad he's not one to play video games besides Tony Hawk or Jet motto.
The game may have played some role in the decision that kid made to murder the other one, but you must see that it's not the only factor involved.
These parents are blaming the game like it warped this kid. There was obviously something wrong with the kid in the first place -- Either his parents hadn't done their job bringing him up correctly, or he was mentally unstable. If the latter is the case, that should have been caught early, and he should have had help.
The article mentioned he used a hammer to brutalize the victim, but it also mentioned stabbing. Why were weapons available to this kid? That's another issue being over looked.
I don't think video games are the cause of this problem. I'm sure they may play some role, but I don't believe it to be any different than if he were watching a bloody movie, or reading a book concerning the same stuff.
There's this kind of low-brow crap in every medium I can think of. It just happened to be this kid was into Video Games, instead of reading.
If he used a hammer you can find those in just about every house. You can stab people with lots of things. The kid was messed up and his parents should be blamming themselves for this no a damn game.
In today's society, blame is often placed where there is money to be made. Potential lawsuits against video game companies can yield millions in settlements. Does that make it right? Heck no.
Dr. Unne, as always, raises an interesting point, but in my opinion, that stance might be a bit too harsh for some. Then again, how can we gauge what it means to be a responsible teenager, or if someone buying this game might be a little mentally disturbed? Unfortunately, since you really can't, unless Big Brother is watching, it really does fall into the individual's lap and the parent's of children to raise them right and make them understand the difference between reality and games. More than anything else, there has to be a degree of accountability in today's world if we want anything to improve. Otherwise, every single problem will be blamed on people who can be sued and not always on the party who actually caused the problem.
I really hope that this person is given plenty of therapy and mental testing and perhaps not allowed back out intho the world until a true cause can be reached for this terrible act. Blaming video games is a cop out to responsibility, when in fact, this person themself killed another. Whether or not the game did influence them is now moot, as the game did not tell him to do the act, but he decided it on his own.
Take care all.
you know who is to blame for this? THE F***ING KID!!! video games have NEVER caused anybody's death, they never will, and they DO NOT create psychological problems. i don't care if these people have ph.d.'s or not, do they play video games? do they live that life? no they dont and no amount of education can ever substitute for that. and the parents... they need to wake up and realise a few things. one, is that they are troutty parents and troutty people. and two, that their murderer of a kid is a good for nothing moron. they also need to know that it was teh parents who helped the kid become that way, not the video games... take some responsibility please! sorry stuff like this just pisses me off. ignorance and stupidity is all that it is.
Absolutely. Pornography, and violent movies and games, are given censors' restrictions - or banned outright - because it can be harmful to expose young people to those kinds of images. People do get messed up by what they see, hence the need for restrictions.Quote:
Originally Posted by Dr Unne
Especially with games becoming ever-more lifelike in the way they portray graphic acts of criminal violence.
Of course, all sane individuals are ultimately responsible for their actions. Parents are responsible for what kinds of media their kids are exposed to. However, that doesn't mean that games, and game content, should be unrestricted.
[q=Black Mage]I don't think video games are the cause of this problem. I'm sure they may play some role, but I don't believe it to be any different than if he were watching a bloody movie, or reading a book concerning the same stuff.
[/q]Again, I agree. Under 18s can't legally buy or view American Psycho - the book and the movie - in my country, and a good thing as well. If kids were entitled to experience that kind of thing, there'd be plenty more messed-up kids, and it'd be unreasonable just to say, "well, they must've been insane already" as though that excuses it. Games are a bit different to other media, since the player actually takes on a character's role, controlling their actions plans. In a movie or book, you're shown what happens - it's a far more passive experience. When you watch a movie about criminals and their crimes, you're generally not meant to think, "Hey, racially-motivated murders! Rape and torture! Funfun!" Generally, those acts are portrayed as criminal and objectionable, they're meant to incite disgust and to paint a picture of what the characters are like. Games, though, have shown an increasing tendency to put the player in a position where they're expected or, in the case of Manhunt, for instance, they're even rewarded for commiting sadistic and inhuman acts of grotesque cruelty. In Doom, Silent Hill, Syphon Filter etc, the objective is to fight the "good fight" against evil opponents of one form or another. The violence perpetrated by the player is targetted at deserving targets, and is necessary in order to save lives. This is markedly different from games in which the point is be a sadist. The distinction doesn't merely need to be drawn between degrees of violence in games, but also types of violent act. Manhunt got banned in my country; the censorship office said this was because the game's subject matter was primarily focussed on making the player indulge in, and even enjoy, carrying out horrific acts, with great emphasis on the details of suffering. Basically, the game had the potential to be "injurious to the public good" by its very nature, since there was nothing to mitigate the violent content.
Game makers should take more responsibility for what they make, too. I honestly believe that, in a matter of years, some company's going to issue a title called Kid Rapist Deluxe or something. There'll be massive public outcry, then the self-absorbed nerd responsible for the game'll appear in the press saying, "But it's not real, it's just a game so no-one's actually hurt. It's all about having fun, not hurting people in real life. Like, there's games where you get to drive cars fast but no-one complains about them. Society's just afraid to face reality. I'm glad my game's generating all this controversy, because it highlights the important issues. My game won't have any bad effects, it's up to people to decide what they want to play or not." Those are the same excuses that get used to justify increasingly extreme content in games; it's only a matter of time before someone uses them to support a game about, say, sexual violence.
If there was a game released about rapists, i still dont think it would affect the way people act. i would however, NEVER buy a game like that or promote it in any way, not because it "has dangerous psychological effects" but soley because its degrading to women.
But the problem is, literature can and does affect the behaviour of some people. It can serve as a trigger, or an inspiration, for things they might otherwise not do. It's nothing new, either. Back when Goethe's Die Leiden des jungen Werthers was first published, it inpired a lot of trends, including fashion and male youth suicide. People were inspired to die because of a fictional character, and it has been consistently shown that fiction can exacerbate latent aspects of a person's mindset in a similar way. This is especially true for the young, whose world-views and mindsets are still in a state of flux, and ripe for influence by what they see around them. Exposure to violent or degrading imagery at a young age has been proven to have a detrimental effect on the young; that fact alone is beyond argument.
The first movie I ever remember watching was platoona dn I'm not out killing people all day. I also remember watching terminator 2 while was very young. and again I have never killed anyone or be arrested or anything like that. I used to listen to eminam when I was in jr high or I started listning to greeday which had swears and the such when Iw as in 4th grade and I seem to be a pretty normal 18 year old.
The point is that different people are effected in different ways. In some people, dormant instability can be triggered or even created by external stimuli. Obviously it doesn't happen to everyone. However, it does happen. Like the two-year-old kid in England, whose halfwit parents thought it was really cute that he spent about six hours a day playing Goldeneye 64. One of his first words was "kill" or "die". Then there's the seven-year-old in South-East Asia, who's receiving psychotherapy for pornography addiction as sexual deviance as a result of having viewed dodgy films between the ages of two and three.
Many people aren't significantly affected by a limited exposure to inappropriate material, but others are. It depends on what they're seeing - the severity of the content, the context of what's actually happening - and on their own unique psychological make-up. The odd action movie never hurt most people, but I'm sure that daily doses of Baise Moi or :bou::bou::bou::bou::bou::bou::bou: wouldn't be quite so good for the large majority of kiddies.
PG shows me :bou::bou::bou::bou::bou::bou::bou: daily. I thik It my be messing me up :-/ since I no longer find it nasty xD
And I see what your point is D. It's just I dunno I think it's kind of stupid to blame other things when in reality the paretns should have been there saying don't play this or don't watch this.
It is disgusting game, no one should have played it, especailly the mentallly ill
I think that's going a bit too far. Children, certainly... but teens? Come on, they may be morons... but not delusional. I think you can allow 16 year-olds to buy that game, or 18 year-olds. Besides, who's to say a 20 year-old is more stable than a 16 year-old? You can never know...Quote:
Children and teenagers often aren't mature enough to draw a solid line between reality and fantasy.
I think the fact a game creates such noise, solely for the fact it's violent, says something... when a kid murderer's parents blame a freaking comuter game, instead of sitting with their head between their knees and thinking about the monster of a child they've created... something is definitely wrong.
These things just incite what already exists in people - bringing it into the surface, making it visible. We don't like that, it scares us. There was some book, in the 19th century, I think... it dealt with suicide and stuff.. and lots of people killed themselves, back then. Same goes for this - it just triggers something in sick, weak people. Frankly, I don't think the problems lies only within the medias themselves (be it Clockwork Orange, Manhunt, etc), but rather, the way society adjusts.
Parents no longer educate their children. There are no boundries... kids, and then adults, are lost. Lost in anxiety, sexual temptations, violent atmsopheres... it's all a haze. I think, those things are very hard to eradicate or weaken, without creating a very strict and depressive society (i.e, banning, censoring, etc), and what must be done is ADJUSTMENT.
This has been all over the papers for the past few days. I would have dismissed it, too, but the one point that interested me is that the police said it was "uncanny" how similar the weapon and the way of which he attacked his victim were to a weapon in the game and the way that you attack your victims in the game. I don't know about you, or how much you might trust the police version of "uncanny", but if they say that it was freakishly similar then I won't be so quick to reject that the game has influenced this guy in a bad way. He was 17 and had a game not meant for people under the age of 18, for a start, but even at 17 you should be smart enough to know that the game shouldn't be replicated (let alone smart enough to know not to kill someone). This game was apparently a favourite of his. You have to draw the line somewhere, and I think that Manhunt is taking things too far. Gaining points for a more gruesome death of an innocent is awful. They may as well make a game where you have to organise a terrorist attack, and fly a plane into a building. Touchy subject? Maybe, but more people would find that straight out gruesome murder of innocents has affected their life than terrorist attacks done via planes. It's disgusting and games like this shouldn't be made in the first place. I think they should be banned regardless out of pure bad taste.
wasnt Grand Theft Auto 3 also blamed for a different murder?
I do agree that the video games can put ideas into anyones head, no matter what age they are. But the video game does not make them act on that idea, its there choice. The video game may have put an idea in the guys head, but no matter how violent or disgusting the game maybe, it did not force the guy to commit murder.
So I dont think its right for them to balme the game for him commiting murder, it can only really be blamed for the idea, if that.
I reckon that the game shouldn't be sold to people under age. I dont think they could stop them selling it to people 18 years and over...not sure.
I think he's old enough to take responsibility for his own actions and the parents have to realise in blaming the video game, there just sending the message that, if you kill someone, you can blame it on something, and let that take the wrap for your actions.
Off topic - please dont call teenagers in general morons, its actually degrading to us when we havent done anything. Try and be more specific about which teenagers are morons, like that guy. Otherwise, calling the whole teenage population morons is like i said degrading.
Nah That was GTA Vice City there was even a big documentry about it and talk of banning GTA games but there not going to.Quote:
Originally Posted by Grover
Let's ban knifes.
Seriously though, I do believe violence can affect the minds of people. Yes, violent conducts can arise from the continuous viewing of violent actions, and yet this same violent conducts can be repressed through education. I play a lot of violent games, and I am not violent. Well, maybe verbally aggressive sometimes (Not as in screaming bad words, but as in glaring and puting some kind of deep evil voice saying nothing polite) but certainly I would not likely move to physical violence unless taken to a total extreme, and still not even then do I believe I could hurt someone much, with that I mean I would give the person a few punches but I wouldn't move beyond that (Well, such has been the experience the only two times in my life I have attacked someone who has made me royally pissed).
However, people of short intelligence and wisdom or short sanity levels can get driven to do violent actions. However, videogames are just a little factor on the whole collection of factors that may lead to this. Will you ban bad education? Will you ban loneliness? Will you ban genetic factors? Will you ban the fact ours is a damn violent society? Of course videogames are a factor that may lead to violent actions in SOME people, but they are not the only damn reason. Someone normal dosen't stab anyone because someone in a videogame does so. And someone normal can't get "unormalized" by a game.
And Manhunt sucks, anyway. I got it for free from the videogame site I work for to give it a review, and I had to play all the damn game, it was so terribly repetitive...
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Originally Posted by Big D
OOC: It's important to note, though, that it might not have been so much an inspired trend than something brought more to the social forefront by the book's publishing. When a previously subdued issue comes suddenly to the public's eye, that issue can just as suddenly seem far more prevalent simply because the public's awareness is on the rise. i don't know anything about this instance, so suicide rates might well have abnormally increased. But there's always the possibility that its publicity brought more suicides to be reported and noticed.
Somehow i know that point figures into this discussion, but i don't feel like typing so i'll leave the implications to you folks. :aimsmile: