Do you know why they couldn’t ban Superman? Ban S-man, see the crime rates hit the sky.
Tipper Gore and the Mothers of Prevention.
Who cares about these people? They can’t stop violence or sex in videogames - by arguing with them, we give them publicity and credibility. Just laugh them off.
But if they just did a lot more studying on the matter, Curtis, they’d actually have an interesting point.
Arac, no, not state funded or selected games, games which the kids themselves choice for the parents to play. I don’t want to see the government interfer with private lives any more than you, one problem is that the government people can hardly pronounce the titles of the games their grumbling about accurately at all. Actually its kinda scary but neither can the lawyers the game companies hire to defend their comapnies. I heard one female lawyer call Mario, Mareio, and another one call Legend of Zelda, Legend of Zell-Day! Now that’s fucked up!
The problem is as Steve says, they just don’t give a fuck, we’re living in a society where the parents let kids raise themselves, because they were already too fucked up when they had these kids to ACTUALLY be raising kids. They did not know what they were doing. I will say one time two elderly people, possibly grandparents went shopping for their grandchild, and could not understand why a game was rated a certain way, and asked. I think it was Tony Hawk or Matt Hoffman. It told them that in certain areas of the games, there’s use of alchol, or mention of it, a slap feast between two hookers, and some of the music had a few bad words in it. So at least there are some who are looking and asking questions.
Is this in the world where people urinate rainbows, then? There’s a board meeting thing every time a kid wants to play a game and his parent is allowed to play it first to test it? Any logistics on how this is going to work?
Well, parents wouldn’t do it if they didn’t care, but even if they did, the system you name seems very logically inflated and hard to control or use.
Good to know that some people ask, although I’m in the opinion the profanity shouldn’t be a descriptor since words are words, and making some bad is inane, but this isn’t an argument I’m going to win with ratings-board people.
Okay the system I think of probably would not work because the red tapers would not like it.
The game industry announces which games are coming out on certain dates, just as they do normally. Now nongovernment agencies perhaps overseen by certain representatives of both game industry and lets be fair, government, (as the beaucrats would stomp their feet and cry fould for not being at least a little envolved), send out invitations to adults and children to test and play these said games. What is more (okay we’re getting fantasy here, but it would be cool) the said parents and children are paid to play and rate it themselves, yes let the viewers rate the games.
This is recorded, and an announcement goes out.
Okay I now see a pretty pink unicorn prancing by so I must have stepped through some sort of peace loving fantasy world, but I’m trying here, and I’m not yelling my head off, because someone said video games are or aren’t responcible for violence. What other viable options can you guys and girls suggest that would make both sides, even viable to be someone happy?
The system we have is perfectly fine. All it has to do is put out there what is in the game. If it’s too goddamned hard for parents to read the back of case that their little shitbag keeps screaming for, maybe they deserve to have a few loads of screaming death thrown their way when their bastardspawn decide to make their schoolmates lives a little shorter because they didn’t know how to deal with being called names.
Y’know, survival of the fittest or some other shitty excuse for us not being able to say “you’re retarded okay so stop pissing in the gene pool”
The problem is they won’t care about that either, someone has to make such parents responcible to these actions, or risk losing their kids.
Here’s an interesting law that I think might be popular here.
What if some kid decides to blow up his school mates, school etc. and claims its the video game’s fault. The court still punishes the kid. So why not the parents who didn’t even give a fuck what their kids were playing either?
After all the movies are accused of being the source of such crimes and no one puts any stock in it, kids still get jail time. Why not the parents too?
Well, the flaw isn’t in not blaming the parents, it’s in blaming the videogame. It’s part of western society’s inability to accept random chance or insanity. Everything has to be somebody’s fault. Videogames, being previously a niche of nerds, and nobody really likes nerds, has been an easy scapegoat for a while, and now that it’s actually fighting back instead of rolling over like any recent democratic candidate, and thus generating controversy.
((Oh, and while the simile wasn’t poetic, it was true, so screw you if you didn’t like it. =P))
That’s where the problem presents itself, you’re looking at it to idealistically, ziggy. You won’t be able to try or punish the parents because you can’t prove anything went wrong when that parent was raising the child. Idealism obviously never (as seriously as you can use the word never, at least) works. You have to look at the easiest, most probable way that it will turn out. That is, there will probably stiffer and stiffer fines for people caught selling video games to children underage. It’s the most likely because it’s easy to put into place, and the punishment involves money; which may end up escalating to something akin to selling alcohol to a minor, or just fizzling out at a fine and possible job loss.
I’ve thought about that too, it should work, but if enough disband the law, and the stiff necks do not decide to bar the law, then can easily see shops stop selling games, or worse a black market for them. Like prohibition era. Bring in the video mafia now!
Watching Adam Sessler go up against Jack Thompson reminded me of Marcia Clark going up against Johnnie Cochran and the Dream Team of the O.J. Simpson case; he was right, but he was so out of his league that it didn’t matter.
I’m not going to get into the argument as to everything else. We’ve done this argument here so many times that it’s not even funny.
I will comment on one thing, however:
Actually, unfortunately, a lot of people <I>do</I> listen to him, including Senators Clinton and Lieberman. Senator Lieberman especially has been strongly anti-video game since some time in the early '90’s (around the release of Mortal Kombat). That was when I started to notice that he leans a little sharply to the right of the rest of the Democratic party, and I’m glad that (finally) the rest of the party seems to be paying attention.
I don’t understand why people think that video games should be restricted to certain age groups to “protect” their children. I was allowed to read “A Clockwork Orange,” an extremely violent book, in 9th grade. I have watched some terribly gory movies, and played games at age twelve that many in Jack Thompson’s corner would deem obscene. As a result of seeing the effects of violence in real life, the news, and even violent media, I do not physically hurt anybody. In fact, I would figure that a human being with absolutely no outlets would be more likely to be aggressive than someone who has healthy outlets such as sports, games, and music.
That’s why the parents have to be able to tell what is and isn’t good for their kid at what age. The only reason the age restriction exists is to tell the parents the gist of what’s in it. If they still want to buy it, they can. They just can’t bitch and moan if they think it turned their kid into a horrible horrible beast of a killer. I don’t think anyone should be able to restrict any sort of media from children without the option of the parent being able to choose if they can see it or not.
He couldn’t master the fatalities, crybaby.
If their kids turn into “horrible beasts” it would be more likely due to prescription medication and/or pre-existing mental conditions. Whether they play, read, or watch violent media is incedental. In fact, I’ll be damned if there isn’t a human being in this COUNTRY that isn’t exposed to horrific violence at least once a week, and the majority of us seem to be getting along quite well, thank you.
Maybe these nutcases are meant to weed out population? After all, we do have too many people, most of them idiotic.
Noooot… quite. It’s more like OH GOD WHAT DID YOUR VIOLENT SHOW/GAME/MOVIE DO TO MY BABY!!!
People, won’t anyone think of the CHILDREN?
Wich kids, the good ones, the bad ones, or the pill popping, pycotic ones?
Where is the rain to wash the scum of the streets?
Okay, that didn’t really have much to do with the topic, but I had to make the Clash reference.
Anyway, yeah, I’m not really a horribly violent person. Not quite as pacifist as GAP, given that I’m in Muay Thai and tend to end up getting in fights wit racists at Oi! shows, but I’m hardly the kind to randomly attack somebody or go on a muder spree. If it isn’t a sparring/tournament match, and they don’t hit me first, I probably won’t fight.
Muay Thai? An acquaintance once started taking lessons. Some time afterwards their teacher got pretty roughed up in a tournament and continued teaching despite his medication, which must have been quite heavy. To quote from memory “He looked as if he were run over by a truck”. When he knocked down pretty wildly another pupil, my acquaintance thought it was time to walk.
And the teacher hadn’t ever played a video game 