The Sunday Night Martini Grille
Wednesday, May 2nd, 2001
Hello, and welcome to a special edition of the Sunday Grille. I'm Mr. Nevermore, but hopefully not for much longer. This was my first experience hosting a Corp moderated talk, but the subject pretty much hosted itself. This week's Sunday Grille is brought to you by the letter V and the number 6. This is of course because the topic was videogame violence, and whether it can lead to crimes of the triple-six persuasion.
Since my thoughts on the state of violent content in the video games industry and the recent 5 billion dollar lawsuit are available in my recent editorial, my goal was to primarily support the discussion from the opposite side, filling in arguments contrary to the current line of thought. As is standard operating procedure, the full chat log can be found here.
The departure of one of the room members prompted me to begin the talk with the point that concludes my editorial. The thought was, perhaps parents and adults need to be more directly involved in their children's game playing habits in order to reinforce what is important.
Mr_Nevermore: Alright, but let's examine this:
Mr_Nevermore: I'd say that while Dreth may be loathe to go to bed, his/her parents are doing the right thing.
Mr_Nevermore: Which is being involved in the setting of limits and or guidelines.
Rain: Hell, I have school tomorrow too, but I go to sleep at 2am every night.
Rain: Coffee is my god.
Mr_Nevermore: And I would say that a lack of involvement, on some levels contributes to some of the social problems which people try to pawn off on videogames.
Rain: my parents don't have a lack of involvement, but I just trick em ;p Rain brings up a valid point. I remember quite clearly having rules and regulations governing my video game playing as a child which would make governmental bureaucrats scratch their heads in confusion. However, just like any kid would, I found every possible way to skirt the rules. Therefore it is not just the establishment of rules that curbs actions. Without enforcement, the strictest regulations are for naught, and perhaps this is where some interest groups' concerns lie.
What I was driving at, however lay along a slightly different line.
Mr_Nevermore: Do you feel like they've instilled in you a sense of what's acceptable and what's not?
Rain: Yes, I do, Nev.
Soulflame: parents have a lack of involvement because they are both tired after working all day long at their stupid jobs, just so they can own two suvs and a goddamn house in the suburbs.
Mr_Nevermore: And what is the result of this, Soul, in your opinion?
Soulflame: kids are parented less by their parents
Mr_Nevermore: And where do they turn?
Flexo: mtv
Soulflame: I would say that flexo I found myself unable to dispute Flexo's one word answer. Are parents getting through to their kids, or are we unable to compete with the tight grasp mass media has on our children? To prod the point a little further, I brought up a statement made by a certain Lady Robin who kindly engaged me in a prior discussion.
Mr_Nevermore: Ok, now: to the people who would say,
Mr_Nevermore: "Our culture's emphasis on violence and rewarding 'look out for #1' is leading out nation's youth down a dark path."
Mr_Nevermore: Can the media can take a kid and turn him or her into a killer?
Flexo: just a thought
Flexo: throughout the course of american, and human history - people have used violent revolt to free themselves from oppressive institutions
Soulflame: We just hear about it more.
Soulflame: School shootings are not a new phenomena.
Soulflame: Blaring them across the media IS
Once more I tested the waters with a question of Lady Robin's.
Mr_Nevermore: "If Natural Born Killers can turn two teens into killers, and Jackass on mtv leads people to light themselves on fire, why couldn't a video game do the same?"
PyroRaven: Pfft
Soulflame: But I would argue that NBK can't turn kids into killers.
Soulflame: You have to be a killer in the first place.
Clearly this is a problematic distinction. Is may not be possible to accurately measure the effects of playing video games on a child's emotional development. For the shooters at Columbine, which came first, the mental instability, or the enjoyment of Doom? Along those same lines, why do the media and video games sell so much violence? Have we been taught to consume it, or did we seek it and therefore receive it?
Mr_Nevermore: Keeping up my devil's advocate position...
Mr_Nevermore: well it's the old argument of does life imitate art or does art imitate life...
Soulflame: The answer is yes.
Mr_Nevermore: Is the media violent because we are, or are we violent because the media is?
Flexo: so would you say the media "inspires" the kids for these events?
Soulflame: Take columbine.
Soulflame: That was not inspired by the media.
Rain: This is my opinion:
Rain: I think most of the problem is political correctness (hear me out).
Rain: People can't just be qualified CRAZY anymore, and taken out of the school environment.
Rain: Because that's not PC Rain hit on a very interesting point. In fact, the primetime Fox television show which seems to include every possible controversy that could plague a public high school, Boston Public, aired an episode which illustrated the difficulty of singling children out as "crazy", or a threat. In the episode, one student with no prior discipline records admitted to keeping a "hit list" for his personal vindication and was subsequently forced out of the school by the superintendent. There is a fine line that must be walked in order to protect children from being guilty by suspicion.
Mr_Nevermore: So who is to blame? Because someone needs to take the blame apparently, and the parents decided it was videogames.
Soulflame: Videogames? No.
Mr_Nevermore: Was it movies? MTV?
Soulflame: If someone says, "Doom taught them how to shoot" I am going to go medieval on them.
Mr_Nevermore: It's already been said.
***Soulflame goes medieval
Since it had been a while since he'd put his metallic foot in his mouth, I knew I could expect something colorful and unrelated from that wily robot, Flexo.
Flexo: just out of curiosity, if video games make people killers, does porn make people have sex?
Soulflame: No, porn makes me laugh my ass off.
The discussion managed to move back to more related subjects, but in the end, I gave the participants a chance to spew out whatever they'd been holding back thus far or just add some final thoughts.
Soulflame: Game companies won't lose the suit.
Soulflame: There should not be stricter regulations.
Mr_Nevermore: Zif?
Flexo: I fail to see how game companies are responsible to how people respond to their product
Zifnab: Videogames do have an impact on people. So long as people keep making games to blow stuff up in, society will slowly become desensitized to violence. This will have relatively little impact on society, beyond the fact that people will be desensitized
To conclude this edition of the Sunday Martini Grille, I suppose my final thoughts would be the following: The games industry is a budding one. We are still feeling out where the lines are, and until developers regulate themselves, there will be people who say that protective or repressive measures should be taken. My only concern is that the public concerns themselves are aimed at the right places. To aim at anything above the source of the issue is counter productive. So long as people remain willfully ignorant to the reality that for most people gaming is only a danger only when your girlfriend gets fed up and takes a pan to your cranium, mistakes will be made. In my opinion that is what has happened with these recent lawsuits.
I'd like to thank all those who chatted with us on Sunday, and specially thank all those who approached me individually with comments both positive and negative regarding my editorial. I feel that the more openly we can discuss issues regarding the role of videogames in our lives, the more we can dispel the myths that surround our hobby of hobbies.
Feel free to further debate the issue in our forums.
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