Violent Video Games - 10,000 Times Worse Than Molesting Children

Well, they're at it again. Here's the latest piece of trashy shock media aimed at people who play games:

http://www.nypost.com/seven/12292003/business/14640.htm

That person should really give us (the gaming community) more credit than being so impressionable about video games. Maybe he/she is able to be influenced by everything they see, read and hear, but I for one, am not. Not only that, but I don't much care for the catch-all belief that all video games are bad. I certainly hope they're not trying to say that Hot Shots Golf is bad too. This is the same shitdrivel that Lieberman brought up back in the days of Mortal Kombat. Sure, violent video games can be seen as bad, but there are sure as hell a lot of worse things in this world, and they AREN'T perpetuated or created by video games. Before you know it, everyone's going to use it as a scapegoat..."I didn't think it would be a good idea...But when I played a video game, I thought war would rule." Keep in mind America's Army, a game created by the government so that it might serve as a recruitment tool since it does, to some extent, glorify what the American military does. So I guess video games are okay, as long as they're created on the terms of those in charge.

EDIT: I'd be really pleased if there was a part in the game where you could off mouthy editors and reporters who bitch about video games when the news is slow.

Yes, the line "Kill the Haitians" is the main problem with Vice City, and not this stuff:

The offending line has brought public rebukes of the company from both Mayor Bloomberg and the Anti-Defamation League, and Take-Two has responded by saying it will remove the words from future editions of the game.

But trust me when I tell you that considering what else goes on in "Grand Theft Auto: Vice City," that phrase is nothing.

HERE'S the game's basic bit: You're a cocaine dealer, see, and you get ripped off in a drug deal that goes bad. So your mission is to get your drugs and your money back - by committing as many violent, homicidal crimes as you can possibly think up.

You can pursue your goal by killing Haitians, of course, but you can also kill anyone (or everyone) else. You can machine-gun them, beat them with baseball bats, chop them up with machetes or run them over with stolen cars.

And when you do, everything will look incredibly and shockingly real, with blood spewing everywhere.

You can kill a cop, steal his gun, and then use it to shoot someone else. Or you can pick up a prostitute and have sex with her in the back of your stolen car, then beat her to death - or shoot her, bludgeon her, whatever you want.

IMO, this whole kill the Haitians BS is pretty stupid, it's like "let's ignore the rest of the game, and concentrate all our energies into removing a single line of text, which was probably put in to stir up controversy". Lame.

That guy was an idiot. Child molestation is 10000 times more right than a fucking video game. I think he should be under investigation with that kind of mentality ; P

The man who wrote that is ignorant and has no real backing to his argument, espcially when compared to the whole context of real life. It's people like that who are poisoning society and brainwashing people into mindless zombie drones doped up on prescription medication and arrogantly bosting how great our country is without having realy reason for being patriotic. It's people like this that have turned my life into the shithole it is, people who see things that are different or honest about things (he noted that GTA:VC was 'realistic') scapegoat them, and people like me or companies like Take Two recieve the shit end of the deal.

AND WHY IN THE HOLY HONEST FUCK DOES IT MATTER WHAT THE FOUNDER OF TAKE TWO'S FUCKING DAD DID, IT DOESN'T FUCKING MATTER AND IS TOTALLY IRRELEVANT TO THE ARGUMENT AND ONLY FURTHER PROOVES THAT THE AUTHOR OF THE ARTICLE HAS NO REAL SPINE TO HIS ARGUMENT.

I'd say the guy who wrote that article needs to be beaten to death severely, but that wouldn't really help our cause too much. :P

You know, Michael Jackson was accused of child molestation, but if he had played Grand Theft Auto, he would really be in trouble.

Such logic would make Mr. Spock cry.

you lot are just pissed that doom is no longer the media's favourate fuckboy.

At least until Doom 3 is released.

The whiney bitches who are complaining about this shit need to desperately change their fucking tampons and shut the fuck up.

so what if it says 'Kill the haitans!

next thing you know, nazis wont be able to say 'KILL THE JEWS' in a ww2 game

...and I must wonder who fucks like Bloomberg think they are. Just because stock is traded in NYC doesn't mean that he has any power over national-level commerce, that asshole.

I propose the line be changed to this: "Kill the upstanding and friendly Hatian-Americans!" It's very PC without compromising game content.

Tobester said:

The whiney bitches who are complaining about this shit need to desperately change their fucking tampons and shut the fuck up.

so what if it says 'Kill the haitans!

Heh, indeed. If they don't like "Kill the Haitians!" they could just change it to "Kill the free-loading drug-running illegal immigrants!" and they wouldn't be too far off the mark. (though not all Haitians are like that. some of them are respectable businessmen who are guilty of spousal abuse. that is to say, some of them are quite Americanized, though not many)

the_Danarchist said:

Here's the latest piece of trashy shock media aimed at people who play games

Um, this article is aimed at investors. (of course that doesn't give them any excuse as to the amount of ignorance that went into its creation)

And when you do, everything will look incredibly and shockingly real

No bullets hole in the body and swinging a katana or chainsaw doesn't cut any limbs. Sheesh, this person is gonna freak out when D3 will get released

with blood spewing everywhere

There's blood in GTA3 and Vice-City ?

Bloodshedder said:

Um, this article is aimed at investors. (of course that doesn't give them any excuse as to the amount of ignorance that went into its creation)

Well I kinda meant that it was blaming us because we buy this stuff.

As for the "Kill the Haitians" thing, thats pretty dumb if you;re going to remove it. Race wars exist all the time, it's pretty much a fact of life in urban places. Hell, even Ocean Shores, WA, a tiny (and ugly) little resort town on the coast had this huge Fillipino vs. Japanese (I think) race war going on for a while. So by eliminating race wars like this (I heard it was the Cubans or something that ask you to kill the Hatians), you're basicaly ignoring what happens every day.

Secondly, the GTA games are supposed to be kind of a parody of action and crime movie. Look at all the action movies that come out. Pretty much EVERY SINGLE ONE is full of stereotypes. There's always a black cop or something who is a "badass mofo" and prone to being a tad more violent then his white partner. There's always a gang of foreigners who are doing some kind of illegal drug/arms trade that needs to be stopped weather they are Afghani, Dutch, Cuban, Colombian, Swedish, Saudi, Russian, Japanese, Luxomburgian or whatever. There's always some street-wise ethnic guy somewhere in the mix. The entire entertainment industry is based on stereotypes. Hell, the advertisement industry is full of stereotypes. You could even say our entire economy runs off stereotypes. It's just one of the sad facts of modern society.

Darkstalker said:

There's blood in GTA3 and Vice-City ?

Uhhh, yeah.

Darkstalker said:

No bullets hole in the body and swinging a katana or chainsaw doesn't cut any limbs. Sheesh, this person is gonna freak out when D3 will get released



There's blood in GTA3 and Vice-City ?

Heh, I was thinking the same thing. When you kill someone in GTA3, they just kind of fall over and bleed. At the worst, when you use a sniper rifle or explosive, their limbs fly off and blood goes spurting out, which is practicaly like the Black Knight in The Holy Grail. Just kind of campy. Hell, if falling over and bleeding is realistic ultra-violence, then they might as well target Civ3 as well for it's battle animations. Oh no, that little soldier fell over clutching his gut, thats horrible! Or how about games like Starcraft where the marines explode with blood flying everywhere. They should ban that game and give the developers the death penalty!

Darkstalker said:

There's blood in GTA3 and Vice-City ?

It can be turned off, but who would do that?
This article is supposed to be aimed at investors, then why the holy fuck are they ranting about the guys father? I don't think investors in the NYSE give a flying fuck about the companies. If they smell profit in a stock, they will flock.

Isn't this all just freedom of speech and expression? They can say all this shit in movies and books, WTF?

Scabbed Angel said:

Isn't this all just freedom of speech and expression? They can say all this shit in movies and books, WTF?

It's too early in the de-evolution of society for people to start saying that literature is evil. Give it a few years and I'm sure we'll be burning books left and right.

Ultraviolet said:

It's too early in the de-evolution of society for people to start saying that literature is evil. Give it a few years and I'm sure we'll be burning books left and right.

Yay! Something to warm our poor hobos!

What upsets me the most is that the GTA 3 and 4 games are considered "shockingly realistic." If society has accepted this as being realistic (emphasis on graphics, controls, sound, and player movement), then I'm about ready to change my socks.

I think they mean that it's as realistic as they have seen so far.

Ultraviolet said:

mmm, fucking boys

stay out of this Father Faint or the pope will hear of this.

SlowMotionHobo said:

It can be turned off, but who would do that?

Then I must've had it turned off. :/
All this talk about Vice-City makes me want to re-install it. I'll also check that blood option.

AndrewB said:

What upsets me the most is that the GTA 3 and 4 games are considered "shockingly realistic." If society has accepted this as being realistic (emphasis on graphics, controls, sound, and player movement), then I'm about ready to change my socks.

No shit.

These people don't know what they're talking about. They are suburban (no offense to people who live in the suburbs) yuppies who's most common line in the morning is "Honey! I'm off to work!" "OK, dear. By the way, I'm going into the city to join a march against 'ghettos'. Ghettos are such horrible places and ideas. What kind of weirdo would decide to make a 'ghetto' neighborhood?"

Oh yeah. And there's no fucking way he's comparing child molestation to video games. No fucking way.

Articles like this make my blood BOIL. (Not in the temperature sense either - the Rock Howard sense, a la Fatal Fury. Kill the lights, I'm about to perform Raising Storm on this reporter.) If the media has to bash on VIDEO GAMES of all things, there's no reason for the media to exist because if they're not keeping up with news (and there's ALWAYS news) and posting crap like this, it's doubtful that they will retain their audience and make a profit. Heck, a survey that went out a while back...didn't that say that ~60-some percent Americans play video games? And that huge chunk is mostly people who don't care what the media thinks about their hobby. And so the media is in for a mass boycott. I ain't touchin' CNN from now on, just in case they pull crap similar to this.

The guy makes one valid point: if the company has indeed committed tax fraud and the SEC can prove it, then it probably would be a good idea to sell stock in the company. As for the rest of it, it's utter garbage. The part where he calls the game worse than child molestation, perjury, and secondhand smoke is laughable.

News flash for him: if people are convinced by this game that it is ok to mass-murder people, they weren't right in the head to begin with. Those two kids who sniped at the cars may have had an idea to do it, regardless if they played the game or not. We've seen this before with Doom and Marilyn Manson being blamed for Columbine. I've been playing violent games for years, and I have no desire to murder anyone. I agree that environment helps in the mental development of a child, but damn it, the parents should be seeing to it that the child develops properly and has a proper understanding of why murder is wrong. A video game should not be the child's source of learning. It is not going to convince the child differently unless he/she has no concept of death.

Also, why does he bring up the Beltway snipers as a hypothetical argument? If they didn't play Vice City, there is no point to the argument.

I also don't see the point of going into the founder's family background. So his dad committed tax fraud. What does this have to do with his argument? Is he saying that Take Two Interactive is founded on crime because the founder's father is in trouble with the law? Preposterous. Now if the company itself has been committing tax fraud, that's a whole other story, and his one real point that selling stock in Take Two might be a good idea, is valid.

Ok, so why is it that the haitans are being such pussies about their ethnic group being slaughtered in a FICTIONAL game!?! I don't see the Cubans being pussies about their ethnic group being slaughtered!

geez, this guy's living in the past, manhunt is where it's at.