h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I almost added as a kinda disclaimer that I wasn't in any way suggesting that children should be tried as adults.

I thought that from what you said about the US system but its nice to be sure.

Going off topic, I've only met one USian in favour of the death penalty that I have liked, lovely girl from Louissiana perfectly normal, kind and friendly and yet for some reason I can't fathom is in favour of the death penalty, I mean she has explained to me, but I just can't sympathise with the state sponsored murder position. Which if I was heading towards a rant would lead me to my thoughts on Israel...

Back on topic, I don't think I have explicitly staed that I think the whole snuff flick and snuff computer game theory for warped minds is a load of

"the whole snuff flick and snuff computer game theory for warped minds"

What theory is that?

H.

I'm sure you are familiar with the principle put forward by some that it is people watching violent media that causes and inspire previously well adjusted children or adults to go out harm other members of society.

A favourite novela of mine is 'A Clockwork Orange' [a favourite film too], I don't go out of night to rape and steal.
People don't listen to rap music and start riots.

We're on the same page, just checking.

You're right, of course.

The thing that makes me laugh/puke (delete as applicable) about that theory is this: it is invariably put forward by people who consider themselves immune from the effect they're describing. Balding, bespectacled middle aged busybodies who don't remember or never knew what having an orgasm in the presence of another person is like. They pontificate about the perverting effect of these artworks on the mind, but they never, ever mean THEIR mind - they always mean some hypothetical "inferior" mind. Usually the mind of someone black, or working class, or poor, or American, or whatever is not like them. They, of course, can view whatever degraded perverse filth they like without it affecting THEM. And of course their regime would REQUIRE people to be paid to do little else 9 to 5 but be mired in these kinds of appalling depravity, purely so that they can be assessed for the purposes of censorship. Nobody worries about their mental health, do they?

Mary Whitehouse and all her interfering ilk are scum, philistine pondlife whose lives are so bereft of joy they having nothing better to do, nothing more important to campaign about than the control of what other adults may use as entertainment.

H.

The thing about Mary Whitehouse [and let us pray for her sake that Heaven isn't like the Garden of Eden] and the like that irrittates me is that they will sit and watch something they claim to be depraved filth and count the number of swear words, exposed niples or heaven save us an engourged penis thatfeature in something. *If ~You~ Don't Like It - Do Not Watch It!*

Here we go again... I suppose I should be glad that it's just a violent game that's the subject of this controversy. Back when Michael Carneal murdered his classmates somewhere in the U.S. I got the impression from the list of games that were supposed to have inspired him that someone had just listed his entire games collection; a lot of violent games were in there, but so was Final Fantasy VII.

Some of the ways in which the topic has been treated are very odd. I remember PC Gamer receiving a letter asking why their cover-mounted demo of Kingpin had had to have all the swearing bleeped out but none of the violence (against bystanders, if the player pleases) removed. The staff were as perplexed by this requirement as the writer of the letter. Questioned in an interview in the now-sadly-deceased Total Control about the apparent disparity between the B.B.F.C.'s rulings on Carmageddon and Blood II, a member of the B.B.F.C. explained that the latter game was not expected to appeal significantly to minors because its genre was suffering from 'consumer fatigue' and the game was relatively 'complicated to operate'.

Belief that children's morality can be significantly influenced/conditioned is very strong; if it weren't there wouldn't be so much effort put by parents, teachers, etc. to train children to behave in approved ways. (There's not much you can do as regards teaching them ethics as anything more sophisticated than a set of basic rules until they get older: 'Now, children, have we been abrogating our particularity to the universal today? Have we been acting as if law-making members of the Kingdom Of Ends?') Yet when they misbehave, most of us would hold them guilty, rather than blame the inefficiency of our brainwashing techniques. And I'm not sure many of us would really want to live under Plato's proposed level of censorship anyway.

I seem to recall that 'Man Bites Dog' escaped serious censorship because it was in black and white.

On the subject of black and white blood. "The House of Blue Leaves" in Kill Bill 1. In colour in the trailers, black and white on release. Naturally that makes all the difference.

I'd be prepared to bet folding money that that was an artistic decision rather than any concern about censorship.

H.

Maybe. *shrug*

I'd have to go with artistic too.

On topic I've come across some psychological research about violence in video games and TV, but I've only read citations of the research and not the full research papers so I can't go into full detail. At face value much of the research supported the view that TV and games lead to higher incidences of violent crimes etc.

A lot of the research seemed flawed - in order to compare game/TV groups to non-game/TV groups many used different societys some of which had the technology for video games and TV others of which didn't. However this difference in technology was not the only difference between the societies - there were massive economical and cultural differences between them that make it very hard to tell what was responsible for the higher murder rates in the game/TV sample.

Some of the research focused on getting existing groups and using a number of measures to check their attitudes after one activity or another - but the connection between giving answers more in favor of violence on a questionaare and actually killing someone is weak at best.

The problem is that this cannot be directly researched under controlled conditions because the incidences of violent crime are so rare and it could be seen as unethical to run a study involving watching how and when people kill each other. Just a tad.

<>

Yes, it does teach that life is extra cheap - that's true. That's a subtle effect, though, and I do not think the games as such actually induce anyone to kill in the real world.

If television, pc games etc caused violence then 1 would expect the western world to be the most violent part of the world and thhis to be the most violent period of humanities history, neither of which is so.

"it does teach that life is extra cheap"

I don't think games do teach kids that life is cheap. I think bombing the civilians of a nation that's no threat to you, then idly reporting the deaths as a list of statistics teaches kids that life is cheap. I think that strapping explosives to yourself and detonating it in a crowded restaurant teaches kids that life is cheap. I think that using helicopter gunships to demolish sections of housing estates teaches kids that life is cheap.

Part of the problem, I think, is that many opinions expressed here and elsewhere on this subject come from people whose experience of these games, if they have any at all, comes from watching someone else play them. And it's difficult to convey how wildly misleading that experience is.

A quick analogy: watch a juggler, a good one. They keep up a steady stream of patter, and their props seem to dance in their hands with a life of their own, sometimes misbehaving, but always coming back in line. The juggler seems barely in control. That's YOUR impression as a viewer. The juggler sees something completely different. What looks to you like an intricate and improvised routine is to him a rigid, scripted performance of motor reflexes he's honed over hundreds of hours of repetitive practice. If he just threw stuff in the air and dealt with it when it came down, the way he seems to, the act would be very short indeed.

So to computer games: to you, outside, it seems incredibly lifelike and realistic. You watch someone with a controller in their hand guide their pixellated avatar down a corridor, tiptoeing into a shadowy corner, silently drawing a knife, then waiting patiently for a sloppily-dressed goon to walk by... then leaping from the shadows and gutting him savagely and silently before dragging the body where nobody can find it. That's what YOU see, and it seems disturbingly close to a real life situation.

But if you played the game at all, you'd have a very different experience, the juggler's experience. At first, the graphics would impress - but that fades in a minute or two, and you see through to the mechanism underneath. You HAVE to - otherwise you're going to get nowhere and all your flaming torches will fall to the ground. The encounter described soon comes to seem like what it is - a *puzzle* to be solved, and with about as much personal involvement as a Rubik cube. You HAVE to see it like this, because if you don't, you will lose, again and again, until you either wise up or lose interest.

What I'm saying is that even the most realistic, violent computer game is, underneath it all, about as personal as a game of Tetris. And any child who can be at all entertained by such games - as opposed to playing them for five minutes before getting bored with being killed all the time - knows this instinctively.

It is the quintessential gamer reflex, learned almost as soon as one can pick up a gamepad: look past the graphics to the mechanism underneath, and find out how to WIN. Sure, we like graphics. If you're going to play a game, it helps if it looks nice. But what keeps us playing past the first few minutes is not the graphics, it's the mechanism. And one of the finest games in existence, Tetris, is mechanism at its purest.

What computer games really teach kids - the kids who actually play them and win, not the dilettantes - is to look beneath the surface at how things *work*, then to exploit that.

Personally, I think that's a pretty good lesson to teach. But hey, I'm an engineer, I would say that, wouldn't I?

H.

Brilliant explination of what a game actully is. Often the best solution to a game is to look out the box, it is programmed to be approched the obvious way, thus that is how it would be prgramed to respond. Look at the puzzle and find a way not expected which is a lot easiser - the goons are looking the other way.


An example from GTA: VC, there is a package on a roof to collect, obvious way leads you through lots of goons that you have to take care of before gett up to the package. then at the top there is someone hiding, i saw all of that before even startign the mission, i new i would likely die on the 1st attempt, but i wanted to check it worked the way i expected.

Then the second time round i don't go how the game was programmed, i find a roof, i shoot about 5 guys instead of 30 and get the package with minimal damage to myself.

The way to succeed in a game is to look for the least confrontation possible.

From the BBC news page about the manhunt story. I remember when I set up my punk bank we were going to try for some really sick name in the hope we enrage the local press and get some publicity...

>HMV spokesman Gennaro Castaldo said: "Interest in Manhunt has significantly increased for all the wrong reasons. It's flying off the shelves.

"The great irony is that since it came out last year, sales of Manhunt had been negligible.

"People who had never heard of the game now want to buy it. Many think it's going to be banned and that lends a certain caché."

"when I set up my punk bank we were going to try for some really sick name"

Wow! Cool! You have a punk BANK! What do have, like, chequebooks with safety pins through them, ATMs that spit at you, managers with pink spiky hair?

H.

It is funny how typos sometimes make for a more interesting post!