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

Oh yes, of course, games make murderers out of harmless teenagers...

Good Grief, I'm still here! - Games must have something, after all.
Still, to answer your

Obligatory questions:

Is anyone else the same?
- yes, me, pretty much

Do you see computer games as A Good Thing or A Bad Thing?
- Good for those who are not sufficient within themselves
- Bad for those who, normally, are

Do you think you're missing out?
- No, don't think so - but, really, don't want to find out.

What's put you off so far?
- I have one addiction and am glad it's not drink or drugs - or games.
- Someone hinted that exercising imagination in a game is as good as the real thing - unlikely, says I.

What has been your experience in the past?
- Quickly leads to boredom (though I gather things just may have changed, forty two years on).

What could get you into them?
- Again, boredom - the loss of h2g2 maybe?

Odd that it doesn't seem to do that to *all* of the many, many people who play games, mind. You'd think massacres would be a daily occurrence.

>> Evidence that a single one of them was linked to gaming? A shred? <<

Teenager with gun enters school and begins randomly shooting
everyone in sight. What part of that scenario is normal outside
of an FPS game? Certainly senseless violence and random mayhem
are not unheard of but the incidence has risen sharply since
the advent of violent video games which offer no consequences
for such action and suggest that Life is disposable.
There are no RESET buttons in RL.

~jwf~

So why don't more people do it? I mean...you'd think.

Apologies for not trawling the backlog to see whether someone else has already posted this: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2096128/Gamer-lies-dead-Taiwan-internet-cafe-9-HOURS-notices.html

>>What part of that scenario is normal outside of an FPS game?<<

You're right squiggles, which is why there were no killing/shooting sprees before Wolfenstein 3D, widely regarded to be the first FPS, was released in 1992

Seriously, what ignorant unsubstantiated twaddle. I'd say you should be ashamed of yourself for spreading such malicious falsehoods but then I'd probably have to explain the concept of 'shame' to you.

Yes, but lots of things changed around that time. Correlation is not causation..

I blame that raucous rock'n'roll music myself. It's all been downhill since Chubby Checker.

@Z - he's being silly. The Hungerford Massacre was on 19 August 1987.

Hell - the Birmingham, Alabama massacre was Sep 15th 1963. I'm not entirely certain - but there may have been even earlier mass killings.

Haven´t read the backlog, so I´ll answer to the OP.

I´ve never played video games, not even tetris, nothing of those gadgets. Simply because I didn´t have them.I couldn´t have them.

I feel curiosity and I know there´s art in many of them.

Maybe one day, I´ll try.
my niece, 16 years old, loves them, I´ll ask him to show me something. This Christmas time he was playing in one whose setting was a medieval Italian city. It was very attractive.

Probably I´ll try to learn more because those kind of games are being used for educational purposes. Most children are used to that "environment", so those games can be very useful to make children and teenagers learn through enjoyment.

That would be basicly my interest to approach to them.
To have fun, I prefer another things.

>> I'm not entirely certain - but there may have been even earlier mass killings.

I find it really hard to think there weren't. Forget guns: all you need is a psychopath, a lack of meds, and a sharp weapon.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/madman-at-a-teddy-bears-picnic-1327865.html

They have always been there, it's just the news media that has become better and more global. If something like that would have happened somewhere in a village in the US I'm sure you would not have heard about it over hear 100 years ago. Now you do. And so it seems to happen more often, because you even hear about it if it happened a long way off from where you are.

I think that game would have been Assassin's Creed, Maria. (See! See! I do know something! )

I've seen a few articles about how they created the new version. It involved some sophisticated architectural modelling, on site in Istanbul.

And yet, with all this...I think it's the actual game playing part that puts me off. I can't quite articulate why.

@ Ben.

You know - I'd lay money that the Dunblane murderer wasn't a gamer.

(16 years ago less a couple of weeks, btw. It was just after my mother died. One of those 'I remember what I was doing...' events.)

When my husband played Wolfenstein on the PC, years ago, he got so involved that on one occasion when I entered the room he didn't notice at all and then jumped about a foot in the air when I tapped him on the shoulder. Happy days. For weeks my life was filled with the duh-duh-duh-duh of Wolfenstein.

I did have a go at Lemmings and Side Pocket on the Megadrive, and now I regularly play Spider and Flood It on the computer, and Singstar on the playstation, and some games on the Wii (both with the children and on my own). I don't consider myself a gamer, though (unlike husband, elder daughter, and son, who can all thrash me with ease at Mariocart). They are things I like to do, along with all the other things I like to do.

So ... I dunno. Not weird, exactly, not playing at all. But, unusual, I'd have thought, in this day and age. There's so much out there that I can't believe there's nothing you'd enjoy, Ed.

Mol

>>There's so much out there that I can't believe there's nothing you'd enjoy, Ed.

Oh, I don't doubt it. The only problem is lack of inclination to find out which.

"I have to point out that his testosterone levels and aggression
are already way out of whack. "

And once again you insult me by making utterly false statements based on zero evidence. Anyone, *anyone* who actually knows me would tell you that I am one of the least aggressive people you could possibly meet. Yes, I am quick to anger and I don't suffer fools glady but I am not aggressive. Passive-aggressive maybe, but only when I'm under a lot of stress.

"Which recent high school massacre would you like to examine?"

High school shootings pre-date widely available computer games by over a century with the first recorded shooting by a student in the US being in 1853 (with over 100 such recorded incidents occuring prior to 1992, when Wolfenstein 3D was released). Like most such things they are simply more visible now in this modern age of instant media.

Did you blame D&D and heavy metal in the 80s?

There have been no proper studies which have linked playing computer games with aggressive/violent behaviour, and the only media reports which have made that explicit link were written by those with an interest in portraying computer games negatively. Your credulity stuns me, Squiggles.

I think it was Marcus Brigstocke who said that if computer games influenced our behaviour, we'd have a whole generation sitting in little rooms listening to repetitive music and munching pills.

On computer games and addiction, here's an important distinction. When we say that things are 'addictive', we usually mean that 'addictiveness' is a property of a thing, not of a person. So, it doesn't really matter who you are, both cigarettes and morphine are just so.... moreish.

But with computer games, it doesn't make sense to say that addictiveness is a property of the games themselves, because there are so many people who have a perfectly healthy relationship with computer games and much else besides. If someone becomes addicted or unhealthily obsessed or however you want to put it, the chances are that the issue isn't in the computer, it's in the chair.

As for massacres and school shootings, I believe that expert opinion is that a far more important factor than any real or imagined link with whatever the current moral panic is (D&D, goths, computer games, heavy metal) is how the media cover them. Make the murderer into an (in)famous, notorious figure on every screen -rather than the sad, inadequate, troubled cowards that they are - and there will be copycats.