Tendo City

From VE3D:

Quote:August 20, 2003 -

At least two of last week's three fatal shootings outside Kanawha County convenience stores could be drug-related, authorities said Tuesday.
Chief Deputy Phil Morris sent a group of sheriff's deputies to Campbells Creek on Monday to interview residents, and they learned of concerns about methamphetamine use in the unincorporated area where the victims of Thursday's two separate shootings lived and where one shooting occurred.

...

Two Kanawha County Wal-Mart stores have pulled sniper-style video games from their shelves, company spokeswoman Melissa Berryhill said Tuesday in a telephone interview from Bentonville, Ark.

"We have not made a corporate decision to remove these games from our store shelves," she said. "Individual store managers can make a decision based on what they feel is right for the community."

One store is located in Carrier's hometown of South Charleston. The other is located in the nearby city of Nitro.

Both removed the games "Halo" and "Grand Theft Auto Vice City," Berryhill said.

They take away a few games from their shelves but they still sell guns. I love this country. :bang:

Yeah, but the thing is you won't go crazy and go out and kill people with your guns if you don't play games where you shoot people.

What about paintball??!! I mean, Good Lord, you're USING a gun that actually SHOOTS people!! Real live people! You win the game by shooting everyone!!

Well you see with paintball you're actually using a gun against real people, not a keyboard and mouse or a game pad. The thing is that you need a keyboard and mouse or a controller to learn how to kill, not something like a paintball gun. You're so silly!

Still, that's beside the point. It's just a game, just like laser tag (only more painful). It's something one of my brothers plays all the time, and he's hardly a violent person.

It's stupid to blame games indeed. Guns at least are the actual tools FOR the killing, but like someone said, the gun won't kill on it's own. It takes someone loading one and pulling the trigger. Honestly, people need to learn responsibility for their own actions.

If they're going to remove anything from their shelves it should be guns, not violent games.

Yeah, but for someone who's already a muderous person, playing violent games only helps brood more of their murderous side. Of course for the rest of the people, it probably doesn't have that same effect, but I'm sure that there are plenty of those idiots out there who are influenced. You realize alot of people are stupid, for example watching a movie and going out to play Russian Roulette for reals, so if you're going to say that video games absolutely do not promote the thought of violence, you're just being biased. Theres going to be those idiots who are influenced by video games and media and they can come in few numbers or large numbers, depending on how popular your particular media is and how the statistics work out.

By the same consistent reasoning, in a similar irony of blaming guns, while it may be absolutely true that guns don't kill people, instead people kill people, the guns are still the tools that they use to kill people and making it a particularly dangerous tool since one has easy access to guns and it is relatively much easier to shoot a man dead than to run up to him and stab him where it will kill him. So the fact that the gun exists and is easy to access these days does do a little bit to help those people who are murderous or blow their head off in a fit of fury to kill people because they can do it very easily.

What I'm saying is that the media should not be blamed for violence in our society. The guy who shot Reagan blamed it on Taxi Driver, and insane people have been using movies and games as an excuse for their violent deeds for decades now. If you remove movies and games there will still be violence, just that you'll have to find something else to blame it on. Using the media as a scapegoat for insane acts is almost as insane as the acts themselves.

I think we should ban bread. I mean think about it: almost all violent crimes happen within 24 hours of eating bread, almost 100% of all criminals eat bread, and most murders in homes happen within 100 feet of bread.

With statistics like how can we continue to let bread flourish in out society?! We must eradicate it once and for all!

I'm sure that N_A could find some way to blame violence on bread, given enough time.

Quote:Originally posted by Great Rumbler
I think we should ban bread. I mean think about it: almost all violent crimes happen within 24 hours of eating bread, almost 100% of all criminals eat bread, and most murders in homes happen within 100 feet of bread.

With statistics like how can we continue to let bread flourish in out society?! We must eradicate it once and for all!

Lol! This is the first thing all night that made me literally laugh out loud.

If everyone who played violent video games shot people in real life, wouldn't the statistics be higher for teen violence now rather than <i>lower</i> since the 80s?

Quote:They take away a few games from their shelves but they still sell guns. I love this country

Hah! No kidding. They edit their cds of swears (oh noes! Not ouchy words!) and take games off their shelves...but they still keep selling them shotguns.

Quote:Lol! This is the first thing all night that made me literally laugh out loud.

I actually stole that from my local paper, there was a lot more to it but that was all I could remember.

Quote:Originally posted by Great Rumbler
I actually stole that from my local paper, there was a lot more to it but that was all I could remember.

See, you don't tell me that. The best thing to do was shamlessly take credit for the joke.

Well OB1 is just a plain smart ass fuck who refuses to believe that he is biased while he actually is, in fact who isn't, so I'll ignore his lame ass bread joke.

But on the same note, jesting over the bread thing is kind of stupid anyways, its quite obvious one has to find logical links rather than ridiculous correlations, and needless to say, bread, unless discovered otherwise to have a chemical that induces violent behaviors (highly doubtful), is just a correlation and of course not causitive. HOPEFULLY, I didn't have to actually say that because I THINK most of you are way smarter than that. But I still have my doubts sometimes...

But I fail to see why none of you can pass up your bias just enough to make some logical connections. Hell I play violent video games, how come I don't get stuck in your pattern of thinking and say media is somehow absolutely free of blame as if it were a NONEXISTENT factor, or as if it were not even a part of society ? Its quite obvious media is a part of society, and if its not responsible in what it portrays, it knows that it can very well lead some weak minded or perverse people astray.

Agreed that its still the responsibility of the individual who perpetrates the crime, but to say that media is absolutely unrelated to copycat crimes is just your personal bias of wanting to protect video games so you can continue to play whatever. To be fair to all sides, I strongly feel that media companies have to be morally considerate in their violence. If its violent, its got to be good violence... you know, you good guy protagonist killing the bad guys, or the bad guys being portrayed as definitely bad with their violence. That way, at least the media is morally infallible in that they did not promote in ANY WAY, SHAPE OR FORM, criminal activity, unlike some games I know are rather popular these days. I mean like if you were play GTA a hell of a lot and kill police or do crazy driving on the freeway and they do a complete investigation on your psychology to determine if you were sane or not, they might very well logically link you to being a copy cat of GTA and probably rightfully so, because you've played the game enough that it looks cool, fun and maybe even convinced that its the right thing to do. On the flip side, you play a game like say Splinter Cell... well there isn't alot to copy on the negative side because theres nothing for an ordinary citizen to copy, unless you're somehow inspired to go join up with the NSA and go fight the presumed enemies of the USA to "serve and protect." It might still be violent, but no one is going to blame Splinter Cell, except maybe Iraqis, for making you into a NSA agent. Ironically, there might still be a connection between the video game and your violence that serves a higher purpose.

So here we are looking at this case, I would say GTA is a terrible game. If people did copy cat crimes off GTA, I wouldn't be suprised. I wouldn't hesitate to support authorities to tell the developers to can it. But games like Halo, I don't see why it should take blame.

See at this point, the burden of couter proof still lays with you, the casual gamer who makes casual remarks that mean nothing in science, because theres plenty of scientific evidence already to show that violent games that promote sociopathic activities do promote negative emotions and tendencies the more people play them.

If they didn't copycat they would have just made something up on their own... I know this because of course I have access to a database of all possible realities and I checked into it :D.

Oh yay, here comes N_A with his divine wisdom and unparalleled wit with such great insults like "plain smart ass fuck" to tell us how wrong we are.

Listen bitch ass fuck(see? I can use the same ingenious insults that you use!), no one ever said that there is no connection between violence in the media and real-life violent behaviour. The point myself and others are trying to make is that blame should not be placed on the media and that arrogant sons of bitches such as yourself who prefer to use the media as a scapegoat instead of trying to find the real root of these problems should actually take the time to think about the bullshit you spew forth. Believe it or not, there has always been violence in our society, even before movies and games were invented! I kid you not! If you take away tvs or games there will still be violence. The urge has to be there, the will to commit heinous acts. If it's not video games or tv then insane people will find other motivation for their crimes. So yes, there is a connection between violence in the media and violence in real life. The connection is that people will use the easiest target as an excuse for their acts.

I'm not surprised that you are for government censorship as your fascist beliefs have been made very clear to us throughout the years. I pity these soccer moms who let their five-year-olds play clearly Mature-rated games like Grand Theft Auto and then curse the gaming companies for making them, and I pity people like you.

I think what people need to release is that games aren't just for kids and that the rating are there for a reason. Game like GTA and Halo don't have "M" rating just because someone thought it would be cool to put it on them. They're there because the game is intended for MATURE audiences. If people really want to stop kids from commiting crimes they'd take an active role in their kids lives, instead of blaming videogames and the media after the fact.

My opinion though is that people who emulate crimes and such they see in movies and games are probably going to commit crimes of some sort anyway wether or not they watch Bad Boys 2 or play Grand Theft Auto.

Exactly, they're just going to find some other excuse for their acts. It's the parents' responsibility to make sure that their children play games that are suitable for them, just as it's their responsibility to make sure that their kids do not watch rated R movies or look at Playboy magazines. We live in a very sad age where parents are never to blame for how they raise their kids, and it makes me very sad.

It also reminds me of a relevant PA strip.

Who stole my photo album?!

Anyway, sometimes I wonder if parents really do think the reatings are just "cool looking things".

Let's look at the appearence. The ratings USED to have this look where the letter was hollow and there were bits of dirt or something splattered around it. Obviously this was a design choice, but they changed it to a solid letter on a plain white background probably because it would be taken more seriously. However, the letter is still tilted. TILTED! Who can take that rebellious new age TILTED LETTER seriously? Of course I joke, but I do believe some parents might have a much more subtle line of reasoning along those lines. I think game ratings should look perfectly plain like movie ratings. Also, almost no parents have any idea what the ratings mean, STILL. Kids probably throw away those sheets of ratings the second they open that new console rather than let their parents "in" on it. I think ESRB should change the rating system to look exactly like the movie rating system, just like TV ratings did. All parents know what movie ratings mean after all. G instead of E, PG or PG-13 (I still have no idea what the diff is between those...) instead of T, and R instead of M. On another note, what the letters stand for is more accurate. E for everyone doesn't really mean EVERYONE. General audience is more accurate. T for teen? Some younger teens might not be allowed to see it, or may not be deemed mature enough. Parental Guidance is more accurate there. Mature? Well, most "mature" games have not a lick of maturity about them, so "Restricted viewing" is much more accurate there too.

Yes, parents ARE idiots for not being able to actually look into what the ratings mean, but if anything's to be done by the entertainment industry, it should be this. I doubt it'll work, but hey, at least you can't say they didn't TRY to inform them if they did this. No more letter tilting too, as I said, because really, it's all TILTY and REBELLIOUS and you can't take a tilted letter seriously! :D

Oh come on. If you ever walk into Blockbuster, Best Bey, Eb Games, or any other store that rents or sells video games, there are huge posters detailing how the rating systems work. Parents are very well of the fact that there are ratings systems on games, it's just that most people are still convinced that all games are for little kids.

Yeah, I've noticed the posters every now and then, but I don't stand and read every little thing I see. I imagine the same can be said of parents. It's VERY likely they just ignore the posters entirely like any other ad on a poster and have not much of an idea what it says. I know for a fact there are many parent types who have no idea what I mean when I say "rated M" from experience.

And as I suggest, they might actually take ratings more seriously and dump the notion of all games being for kids if the rating system was the same as is used for movies.

Of course, I'm just offering this as an option. With the parents being too lazy as it is to check into what their kids are doing, and a lot of them now ignoring movie ratings at that (my littlest sister has seen way too many horror movies for example, and is really creeping me out saying that Freddy 1.. 2.. song all the time), I highly doubt this would really actually work. I suggest doing this not because it'll actually DO anything FOR anyone, but to rather cover the industry's collective arse by being able to say "we've tried everything we could to get through to parents, but they are IDIOTS".

A good parent will look at the ratings on games and movies. My sister knows nothing about video games but she's well aware of the fact that there is a rating system for games just like there are for movies (you don't look at the ESRB stuff because you're not a parent) and will not let her kid play anything over "E".

I think people who become violent from media would probably find some other way to enhance their malignance even without it. I doubt a good game of GTAIII would have made Hitler any worse.

Therefore the media at large should create movies and games specifically for these people, that enhances their latent killer instinct, but makes them want to direct it upon themselves instead, thus removing their worthless, stupid asses from the gene pool.

Anger Persona: THESE IDIOTIC "SATAN IS IN MY KID'S MUSIC" PARENT EXTREMIST IRRESPONSIBLE PARENTS NEED TO BE CASTRATED WITH A WOODEM COOKING SPOON BEFORE I #$@#$ THEIR *!@!#@ WITH A #@! AND THEN THE DONKEY !~##!@ @!#!@#! #!@#@!#!#@#!@#!@!

DJ: Now THERE'S an explicit warning!

Only people who already have major problems would be influenced by a game to do something violent. Of that I am sure. However, on the other hand, the younger children get the less they are able to distinguish that kind of thing so I definitely support the ratings and think that parents are so stupid... so often they just let their children have anything, even if its GTA for a 8 year old...

And if they do that its 100% their fault. Not the gaming industry for making a game clearly marked for adults.

Now, if game companies regularly marketed adult-age games at kids, there'd be a problem... and while they used to do that, in recent years they're a lot more responsible about that now.

So I just fail to see the need for further regulation. A better ratings system? Maybe. More parent education? Absolutely. But banning violent games, like they did in Germany? That's going WAY too far.