mundame
03-08-2018, 10:08 AM
March 7, 2018: NEW YORK (AP) — In the wake of the Florida school shooting, President Donald Trump is reviving an old debate over whether violent video games can trigger violent behavior. There’s just one problem: Roughly two decades of research has repeatedly failed to uncover any such link.
Trump plans to meet Thursday with representatives from the video game industry. Trump’s recent public comments referencing the “vicious” level of game and movie violence in the context of school safety show that he is eager to explore the issue.
The Entertainment Software Association, the biggest video game trade group, said Monday that it will attend the meeting at the White House.
https://www.apnews.com/1bebc3d683b3430f940d58c20828fbb1/Trump-reopens-a-seemingly-settled-video-game-debate
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The full article is quite interesting, to me at least, a gamer from the very first computer game in the 1980s (a text game variously named Adventure, Colossal Caves, etc.). I've played a sampling of them all, and have the old boxes on a bookcase to prove it.
I've generally avoided online games because a woman avatar online is constantly messaged with dirty messages and I always play as female. I played Dark Souls all the way thru New Game + (I get a lot of street cred for that), took me 8 months at about 3 hours daily, and whenever Xbox gave me "free" online access, which I didn't ask for and they would take off again, thank God, after about three days, but whenever they did that I would get highly dubious messages and of course people would come in from all over the world to kill my character.
So I didn't like that, and the real point of Dark Souls and other story games is basically "defeating" large lava-leaking centipedes with a giant battle axe, and that is not causing school shootings.
But last year the world-wide sensation PUBG (Playerunknown's Battlegrounds) hit on Linux, free, and Microsoft bought it and rewrote it for Xbox One, and I thought I would try it. You have to have a $10 per month subscription to Xbox Gold to allow play with other people worldwide, so you can see why Microsoft would want the game. Millions, literally millions, play it. I watch other people play on the new streaming channels for the spectator eSport -- Twitch and Mixer -- and new stars are born monthly with hundreds of thousands of followers watching them play. They now have charity invitational tournaments.
So your avatar, looking very like you, parachutes to an island with 99 other people, and the island is littered with modern weapons -- real assault rifles being the most popular (automatic or burst fire switches). It is not actually a shooter in the sense that the goal is Last Man Standing, the last person alive wins the game, which takes about half an hour and then you can start again. Unless you are killed, in which case you start a lot sooner. I play to survive into the top ten; most males play for the kills. (They say so on the streaming gameplay sites, that's how I know.)
Here's the thing: it is quite a rush to kill "real" people. Their avatars, that is -- it's a whole different feeling from killing a programmed monster in a story. I said exactly that on another forum and they deleted the thread and yelled at me! So I hope that doesn't happen here. But that's the whole issue, right? If there is an issue with these new online games "causing" school shootings.
I don't know. I think it's possible, and I have the experience. We are training up a whole lot of young people that it feels really great to shoot each other in a story adventure: you win, they lose, YES, I got him!! Nikolas Cruz was a gamer; one of the police visits to their home happened because he slammed his mother up against the wall when she took away his Xbox console.
I'm concerned about the moral dimensions of modern entertainment.
Trump plans to meet Thursday with representatives from the video game industry. Trump’s recent public comments referencing the “vicious” level of game and movie violence in the context of school safety show that he is eager to explore the issue.
The Entertainment Software Association, the biggest video game trade group, said Monday that it will attend the meeting at the White House.
https://www.apnews.com/1bebc3d683b3430f940d58c20828fbb1/Trump-reopens-a-seemingly-settled-video-game-debate
************************************************** ********
The full article is quite interesting, to me at least, a gamer from the very first computer game in the 1980s (a text game variously named Adventure, Colossal Caves, etc.). I've played a sampling of them all, and have the old boxes on a bookcase to prove it.
I've generally avoided online games because a woman avatar online is constantly messaged with dirty messages and I always play as female. I played Dark Souls all the way thru New Game + (I get a lot of street cred for that), took me 8 months at about 3 hours daily, and whenever Xbox gave me "free" online access, which I didn't ask for and they would take off again, thank God, after about three days, but whenever they did that I would get highly dubious messages and of course people would come in from all over the world to kill my character.
So I didn't like that, and the real point of Dark Souls and other story games is basically "defeating" large lava-leaking centipedes with a giant battle axe, and that is not causing school shootings.
But last year the world-wide sensation PUBG (Playerunknown's Battlegrounds) hit on Linux, free, and Microsoft bought it and rewrote it for Xbox One, and I thought I would try it. You have to have a $10 per month subscription to Xbox Gold to allow play with other people worldwide, so you can see why Microsoft would want the game. Millions, literally millions, play it. I watch other people play on the new streaming channels for the spectator eSport -- Twitch and Mixer -- and new stars are born monthly with hundreds of thousands of followers watching them play. They now have charity invitational tournaments.
So your avatar, looking very like you, parachutes to an island with 99 other people, and the island is littered with modern weapons -- real assault rifles being the most popular (automatic or burst fire switches). It is not actually a shooter in the sense that the goal is Last Man Standing, the last person alive wins the game, which takes about half an hour and then you can start again. Unless you are killed, in which case you start a lot sooner. I play to survive into the top ten; most males play for the kills. (They say so on the streaming gameplay sites, that's how I know.)
Here's the thing: it is quite a rush to kill "real" people. Their avatars, that is -- it's a whole different feeling from killing a programmed monster in a story. I said exactly that on another forum and they deleted the thread and yelled at me! So I hope that doesn't happen here. But that's the whole issue, right? If there is an issue with these new online games "causing" school shootings.
I don't know. I think it's possible, and I have the experience. We are training up a whole lot of young people that it feels really great to shoot each other in a story adventure: you win, they lose, YES, I got him!! Nikolas Cruz was a gamer; one of the police visits to their home happened because he slammed his mother up against the wall when she took away his Xbox console.
I'm concerned about the moral dimensions of modern entertainment.