Reading Stephen King is the equivalent of going in the Haunted House at the fair or the Haunted Hayride at Halloween. It's meant to be scary.
And sitting in front of a screen playing a video game is the equivalent of sitting in front of a screen playing a video game.
I gave this some thought yesterday and approaching it from this angle actually made me question if these games were as bad as I thought. You had to approach me through books, and then the wheels started turning.
Ultimately, I still think it is dead wrong to have first person shooter games, but I understand why people have "fun" with them. Maybe banning them is not the answer, except in the same way Roseanne was just "banned," by private industry saying it's bad business to hire a racist. We'll see what happens; seems whatever business put this game forward has no social conscience.
The disconnect is literally your lack of trust in human beings other than yourself.
99.9999% of people can distinguish between a game, book, or movie and real life just like you can.......but you don't trust that they can, which is where your feelings come from.
I tried to tell you, it's obviously an incorrect feeling because we are, as an objective fact, a less violent society.
Don't tell me what my feelings are, G.T., or that I am "incorrect" or "old" or "irrational." It is just viewing this issue from a different perspective. You don't have a patent on the "right" answer to everything, however much you think you do.
Lecture over.
It is an interesting question: Does media simply reflect our reality or does it shape it? Which came first? Regardless, it becomes a feedback loop. Which came first doesn't really matter at this point. First person shooter games as entertainment reflect the 10,000 + gun homicides a year in this country and the great popularity of guns in our culture. We shoot people. It is what 10,000 plus people a year choose as their option if they're pissed, if they've got a social conflict, if they're just plain nuts and looking to go out in a blaze of GLORY.
Glorifying shooting people doesn't need to be part of our culture. Yet we allow it in music, movies, tv and video games. And now we have people defending a video game that allows you to be the school shooter because it is "Freedom of Speech?" To steal a phrase from our President, that's sad.
We got a whole lot of people to stop/never start smoking through incremental social pressure; it's no longer a popular thing to do in most circles. One of the first steps was "banning" smoking from tv shows and removing advertising from print media. We could mount a similar campaign about using guns. ALONG with spending much more attention on mental health services and whatever else.
But I see the entering-the-haunted-house side of the argument, too.
