Friday, February 11, 2011

Let the Red Water Flow

Video games tend to have a violent aspect. It is pretty much assumed. It's been that way as far back as Space Invaders.

Conflict makes fictional worlds run. It is the drive for the main character. It is the plot mover. Usually this literary device of conflict is played out in some form of gory bloodshed.


Dragon Age 2 trailers tote a fair amount of this life fluid.
Deus Ex seems fairly gory,
Magicka, a fairly comical game, even recently had an unlockable assault rifle that would pulverize anything that moves into a fine red mist,
and the soon to be released game Bulletstorm primarily revolves around making sure you spray blood.

Personally, gore is not an issue to me.It takes particularly realistic gore in realistic situations to produce much of an effect in me. Bulletstorm, Magicka, Deus Ex, and Dragon Age 2 are quite far from realistic situations.

What is an issue is when news teams flaunt the progression of gore and violence in video games as targets for crime rates.

Fox news recently attacked Bulletstorm in an article claiming that the violence in video games that kids are exposed to in games such as bulletstorm are the cause for an increase in rapes.

Well, fox news. The problem with 9 year olds playing gory, bloody, violent video games is not any fault of the game designers or publishers. The problem is that there are parents out there who allow their kids to play these games designed for mature audiences. When a CHILD in developmental stages of life are exposed to hard, fairly realistic violence, it wouldn't be surprising if they modeled this behavior later in their life.

A mature audience playing these games, however, is no different than reading a book or watching a movie, yet the video game industry catches a large amount of blame.

9 comments:

  1. M rated game isn't for 9 year olds. It's the dumb parents fault for buying their kids the game

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  2. i find people jsut complain over pretty much anythign that peaks over a flea sized cup of "morality" which is again their view alone, i have to hope humanity evolves out of the critisizm one day :)

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  3. Very true my friend. Its obviously the parents fault and they fail to realize that.

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  4. Most games out today aren't even realistically violent, but I do agree that the parents should be keeping their kids away from anything violent until they are at an age where they can understand what it all means.

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  5. i hate how people will always say games makes kids violent, thats not true, a lot of studies has shown that the main reason of how a kids personallity is developed is based completelly on the parents, if your kids becomes violent its because you let him not because he plays violent games

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  6. It's the parents fault. It so often is, but they really need to cop to it.

    insightful bro.

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  7. Parents. Enough said. My first video game was Mortal Kombat. & it continued with the gore. Resident Evil, American McGees Alice in Wonderland, etc etc too long to list.
    I turned out as sweet as sugar ^-^

    following~
    Love,
    Anna

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  8. Following. I think people who get violent after playing video games are naturally violent anyway. Probably down to a poor upbringing.

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