Confessions of a mass murderer
Nov 27 '00
Yesterday, I have watched a document on the Discovery channel, called “People out of control”. This document, among other things, blamed computer games for the real-life violence. I looked deep inside of me and realized a shocking truth – I am a potential mass murderer!
A little bit of math
There are people who killed hundreds of others, while playing Quake or Doom. There are even people who killed thousands monsters in some RPG games or real-time strategies. According to my last count, I killed several trillion (that’s a one with twelve zeroes) people! There is no bigger joy for me than building a couple of planetary busters in Alpha Centauri and wipe out whole nations. And there’s no bigger pleasure than carpet bombing a couple of planets in Master of Orion or Stars! (arguably the best shareware game ever). So all together, I killed trillions of little computer people.
So let’s do a bit of math and assume that the average Quake gamer is a potential murderer for every thousand monsters he or she kills in the game. Let’s be generous and say that an average person would have to kill one million of people in computer games to be a potential murderer. By those standards, I am about to wipe out a small town!
Games are to blame
That previous example is a bit ridiculous; the nuke I have stolen if far too valuable to use it on a small town. But seriously – I’m not thinking about hurting someone, just because I play computer games. That is not to claim, however, that computer games are not to blame at all. There are two facts that I have to consider.
First, computer games, especially first-person shooters (such as Doom and Quake) enhance shooting skills. It has been proven by many experiments that avid gamers have often better shooting skills than police sharpshooters.
Second, as the document on the Discovery channel noted, the death in games is often perceived by 11-14 year old children as something temporary and magical. Just consider – you die in Diablo II, and you show up in the main town, where you go on with the game. Or you die in Might and Magic, and a skeleton tells you that your holy quest is yet to be finished, and so you can’t just die. So what are those kids thinking? ‘I can go out and kill everybody in sight, and then kill myself. After that, I’ll show up in my room, and everything will be back to normal.’ And this kid can shoot much better than the average person, because of playing first-person shooters.
An example from Germany
When Carmageddon came out, it came out in several versions – the “bloody” one featured people as living targets, with realistic blood. A UK version supposedly featured green blood, and a German version did not have people at all – instead you were running over some sort of aliens. That is because according to German laws, you are not allowed to kill people in computer games (according to an explanation on the Carmageddon Web site.
However, look at the German youth. While I know a lot of decent people there, there is a percentage of yougsters who burn immigrant homes, and who killed a number of people! This percentage is very small – as small as in the US. Should we consider computer games at fault this time? When the Germans did not have a way to kill people on a computer screen? Or did those people consider the immigrants as aliens with green blood?
The truth is somewhere in the middle
Consider once more my statement that 11-14 years old kids learn that death is something temporary, because of playing violent computer games. While I don’t have kids yet, and I don’t support too much of a parental control, I can well imagine other things for kids to do instead of staring on a computer screen. At the early teen age, they are still children, and should be outside, playing ball with friends, or do something else. I was hiking and cycling, for example. They will stare into a computer screen most of their adult life, so why allow them to do so at such a young age?
By blaming computer games, parents try to hide their guilt. It was their fault they allowed their kids to play computer games. As long as parents consider violent computer games to be dangerous for their children (a belief I and nobody else can challenge), the parents are responsible for not allowing their kids to play those games. However, the parents should concentrate on other issues as well – to raise a child takes more than concentrate on computer games. It takes love, time and good guidance.
Enough of this
Spoken my mind, I feel like playing some more of the original Warlords – it’s a rather mild game, with an average death toll of only about 20,000 per game. That equals another 2% of a potential victim of mine.
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
NetDanzr
|
 - Top 500 |
|
Location: Chatham, NJ
Reviews written: 217
Trusted by: 130 members
About Me:
"Don't gamers laugh any more?" Al Lowe, 2002
|
|
|
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.