Why We Fight 135
AsiNisiMasa writes "The Contrarian in this week's The Escapist is a brutally honest and exceptionally disturbing piece entitled 'Why We Fight.' It examines the underlying mentality behind our affinity for violent behavior in games, citing the desire for efficiency at all costs. From the article: 'Your people face famine, plague, poverty and unrest. What policies would you enact to solve these problems? (Fans of Tropico, you know how this works.) My friend's solution? Death camps. Round up the sick, the lame, the infertile, the ignorant, the useless, the unproductive and execute them.'"
Free Punch Card (Score:5, Insightful)
Here's how it works:
Each citizen gets a "free punch" once a year. You can punch someone and as long as you have your free punch still there can be no lawsuits or jailtime.
See right now there is no accountability in America. People can act like assholes and hide behind suing you if you hit them, and they know it. but, if you had to wonder if the person still had their free punch card, you might not be so quick to be an asshole.
While it is not really feasable to implement in any way, I am dead serious, and it would end a lot of stupid shit that goes unpunished these days. What it boils down to is accountability and punishment, there is none anymore, and this needs to be dealt with.
Re:Free Punch Card (Score:1, Insightful)
Messing with reproductive rights as if you're a fucking authority on anything is not only criminal, its sociopathic.
And if I caught anyone pointing anything at my kids, they would be a stain in 10 seconds.
Hey Tynes, get a clue (Score:5, Insightful)
I especially love this part: "A friend of mine studied political science at Yale. In one class, the professor posted a game scenario: You are the newly empowered dictator of a third-world country. Your people face famine, plague, poverty and unrest. What policies would you enact to solve these problems? (Fans of Tropico, you know how this works.) My friend's solution? Death camps. Round up the sick, the lame, the infertile, the ignorant, the useless, the unproductive and execute them.
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The professor was overjoyed. Finally, a student saw the point of the exercise: making comprehensible what looks incomprehensible when viewed through the media, understanding how Papa Doc and Pol Pot and all their ilk come to power and why they make the decisions they do.
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My friend figured it out. He played the scenario and won. He saved the Kobayashi Maru. It should come as no surprise that he was a hardcore gamer."
That's the most retarded economic/political idea I've read in a long, long, time. It would devastate that country and put it *back* several decades, as your state destroys the people who create your nation's wealth. One of the few things that Adam Smith and Marx would agree on is that a nation's wealth comes from the productivity of its workers - and no, having the government kill off the 'unproductive' would not help at all. High unemployment is a sign of poor utilization of labor, not of defects in the population.
How well off would the U.S. have been in WWII if they had 'liquidated' all the unemployed during the depression? And did you notice how many great scientists came to the U.S. fleeing death camps like his friend proposed, to avoid being labeled as 'unproductive to society'? Some of them helped build the A-bomb, I'm sure you've heard of that? Point is, governments who make judgements about who is 'useful' to society and tries to destory those who aren't usually harm their society itself.
Notice the examples he cites - Papa Doc and Pol Pot - are not known to have improved their countries at all. Even cursory knowledge of history would clue you in to that. This is why Poli Sci people should never be trusted with anything more important than a Sim city or civilization.
Congratulations, John "Dumbass" Tynes, you've managed to give gamers an even worse reputation than before - now we're not just mindless killers, we're closet fascists waiting to have our putsch, too.
Re:Free Punch Card (Score:3, Insightful)
Beautiful until he retaliates with his punch card...
Re:Free Punch Card (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Free Punch Card (Score:1, Insightful)
What about the situation where a strong and health, but complete jerk does something like tipping over wheel chairs in the park. None of his victums can use their free poke at him for fear at least on of them suffering his full wrath as retaliation. How exactly is it really balanced if the weak and crippled are frightened by those who aren't?
Situations like this make the system at best meaningless, and at worst exploitable by the exact same people you wish to curtail!
Re:Education decaying into retold legends of glory (Score:3, Insightful)
You have no clue what your talking about do you? The reason games don't attempt to score things on a moral basis is because the media would have a shit fit if games took that trend. What moral set are you using? Who decides the weight of those moral choices? What's immoral? These are matters that to this day have not been agreed upon, and you want a scoring system based on it? Ridiculous. The media will latch onto any angle they can get to sell advertising. If that means they will crucify video games one minute for being to violent and teaching our children to kill, and they will crucify them the next for attempting to force a moral ruleset on them. You cannot win that fight. And companies looking for a profit don't want to pick it.
Now the fruits are falling off the tree in larger numbers (Columbine). The game industry needs to find a book somewhere (SOMEWHERE) and realize what exists outside a gun's barrel... what the consequences are for asking everyone to enjoy being a Barbarian for an hour. Rome falls.
Quit getting your numbers from the media, they are over sensationalizing things to sell advertising - that's it. Check out the numbers [usdoj.gov] , especially chart 1.1 where you can clearly see the amount of fatal violence going down. The real problem lie in those children, and their parents. If you are susceptable to being turned into a killing machine from a video game, you are one weak willed fool. If your parents didn't teach you the difference between pretend and reality, then they suck as a whole.
Don't give me the bullshit that "Everyone Knows Its A Game". The evidence is mounting high right in that article that more than a few take the metaphor very seriously... and our current political shift... blowing off debt and lives without care... show it is growing indeed. Shallow, mindless politics from shallow mindless ethics.
Everyone does know it's a game. Just becuase someone takes the metaphor seriously doesn't mean that they will actually go out and kill everyone who disagrees with them. Rational people don't do that. They realize that in order to make the world as they see fit, that would probably be the most efficient and quickest way, but probably not the BEST way. Even you are exhibiting behavior, unilaterally deciding what politics are shallow and what ethics are mindless. In a free society if somebody wants to watch football all day, ruin their credit, and vote the way they want - they can. You seem to abhor that behavior, and allude to anyone who behaves in this manner as inferior. Am I to assume that if given the chance to change things you wouldn't? And how would you realistically do that without becoming a facist?
All the games referred to are huge, complex body count simulation systems to tell a story.
That's the point, they are cathartic. I love my tactical stealth games and squad shooters because I NEVER WANT TO ACTUALLY DO THAT SHIT! I would like a decent simulation though where the only person who gets hurt is a non-existent internet man. A bunch of ones and zeros fabricated from someones mimagination and brought to life through a console conduit. To say that this type of material in the hands of an adult is going to be the downfall of our rome is assanine. Rome didn't fall because the actors were putting on violent or Facist plays. It fell because a small handful of power weilders tried to manipulate the whole for thier own gain - and that mentality did not come from any media they ingested.
Re:Free Punch Card (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm reminded of the occasional defense of concealed weapons: you're alot more polite. What?! You're really suggesting that I should watch my mouth because I might get punched? Hell, to a certain extent being able to be an asshole is part of being an American. "It's a free country" has never strictly been legally true, but for a long time it was a true representation of being an American. It has it's down sides (assholes), but I like the upsides (other people don't get to meddle in my life). There are plenty of reasons to be polite, but fear of injury seems like a bad one.
Your punching plan in tempting (oh, so many people who deserve a good punch in the face), but doomed to failing. The reality is that lots of shortsighted people will punch someone early in the year for no good reason. First guy to suggest that the Iraq war as a [good|bad] idea? Pow! Right in the kisser! People will be afraid of stating reasonably held opinions because some unreasonable person might take a swing at them. You might cut down on assholes to a certain extent, but you're going to silence a lot more innocent people.
Ultimately we don't craft laws for the 90% of good people. We craft them for the bad 10%. We have to assume that the bad 10% will be pushing the law to its limits. I'm not prepared to hand that 10% the ability to punch me just because I have a [pro|anti] abortion bumper sticker.