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Censorship Entertainment Games

Violence in Videogames with VG Cats 62

Posted by Zonk from the more-rationality dept.
me at werk writes "Following up on Tim Buckley's interview, CBS News' GameCore has posted the interview with Scott Ramsoomair of VG Cats. From the article: "Psychos will always be psychos; they don't need video games to help them. Though this one time my brother punched me in the arm when I beat him in Mario Kart. Does that count?""
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Violence in Videogames with VG Cats More

Violence in Videogames with VG Cats

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  • What ever happened to people rallying against violent movies? Games may have a bigger influence because of their interactivy, but don't people do stupid shit they see in movies too?
    • The gaming industry isnt filled with the "beautiful people" of the Film Industry. Plus they dont get political like the Hollywood elite do. Politicians and law makers can sqaush them at will with no repercussions.

    • responding to my own comment, here is the relevant quote:

      "Do you think the interactivity of game violence makes it different than violence on television, which is passive?

      A lot of critics like to believe that since you're the one in control you're going try that stuff in real life. Ever fire a gun? I bet you it's nothing like a controller. "

    • Re:what about movies? (Score:3, Informative)

      by fireduck ( 197000 )
      but don't people do stupid shit they see in movies too?

      yes they do [stayfreemagazine.org]. Found that trying to track down the story of the kids lying in the road after seeing it in a movie. That's a scene from The Program. And it lead to a death and a serious injury from idiots who got run over. I'm sure one could come up with examples of people doing incredibly stupid things under the influence of just about any piece of media. There must have been Shakespeare inspired killers at some point.
  • In other news, we read a /. story that might as well be the same thing we read yesterday. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go become a serial killer because I spent an hour playing Call of Duty online last night.

  • Next, on Interviewing Subject Non-Experts... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 07, 2005 @01:23PM (#11867538)
    OK, so I like VG Cats. It's one of my favorite video game comics. I'd love to read an interview with the cartoonist about that. That being said...

    The interview is all about a subject that the interviewee has absolutely no authority in. Well, OK, as a video game cartoonist he probably has enough authority to judge how many games are violent. But the other questions, like how many crimes are related to violent games, he has no way to answer.

    This would almost be like interviewing Illiad about the SCO case against Linux. I'm sure he has an opinion on the matter, but there's no way he knows enough about the legal system to do anything other than spout opinion.

    • Re:Next, on Interviewing Subject Non-Experts... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by UWC ( 664779 ) on Monday March 07, 2005 @01:37PM (#11867690)
      It might be that those more heavily invested in the gaming culture will have a more complete knowledge of the average and maybe even the extremes of those affected (or not) by games. Being immersed in the culture can provide insights and truths that studies can't. Likewise, I'm sure competently performed studies can provide useful information that an intelligent gamer can't. I think there need to be more efforts like this to connect those outside that are trying to find out about (or destroy, I don't know) gaming as a feature of our culture with those more familiar with gaming. It's obviously stupid to have people who know nothing about gaming legislating it out of legitimacy. But it's also not a good idea to leave it totally up to those enamored with the genre. Either way there's going to be some blindness to potential issues. I'm not advocating the superiority of one position or another.

      As a gamer myself, though, I think the ESRB does as good a job of ratings as does whoever rates movies (MPAA? I can't remember). There needs to be more awareness of the rating system, and of the fact that gaming is not just for kids, and thus not all games are intended for a young audience.

    • According to the so-called experts, I should have killed three and a half towns by now. If gamers were anywhere near the scope of serial mass-murderers, I'm sure we'd hear plenty more about it (say, every night) on the news at nine.

      The "experts" are no more right than the VGCats author, or we'd be eternally in a bitter life and death stuggle to stave off that person who played GTA3 for two hours last week.
    • I don't think the point is that he has to be an authority, just a voice within the community. They ask people off the street all the time what they think about things and it's interesting because you get all their eclectic views.

      The author of the story, at the bottom, says that he is basically just gathering data across as many kinds of people as possible. Basically this story is one of those samples.

    • Re:Next, on Interviewing Subject Non-Experts... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by pogle ( 71293 ) on Monday March 07, 2005 @02:53PM (#11868595) Homepage
      If you read at the bottom, there's a note from the guy who's done all 3 interviews; this is a testbed for future expansion upon the topic, so he used a standard set of questions for all the interviews so as to try and avoid injecting personal bias, or going off on tangents with any particular person. And in all 3 cases, the answers are all a matter of subjective opinion (even if Thompson wants everyone to believe its a fact).

      Its an interesting approach to seeing the views of both sides of the community on game-related violence. Webcomic authors are usually some of the more in-touch people with the pulse of serious gamers (at least, authors like those @ PA, CAD, VGCats, etc). So they're generally well respected voices in the gamer community, and have a little more clout I'd say than Joe Gamer pulled off the street.

      Of course it helps that he chose two webcomics (that are both hilarious of course) that are on the more violent/weird side of things, while being drawn by normal, non-homicidal people. They're a perfect contrast to Jack Thompson, and a perfect example of why he's a nutcase.
    • Who exactly are the experts in this? There is no hard data on why people do what they do. Sometimes people don't even know their own motivations.
    • I agree with what you're saying, but to be fair, Jack Thompson makes a living off of this crap yet he knows less about it than some random webcomic artist.

  • Accomplish? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by sporty ( 27564 ) on Monday March 07, 2005 @01:27PM (#11867580) Homepage
    What do these lines of questions against the comic artists hope to accomplish? I met scott once. Nice kid (not literally ;P). But I don't think he has done any study of video games in the realm of psychology. Some psych is fairly intuitive, but unless an independent group studies video games outside, correlates and reports their findings, these interviews seem.. out of place.
    • This is really a questionaire, and he sort of explains that at the bottom. I think what he wants to do is ask these same repetitive canned questions to a lot of people and -then- attempt to do something insightful or interesting with the aggregate.

      Personally I think, as a stand alone piece, it was terrible. It felt horribly contrived, but I could see how as a piece in a much larger body of information, it would be interesting.

      It'd also probably still be very annoying, to have all the repetitive common s
      • all the repetitive common sense answers stacked up next to the extremist answers...what we already all feel on the issue, a massive disconnect

        Yet this could be the intention too: On the left are the consistent views of a majority of Americans, on the right are the views of a few extremists who want to sue game developers. Note the massive disconnect. Clearly the lawsuit happy extremists are out of touch with reality and need a time out.
  • I love VGCats, and it's nice to see Scott's biting sarcasm applied to the common sense arguments he makes.

  • oblig fight club. (Score:5, Funny)

    by Joe the Lesser ( 533425 ) on Monday March 07, 2005 @01:39PM (#11867718) Homepage Journal
    I'd be very careful who I talked to about this. It sounds like someone dangerous wrote it... someone who might snap at any moment, stalking from office to office with an Armalite AR-10 Carbine-gas semiautomatic, bitterly pumping round after round into colleagues and co- workers.
    Might be someone you've known for years... somebody very close to you. Or, maybe you shouldn't be bringing me every little piece of trash you pick up.
    • What's truly funny and insightful about this quote/comment is that Fight Club is not a very violent movie at all (and was very thoroughly mis-marketed as a result). FC is a funny, dark comedy, and what little real violence it has is truly repulsive. If anything, it's a movie with a very anti-violence message.
  • I think that if you play enough video games to become violent as a result of them, chances are you aren't interacting directly with people anyway.

    Of course, I've definetly smacked friends upside the head when they beat me... but that has a lot more to do with they're relentless trash talking, especially considering we were playing sports games.

    • Re:Seriously... (Score:5, Informative)

      by Ayaress ( 662020 ) on Monday March 07, 2005 @02:31PM (#11868314) Journal
      If you're playing games to the point that you're not interacting with people, there are other reasons you'd be violent. Antisocial people don't need video games to isolate themselves, and they certainly don't need them to inspire them to mail bombs to people. Did the Unabomber even have electricity, let alone Nintendo?

      Something that got me in the interview with the lawyer last week is that it said video games "build up the synaptic pathways to kill. You learn to do in real life what you do in the games..." didn't make sense. The game would build certain pathways, but I would think you'd learn to do down down back forward high punch from muscle memory, not to actually rip somebody's head off with the spine still attached.

      One of my life goals is to walk up to one of these people and make the hand motions to perform some sort of Mortal Kombat move, and then say, "If you were right, you'd be dead now."

  • The Roag Runner Conspiracy (Score:4, Funny)

    by Moby Cock ( 771358 ) on Monday March 07, 2005 @01:52PM (#11867857) Homepage
    Imagine the guy had dropped an anvil on the policemen's heads,squashed them flat and said "Meep, Meep".

    Who would be culpable then?

    Warner Brothers?
  • Last time I checked there was thing called the Crusades. Thousands of people got killed. Yet, nobody banned the bible because of it. Hell, 3000 people died on 9/11 and we don't even ban the Koran. Personally we should ban anything that can be even remotely related to violence. I want to punch the wall everytime I see Star Jones on The View. Let's ban her.

  • "We need to think more about violence..." (Score:4, Interesting)

    by superultra ( 670002 ) on Monday March 07, 2005 @02:18PM (#11868170) Homepage
    It's good to see Gamespeak hearing from all sides. We need this kind of dialog. It'd be nice, though, to hear someone answer one of his more pressing questions with a "I don't know." I'm hoping for something more from Bungie later in the week. But so far, I've been disappointed with the gaming response on Gamespeak.

    So let's get two things out of the way: it's clear that it is not just games that causes violence, it is games + X, where X = unstable childhood, major psychological problems, etc. Secondly, I think everyone would agree that in most cases, if the person didn't use a game as inspiration, they would've used rock n' roll, or Catcher in the Rye, or Pulp Fiction.

    But nevertheless, we need more intellgent responses than talking about brothers losing in Mario Kart and the differences between guns and controllers. Not only that, but the game industry should be as troubled as anyone that many of the last decade's most heinous tragedies have had some kind of connection to video games, even if it is as tenuous and silly as the 9-11 to Flight Simulator connection.

    The most recent 60 Minutes had a segment on video game violence, and specifically the police shootings associated with GTA. When the show compared the walkthrough of the shooter in the police department with one of the missions in GTA, it was eerily similar. If I were the brother of the slain cop, I would've sued Rockstar as well.

    In the Gamespeak article, Ramsoomair, who probably planned his answer overnight, speaks to the causality of video games by responding, "this one time my brother punched me in the arm when I beat him in Mario Kart." Other defenders of video game violence often cite that people have played Pac-Man, but no one is running around gobbling yellow dots.

    But it is physically impossible to shoot people with bananas and pick up large blocks and eat powerpellets and fruit in a black maze with neon walls because they don't exist. There is a chasm between the fiction of games like Mario and Zelda with reality. That chasm disappears in GTA. There are police stations. There are real cops. There is such a thing as shotgun, and people do die in both reality and in the game when you point it at people and shoot them. There's a reason why the US Army uses video simulations, like Full Spectrum Warrior for example, to train its troops: it works.

    Jack Thompson is an ambulence chasing idiot. But the responses on our side have been as equally unintellegent and insensitive. Billion dollar companies, like EA and Take 2, must be overjoyed to have so many advocates like Ramsoomair working for them for free (EA especially likes unpaid work).

    We need to think about this more. We need to start answering these interviews with "I don't know"s. We need to be more sensitive to the victims of crimes that are associated with video games, especially when the relationship between the video game and the violence is so brutally direct, as in the 2003 police shooting. If we'd done this earlier, if we'd developed a more intelligent response than screaming the first amendment and making games like Manhunt, maybe there wouldn't be a place for assholes like Thompson. Just because we can, doesn't mean we should. "Everything is permissible, but not everything is beneficial."
    • There's a reason why the US Army uses video simulations, like Full Spectrum Warrior for example, to train its troops: it works.

      I'll believe it works when I see the Army outfitting its troops with mouse-controlled machine guns that have zero kickback at all and tanks whose controls consist of "W A S D" buttons.

      Until then I'll remain fully convinced that the reason the Army uses video games is because someone paid them to use video games, potentially as a marketing ploy, if not just good ol' nepotism.

      As f
      • I'll believe it works when I see the Army outfitting its troops with mouse-controlled machine guns that have zero kickback at all and tanks whose controls consist of "W A S D" buttons.

        First, you'll get no argument from me about Jack Thompson. He's an ass. 'Nuff said.

        However, the army was one example. Say an 8 year old plays WoW. Would you dispute the fact that WoW could teach little Bobby how to barter? How our economic system works? Wouldn't Bobby learn - in the video game - how to save up for t
        • Having never played the game and only listening to other people complain about the auction house in WoW, I'd have to say I have reservations that little Bobby will learn anything about real world economics from the game.

          However, even if little Bobby did learn economics from a video game, there is a vast gap between intellectual knowledge and physical knowledge. Claiming that playing GTA at 8 years of age would make Bobby physically capable of drawing a bead, firing, and hitting three police officers in ra
          • Good points, but I have to admit to little Bobby having been something of a trick question. The most recent issue of Computer Games Magazine sports an editorial by a parent writing that his son does, in fact, learn financial skills by playing WoW. It's a great editorial, and has nothing to do with game violence, and well worth the read.

            The two events you list - the police station and the tree chopping - are substantially different. Chopping a tree takes strength, and if video games do anything with regar
            • Using a weapon, whether its a sword or a gun, takes more physical skill than you think. I remember the first time I fired a shotgun (in Cub Scouts/webelos ;). I didn't have the butt seated properly, and if I wasn't already double-jointed in my shoulder, I'd have probably dislocated it. It hurt a hell of a lot, and made a really loud noise. I hated the skeet shooting trips our troop went on. Even with a handgun, there is still some kickback, which is liable to surprise anyone who has never fired one bef
    • But nevertheless, we need more intellgent responses than talking about brothers losing in Mario Kart

      It may seem silly, but there's a good reason for this kind of argument. It's the same sort of thing that everybody can relate too. Kid's now hit their brothers over Mario Kart. Ten years ago, they hit each other over the remote control, before that over action figures, ball games, just about anything. Short version: Brothers hit each other. Big deal. Gamers are just like everybody else.

      and the differences
      • They should be troubled. Troubled that somebody has such a blind vendetta that they'd make such tenuous and silly accusations. The one fact about virtually all the allegedly video-game related crimes is that they are, all in all, not particularly unusual crimes in and of themselves.

        The Flight Simulator one is a stupid correlation. It's like blaming 9-11 on bagels because the terrorists ate bagels the breakfast before they boarded the planes. While Columbine's correlation to Doom and Quake is more subst

  • People are influenced... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by mabu ( 178417 ) on Monday March 07, 2005 @02:24PM (#11868230)
    I'm reminded of one of Chris Rock's comedy routines where he talks about a guy who lives with a woman who smokes crack. He says, "If you don't smoke crack, YOU WILL." citing the inevitability of people influencing each other, one way or the other.

    I tend to agree. People who argue against violence in games and the media influencing people only look at the issue from a shallow, instant-cause-and-effect-or-else-nothing perspective. Yes, if you watch someone shoot someone on TV, that doesn't mean that you will go out and shoot someone. Nor does it mean that if you see someone purchasing a big Dodge pickup truck, you are going to head out later that day and buy yourself a big Dodge pickup truck.

    HOWEVER, to deny that these images do not transmit subtle (or not-so-subtle) messages which ultimately, either consciously or subconsciously affect our perspective, is naive and foolish.

    They do, otherwise commercials would be useless. Just like advertising seeks to change peoples' perspectives on products and services, games, television and other media also alter what people think of things. In commercials, you only see the positive side of consumption; in television and video games, you also tend to only see one, seemingly clinical and detached version of violence -- which inevitably will serve to convince people in minute segments, that such violence isn't as abhorrent as society's moral structure may dictate.

    Ask yourself, if a video game where one goes on a killing spree in a police precint can be defended by the status quo as being innocuous, would they feel the same way about a game where you play the Germans exterminating jews in WWII? They're both morally reprehensible, but you can bet that many more people would argue such imagery would be deterimental towards peoples' moral judgement. What's the difference? The difference depends upon who you offend and how, but in essence the same argument applies to all media and to deny that it only applies in select areas is ridiculous.
    • They do, otherwise commercials would be useless.

      But commercials are useless. ;-)

    • otherwise commercials would be useless

      You mean like the tampon commercials that make me immediately rush out and buy a box, just in time to get back and see the car commercial? These days I never seem to get to watch any TV shows, and I'm always so in debt!</sarcasm>

      Even without an instant cause and effect, the only people who buy shit they'll never use are those who already have mental problems and who stay up til 4 in the morning, telephone in hand, buying all these things that they saw on TV.
      • Well, WW2 games where you play an American killing Germans sell pretty well in Germany, too. Well, except for those depicting swastikas, of course.
        • Well, WW2 games where you play an American killing Germans sell pretty well in Germany, too. Well, except for those depicting swastikas, of course.

          Comparing American to European markets is apples and oranges. There are a lot of things that are sold in Europe and a lot of European, more liberal media imagery, that would meet with freak-out-Christian-protest-groups in America.

          However if you disagree and think there's no difference, how long before we get to play the Alabama KKK version of GTO? Or Flight
          • I was just talking about that Americans-killing-Japanese game selling in Japan and how that's not an exception. The KZ-manager games are outlawed in Germany (to the point where possession can probably land you in jail already). Yes, those games exist and are traded illegally among neonazis. I doubt they have much to offer besides the theme (which is only appealing to neonazis anyway), much like 99.999% of the "christian" games or Japanese hentai games (man, those child-safety guys would really freak out if
      • otherwise commercials would be useless

        You mean like the tampon commercials that make me immediately rush out and buy a box, just in time to get back and see the car commercial? These days I never seem to get to watch any TV shows, and I'm always so in debt!

        That's a crappy example to make your point, but it does illustrate my point. I didn't suggest that watching a tampon commercial would make you go out and buy tampons, BUT if you saw a scene of a guy going out and buying tampons enough, you'd be desens
        • in that case if your girlfriend (I know, wrong web site to make such an assumption)

          Damn straight. But thats my point. Without a need for tampons, no number of tampon commercials will convince me to buy some. Just like no number of violent games will convince me to flip out and kill people since I don't have a need to kill people.

  • May be a bit late but... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by KDR_11k ( 778916 ) on Monday March 07, 2005 @03:11PM (#11868799)
    ... after reading the interview with Jackass Thompson I came to realize two things:

    1. He wants to ban GTA and then extend the ban to other games. Because for any example he can ONLY cite GTA. "There is no sportsmanship in GTA". No, because you're playing GTA against noone that cares about sportsmanship. Once you factor in multiplayer games with their sportsmanship rules like "no camping", "no aimbots" and "no kill stealing" you get a completely different result.

    2. This man is a lawyer that can't tell the difference between prostitution and rape. In one moment he's talking about armies pillaging and raping, the next he claims GTA bridges the gap between sex and violence. Hell, those whores in GTA had zero to do with the violence (okay, they're targets like anyone else) except for being in the same game!

    He also realizes that parents are failing to do their job but attempts to escape by citing some anecdote about a child that was killed despite correc upbringing. I doubt he is REALLY too dumb to realize that the upbringing of the killer is the kicker, not that of the victims so this is just plain malicious. And what's with that crap about "the industry will rue the day they introduced that rating"? Does he imply they never should have implemented a rating system or wtf is he trying to say?
    • "I doubt he is REALLY too dumb to realize that the upbringing of the killer is the kicker, not that of the victims so this is just plain malicious."

      yeah, i caught that too, he cited the little girl who was killed, and her father said something like "we were raising her right". he just slid it in there slick-as-shit, completely dodging the question and trying for an emotional response. It completely pissed me off.
  • The anti-antivideogamers have regularly responded that "pyschos will still be psychos" many times. I am absolutely against the overt restriction on video games and I love GTA.

    But to suggest for a moment that kids don't learn from watching violence is very incorrect. Experiements on such vicarious (and this is a form of it, although it does "involve" the child) learning shows that it increases with the reward pattern of video games.

    While it wasn't a concern back when games were Final Fantasy I monsters a

  • While i do agree the onus should be on the video game retailers for selling to minors, what in gods name is a child doing with GTA? My parents had 1 rule in my house: No toy guns. Wanna guess how many toy guns i had as a child? Zero. Why? Because i had parents. Remember when those kids burned down their house because Beavis and Butthead did it? All the lawyers ran to blame MTV, Beavis and Butthead, but none of them asked "Hey, this women let her kids play with matches, why the hell did they have matches? A

  • Just look at the numbers! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by ABaumann ( 748617 ) on Monday March 07, 2005 @04:43PM (#11869952)
    Number of copies of GTA San Andreas sold in 2004: 5.1 Million [cnn.com]

    Number of incidence of violence related to GTA: umm... let's say there were as many as 100.

    That's 0.001%. No stastician would say that there could be ANY correlation with a number like that.

  • GTA (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Prien715 ( 251944 ) <agnosticpope.gmail@com> on Monday March 07, 2005 @10:24PM (#11873348) Journal
    I'll tackle GTA since everyone "hates" it from a moral standpoint.

    In no GTA game (AFAIK), there's no mandatory mission forcing you to kill good cops (in SA, the cops are crooked). Nor do you even have to kill innocent civilians. It's mostly drug lords fighting for land or killing backstabbing mobsters or the occasional informant or rapper.

    Much like real life, killing cops in GTA is a choice with consequences. The cops chase you, you have to run away. Killing civilians is the same way. Why don't these radical censorship groups distribute readmes on how not to kill cops in the game? The difference between GTA and most other games is that vulnerability is relatively uniform. You can't swing your sword at the town elder in Zelda; the game simply won't let you. In GTA, everyone is equally vulnerable.

    In the US army's own game, it's possible to kill your drill seargent. You'll also get sent to jail for it.

    It's just s friggin' sandbox. If you want to go kill random civilians in the game, it's possible (not exactly productive and the cops will chase you). In real life, the cops go after you as well (though it does take less to set them off and they'll persue you with greater tenacity).

    Personally, I thought Dungeon Keeper 2 was much more violent than GTA ever was (you know, torturing good people to death and the like).

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