@iambateman Exactly my feelings. Always thought that GTA worlds were more scenery than real places. You can't go in every building, you can't interact with every person except to kill it. There are "missions" that change the game world, that is, when the mission starts the things are put in place for you to interact with, but when you "fail" the mission, the game world returns to it's original place, sometimes even moving people instantly from one place to the other. It feels fake to me, because it tries to be a living breathing world. I remember fast traveling in fallout 3 and seeing my father catching up on the map, really traveling the land, killing beasts on the way, he existed by himself, even if I went some place else. It's quite different from GTA. Even Red Dead Redemption, that i loved, suffers from the same problems for me.
Ps Plus offers Saints Row 3, Battlefield 3 this month, and Uncharted 3 and XCom Enemy Unknow... And that's not counting the PSN and PSVita titles, like The Cave. Why no news about the monthly new freee games? Mass Effect 3, Batman Arkham City, Red Dead Redemption, Kingdoms of Amalur, Hitman Absolution and so many others were already offered this year... but hey, it's Assassin Creed 2 that makes the news!
And Bioshock Infinite does not question big themes, what it does is that it preaches you about those big themes. It's quite different to make you think about something and telling you what to think about a subject.
With every narrative you must create a possibility space. It can be whatever you want, but it must be well defined. Spider Man has spider senses but he does not fly. Jedi control minds but they are not invulnerable to blasters if hit. You can do whatever you want but you must create a coherent possibility space for your world to exist. When you create a really broad one (i.e. my story is set in a dream, my story is a lie, my story is set in every possible universe) what you do is you make any story meaningless. If everything goes, then nothing really matters and nothing really surprises you. It's a dream right? So I can fly or not. It doesn't matter anyway. What Bioshock Infinite does is this. It creates a lazy plot device where everything is possible. So you can say anything and it's all the same. DeWitt is Comstock. Ok. If he was Comstock's son or father it would be ok aswell. It would be the exact same thing. It really doesn't matter. It's all justified.
What the gaming industry lacks is campaign contributions. If EA, Activision and the rest would spend a few millions supporting these guys, all of this stupid attacks would stop.
@CaseThree There have been studies that found no relation at all. There have been studies that found that video game players have less violent tendencies. Of course these are not the reports the media or politicians are looking for. They are not looking to know if video game violence affects people. They are looking for a culprit for a senseless violent act. They are looking for a patsy. It's quite different. And hey, you can look at the statistics in the United States and see that video game violence and video game consumption are on the rise for the past 20 years. But crime rate and real world violence have been decreasing in the past 20 years.
@CharlesBurns @jomipira The thing is nobody cries out about game violence when you find the cause of these acts. If you have a gang related shooting, a drug related murder, a poverty related crime or even a war genocide, people understand why it's happening. That's what you are describing regarding South Africa's poorest areas. But when a middle class, educated, first world young man starts killing people randomly, that's when everybody cries havoc. I agree with @TeePoz0r the issue are guns. In the USA there are 88 guns per 100 people. It's ridiculous. They have the highest homicide rate of any first world country, but they don't have the highest crime rates. They are not the poorest, they are not the ones with most mental people, they have the same violent media as every first world country. But they have massacres and shootings like no other. They have death like no other comparable first world country. What they do have is a gun culture like no other, and access to guns like no other...
Can anyone explain to me how is it that violence in games only affects disturbed people in the United States? In Japan where the video game culture is perhaps the most intense there are no school shootings. In Portugal where I live, every kid has a console, no school shootings. Spain? No shootings. Italy? No school shootings. France? Nope. Germany? One in 1983, was it gaming related? With all the violence Pong had I don't know... The Netherlands? No school shootings. Greece? No. In the UK there was one in 1996. Ireland? No. Need I continue? See where I'm going with this?
It's a zombie game. You walk around a beach resort hacking through dead beach vacationers there well, don't die. You slash zombies for crying out loud.
Now if it was a naked man's torso it would be ok, a gory image. Some zombie head with a piece of human flesh in the mouth, it's perfectly reasonable. But hey... the torso has breasts! Now that's offensive!!! A female breast is offensive? Why?
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