I've never been one to harp on the issue of videogame violence, a topic that has been beaten to death. But i might be changing my tune after observing the recent media witch hunt.
One day,there was a headline story in the newspaper about Grand Theft Auto and how it encourages gun violence against police. The story was littered with statistics that:proved" this argument. Gun violence against cops is on the rise, as are sales of mature an/or violent videogames. Logically, you can deduce that games therefore cause violence. Right?
I calmed myself with some old-school Time Crisis action before picking up the paper again.This time, there was a story that accused some games,including SOCOM, of promoting and glamorizing terrorist activities; this argument has forced the removal of certain locales from some games to prevent legal action. The story included a sidebar starting that the family of a murderer victim had filed a $250 million lawsuit against Rockstar because two kids cited GTA as the reason they randomly shot a man. Of course, despite millions of copies being sold, one random act proves that GTA kills people.
Feelng like i might go insane with rage, I decided to forgo reading altogether and turned on the television, where surely games would never surface in mainstream news. Alas, I witnessed an early morning journalist reporting cluelessly on the violence in Manhunt, shaking his head in disappointment that such horrific thing could never be conceived of and released to "unwiting consumers and children." Not once did he mention the game's ESRB rating;instead, he used the airtime to reflect on Columbine before switching gears to promote Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, which was illustrated by a series of gory shots before being interrupted to go live to Haiti to show a dead man in the street. All this was at 7 a.m., when plenty of kids are cartoon surfing. But if you watch/read/listen to the news, you might believe they are playing videogames and thinking of ways to kill you.
Perhaps that mindless anchorman has been conditioned by a culture that accepts other media as "art", even if it contains violence. Was Francis Ford Coppola sued for making The Godfather? No, he won an Oscar. Before you spam me for encouraging violence, let me be clear: I am simply asking that the media take it's collective head out of it's ass and start portraying games objectively and in relation to the other forms of entertainment on the market. Of course, then there would be little controversy. And who wants to report that?
Log in to comment