GTA In The News Again...

[Brandon354]

Maybe it is just me but playing video games does NOT make me want to shoot someone, it does the opposite. If I want to kill thousands I am perfectly okay with playing gta and setting virtual people on fire and beating their heads in with bats instead of doing that to real people.

[CrazyEyes]

Nah, guys.  It's easy math.
 
A picture is worth a thousand words, right?  So if you're playing a game at 60FPS, that's 60,000 words per second or 3.6 million words per minute. That means that in the first ten minutes, Call of Duty has more emotional weight than Wikipedia's entire list of longest novels.¹  Way more possibility for emotional damage there.

 

 

In all seriousness, I don't think violent video games have any more of a negative impact on a person than a violent movie or book would.  I simply think that if that person is already mentally unstable, or otherwise doesn't understand the boundaries between what happens in the media and what happens in real life, then you are asking for trouble if you allow them access to violent media of any kind..

 

Incidentally, the game may only portray the violence as occurring to or because of the character, but it is you the player that the game is trying to immerse in this role.  Many games feature silent protagonists so that the player can project as many of their own features onto that character as they want.  In terms of getting you as a person enganged in the violence I'd say video games do at least as much as writing or reading agression.

 

Of course, all of us here manage to play violent video games without commiting any murders.  So do hundreds of millions of people around the world.  A handful do commit crimes, even violent ones.  They're a monirity in the extreme, but that doesn't matter to people who want an easy answer for why a man shot up a school.  They don't want to hear that, well, there are crazy fuckers everywhere and this shit just happens sometimes.  They want to blame something they can fight against.  It's understandable.

 

What you end up with, of course, are idiots perpetuating idiocy.  We all know the usual accusations against our precious "murder simulators."  The sad thing is that people might listen if the accusers were ever informed about the subject they were attacking.  My favorite? The parts of the interview where that psychologist claims that shooting at a target in a video game is like practicing shooting a gun... someone has obviously never fired a gun before.

[Rathlord]

I would challenge anyone whose knowledge of guns came only from Grand Theft Auto to actually fire a gun in real life. Seriously. You point and press one button. Most of the people who play GTA probably couldn't even load a sporting rifle or assault rifle. They might be able to manage a revolver or a pump action shotgun (but probably not a break action shotgun). If I had no real world experience with guns and had just learned from GTA, I wouldn't even realize that safeties exist. All in all, like I said, it's a crock of bullshit from people looking for an excuse to blame tragedies on and people who are just vying for attention.

[CrazyEyes]

I got curious so I googled Kristopher Kaliebe a bit.  All the addresses I could find for him ¹ and the medical association he works for ^{2 (box on left)} put him close to New Orleans - about 100 miles from where the shooting in this article took place.
 
Now, Slaughter is a tiny town, so it may not have a lot of medical professionals there.  But are there really no child psychologists closter than 100 miles away or was it just that none of them would say video games are like shooting a gun?