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April 06, 2005
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Fantasy and reality
Jake van der Kamp, hurry home. Your column has been taken over and they are wrecking it with idiocy. Today's Monitor column in the SCMP: When will society stop kidding itself that violent virtual games do no real damage?Actually the link doesn't appear so clear to me. What is clear is a lack of good upbringing. You know, teaching the difference between fantasy and reality. Let's wheel the clock back - violent "games" have been with us since Roman times (the collesuem), right through the Middle Ages (jousting) and to today. Sure, Legend of Mir 3 is hardly the nastiest game on the block. Indeed, the atmosphere is all tousled hair and swirling mist. Nevertheless, the covetousness it evidently fosters drove a middle-aged man to murder in revenge for the theft the teen committed. So the game effectively generated two crimes.The case was more complicated than that. The item in question was worth realy money and was sold for real money. I don't condone the murder. But this isn't mere pixels we are dealing with, but personal property. This isn't the first time someone has killed over a theft and it won't be the last. But it hasn't nothing to do with video games. Parents need to start taking the perils of electronic play seriously. They assume it is no more likely to inflict or exacerbate psychological damage than baseball or hopscotch and tacitly embrace it as a convenient tranquilliser like television, only more effective thanks to the interactive element that makes it "immersive".That's because most parents believe (rightly) they can teach their kids to differentiate between play and reality. It's why parents let kids watch TV and movies, too. They do not even want to consider what off-screen forces gaming might unleash. Instead, they cheerfully advertise their bumbling incompetence in relation to all things techy and brag about how slick their children are.< i>I know because I child-mind for friends? How does that qualify you? It's play, damnit. Kids have been playing cops and robbers, cowboys and Indians, you name it, for years. Are we going to ban that too? Maybe it already exists. The momentum of development mirrors the head-long thrust of the action.Great. Let's just all play Tetris and watch the magical drop in crime rates. Perhaps, games in the opposite combative mould can sharpen your reflexes and encourage quick thinking, as proponents claim. They insist even pre-pubescents know the difference between events that unravel in pixels and what happens in the "meatspace" inhabited by carbon-based life forms with nerves and feelings.Violent games make kids violent. Then Mum or Dad say "stop hitting or you won't play that game again" and the kid learns what happens in the video game isn't reality. If society is getting more violent from all these video games, why are crime rates, especially for violent crime, falling? Just try watching House of Flying Daggers or Ong-Bak: The Thai Warrior. In the aftermath, when you waltz out of the cinema, you are bound to feel a little more aggressive than when you walked in - such films are designed to fire you up, trigger adrenalin.Here's the amazing conclusion: reading thi9s article made me more aggressive than before. Before we ban video games, let's ban articles like this. They're dangerous. posted by Simon on 04.06.05 at 12:17 PM in the
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