http://www.sk-gaming.com/content/15241- ... ed_911quot



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIu3JMGxk3Q

Woah, blaming video games?

That ain't new. But on 9/11!? THAT's new to me

Ludicrous... Sounds to me like yet another 'expert' who just doesn't 'get' videogames. And that is sad...

How many people are there out there who play Halo/COD4/Doom3 etc.? Probably hundreds of thousands... How many people have used video games as a scapegoat when slaughtering innocents? 10 or less?

Now take into account how many of these people have mental illness or mental instability... Seriously, how do these people obtain monetary funding to 'prove' one side of a story? Can I get funding to disprove their 'proof' please? That's ridiculous.

Maybe they need to ban food from existance since it's the cause of so much consumption of it... Perhaps a ban on smoking and drinking because of all of the pollution and health issues? Where do these people come up with this preposterous idea??? I REALLY WANNA KNOW!

The problem is the unfair singling out of video games.

Books, movies, music, spoken word all reinforce or awaken any natural violent disposition potential in an indvidual yet video games are often blamed unfairly or unequally.

That's a fantastic bit of insight Bo, I love you.

Are you being serious or sarcastic?

*shrug*
I concur with both angles, yet with neither to their respective extremes.

It happens in all great societies who are structured around personal gratification - the fact remains that what is in vogue is the mother goose to the trailing gosling, or child of the day.
When Goethe's <i>The Sorrows of Young Werther</i> hit print in, if I correctly recall, 1779, there were reported suicides from a plethora of young males who had both read the book and experienced a jilting occurrence in the fields of Love.
Or, similarly, in the St. Louis area several years back there were reports of gang-related self-mutilation, which constitutes essentially a series of incidents which had young black men who listened to 50 Cent having someone they know hold them down and shoot them in the shoulder, so that they too could say they were shot.

The former is tauted as a literary classic, the latter is both a popular rapper and hated by the majority of all so called 'people of culture', and yet both lead to similar conclusions.

It is clear, therefore, that no matter the influence, we will be influenced, and it oftentimes rests solely on the makeup of the person in question - if they were inclined to react a certain way to a certain stigma, or no, or etc, etc, etc.
This is unmeasurable.
We cannot calculate on a personal level, even if we could it would be silly to attempt to do so, and so we attempt to nip it away in other more specialized areas that seem adequate, such as video games.

The truth is, people who play violent video games may possibly develop violent tendencies, even as those who read Goethe's novel may decide that suicide after failed love is the way to go.

What is responsible, then, is not these districts of influence themselves, for were they truly responsible then we would have to quash creative culture and dictate what is or is not acceptable, as we see they are now doing, and this is a measure I find both silly and evasive - for the problem can never be 'what' is influencing, it lies in the failings of society.

Were people properly introduced to a variety of themes, cultures, ideas, and concepts from an early age in their lives, then the part of us which reacts to the influences of others could become the part of us which discerns a series of trends only, and then decides how to act.

So yes, video games can incur violent proclivities, but what does that matter so long as our peoples are so unprepared for the onslaught of the 'Vogue' that they are then susceptible to being influenced by something so menial as a video game, a book, or a hiphop record?

We learn through that which influences us, and therefore the greater a variety of prospective influences, the greater the variety of options.

So long as people are programmed, rather than informed, bound to the trendy they shall be, really.

@Bo: Just because ya don't like me, does it necessarily mean you have to walk around with yer back up against the wall. I do not show disrespect up above, I was praising your input as I value everyone's opinion providing it has a constructive nature. If you can't figure it out, PM me next time. Aight? Thank you.

Mental illness does not always translate into sociopathic behavior. I am a paranoid schizophrenic. I take an "anti-psychotic" prescription drug for the symptoms. I've been around mentally ill people, from schizophrenics to borderline personalities to bipolars. None of them were sociopaths. I used to live down the hall from a schizophrenic who suffers from Tourette Syndrome (he could be heard in his apartment swearing and shouting, as if he were having a heated conversation with someone over the phone). He was harmless. He was also pretty well behaved when out in public.

Mental illness tends to get a bad rap. People hear buzz words like "psychotic" and tend to envision a wild sociopath who's unsafe to be around.

All these years later, JT makes another grabass attempt to return his name to the headlines.

Sure, violent video games could affect certain people in a negative manner. But ANY violent stimulus CAN do this if this type of person is affected. Violent movies, or even real life murders are not often pinned as even a probable correlation for violent behavior half the time. The excuse of video games has become a hot scape goat, and if anyone who knows two cents about video games attempts to battle this, the media's little veil will be dispelled. However, I think that even if the media's perception of the negativity of video games is shattered, the negative image WILL come back.

One thing I feel that video games can be correlated to is addiction to an extent. Especially with MMORPGs.

Jamos blames stupidity on Jack Thompson.