Comments on: Ironic Situation

By: anon

anon — Sun, 13 Feb 2011 21:37:55 +0000

The government of India officially stated they are looking to get electricity and the ability for televised broadcasts to the vast majority of the nation “because people watching tv spend less time engaging in procreative acts.”

Video games definitely equal LESS sex.

@Spyda K: You say sex would just make it “awkward”, but that’s the point of the conversation, **WHY** would it be awkward? It’s much more to do with societal (esp. religious) hangups than anything else.

By: GFYM

GFYM — Sun, 13 Feb 2011 11:18:25 +0000

You enjoy a clean cumshot as much as the next guy?

Maybe there’s the difference.

By: Cortney

Cortney — Sun, 13 Feb 2011 09:11:05 +0000

Video games do not MAKE someone do crazy shit. The people who do end up going on massive killing sprees and just so happened to play a violent game are most likely messed up in the head before they event started playing the game. Crazy peeps gon’ be crazy no matter what triggers they are exposed to, whether it be videos games, or movies, or seeing someone get slapped in the face.

By: Ejigantor

Ejigantor — Sun, 13 Feb 2011 05:30:37 +0000

You state repeatedly that there is no catharsis from violent video games, but the research you keep citing, (indirectly, of course), based on your statements, are studies of VIEWING violent acts. You seem to be failing to account for the fairly important distinction between passively viewing something on a screen and actively interacting with something that outputs to a screen.

There may be no (outside statistical anomaly) catharsis from watching, but you cannot apply studies on passive media as blanket truth when referring to interactive media.

By: baha

baha — Fri, 11 Feb 2011 13:32:37 +0000

For one, I don’t like the generalizations about American society and how Americans are “violent” or “prudes”. That kind of broad stroke isn’t fair, nor is it likely based on anything but what you see on TV, which is just ignorance. It would be like stereotyping all Europeans as dried-up snobs and all Canadians as drunk rednecks.
Next, I have to agree that it is a trenchant point Steve brings up. The potential harm of sexuality in media (and I’m not just talking video games) is generally overblown and generates a false moral panic whenever it appears. I mean, pre-pubescent teens have been seeing sex and nudity for generations, whether it was your a kid stealing his dad’s Playboy a few decades ago, or a kid today sneaking onto the net to find some naughty websites. Either way, young boys are sneaking peeks at boobies long before they are having sex, and probably long before they get the “birds and bees” talk (if they get it at all). Heck, I learned what I knew about sex before my first time from 7th-grade health classes and reading lad magazines (like Maxim and FHM). So why does it always have to be so damn hidden? Kids are going to learn about it with or without thier parents, so it would probably be better to have the parents indroduce it and teach thier kids in a safer way.
Next, it also depends on the depiction of sex and nudity itself. Some circumstances would make it smutty, some would be ok, and some would be art. For example, American Pie was just titties for the sake of titties, but the stripping of the jews in Schindler’s list demonstrated the depravity and inhumility they suffered (and couldn’t have had less to do with sex). A lot of other good movies use sex as a medium just to demonstrate interpersonal connections between characters, and while most of them simply allude to it instead of being explicit, I wasn’t at all uncomfortable with the scene at the beginning of Stigmata that showed the main character as a promiscuous girl, because that was relevant to the plot. I might not want a 10-year-old to see it, because he or she might not have the depth of understanding to get that point quite yet, but I think a few years later, after a good long conversation, he or she would be ready for it.

And I think that’s the main rub for the controversies on both sex and violence: parents simply don’t want to be bothered to explain to thier children about how violence is bad and sexual responsibility. Instead of giving thier children the knowledge they would need to enter adulthood with a moral compass, they choose to ignore it, and see video games as a threat because they expose thier children to things that force them to take thier heads out of the sand.