This has been going on forever, the news always says stuff about this, and they say that the Columbine idiots shot up the school DIRECTLY because they were "addicted" to Doom. Obviously they were messed up if they were addicted to Doom in 1999!!
I think the whole thing is stupid, I think movies are A LOT worse! In a game, when you "kill" someone, do you get the satifaction of bloodlust? Or the satisfaction of defeating someone (or computer)? Obvious the second one. When I play Metal of Honor multiplayer, I don't get pleasure from "virtual" bloodshed and murder, I get pleasure from defeating with my reaction times and strategies. Quake III may seem like mindless violence, but it's really a tournament of reaction, concentration, hand-eye coordination, planning (you know, determining where someone will be), extreme use of senses (I play Q3 religiously, I can stand in a room, see a bullet hole appear next to me and within a few milliseconds, plot exactly the path of the bullet, determine where the person is, spin around and send a rocket to their face without ever seeing them, I've never lost a tournament at school, but for some reason, I suck at Quake II...). I mean, there's SOOO much more to "mindless violence" than the average person thinks. I betcha that if you take 2 people, one person who is very good at a game like Q3 or UT2K3, and a person that doesn't play computer games, and put them in a real car crash senario, I guarantee that the computer game player will be able to analyze and act MUCH faster than the other person, and come out of the crash in a much better manner. FPS players build their senses of awareness, both of other entities and of environment. They use the environment to their advantage while predicting the movement of other people/entities. My mom's watched me play Q3, and every time, she just stands there in astonishment. First it's from the gore...then from how I can detect someone through a blood cloud, and somehow, know where they are going, and annihilate them within milliseconds of detecting them. The advantage is to "detect" someone without actually seeing them. Ways to do this is by sound (we don't have sound at school though), bullet holes, powerups (if they've been taken, you can determine if someone is near, and if they respawn in time, you can determine the direction the person took), by seeing other people looking in different directions (if you see someone, they their looking next to you, there's probably someone behind you), and the unexplainable extrasensory (my mom is always stunned when I can see a doorway or something, stand there for a second, send a rocket to it, and at the PERFECT time, a person steps out in front of it. I do this so often, and I have no idea how). When one frags another, it is the defeat that satisfies, the fragmentation, not the actually feeling of "murder". People at school always think I'm cheating, because I'll see someone from the tiniest corner of my eye from very far away, and blow them up with a rocket. Or I like going into their faces from NO WHERE and blowing them up, and they just sit there completely stunned. Yes, I love Quake III.
Mindless violence? I think not.
*WARNING post contents disturbing
by pretz » Jan 1, 2003 @ 8:37pm 
