The blog that's gotten one comment ever! Thanks mom!

Thursday, December 20, 2007

My confusion

This just makes me so sad. I'm not even sure what to say about it. Me and some friends had a lengthy and heated discussion of what it means to be tried as an adult. I don't know the right answer.

I've grown up with video games my entire life. Yes, Galaga doesn't exactly compare to some of the latest games in terms of violence and realism. Heck, despite my friend Batty's recommendation of it, I can barely play through a few minutes of Condemned without getting to freaked out to continue. But I've never had difficulty with the distinction between what happens in a game and what happens in reality. Well, ok, there was that one time, but I only needed stitches, and no one got hurt but me. I just don't know what to do about things like this. I've got a Mortal Kombat 2 arcade game in my basement. Should I not let my nieces play it (they almost always insist I let them)? Can I safely assume that most people share my ability to understand that what happens in a game, or a movie, while entertaining, isn't exactly behavior one should imitate?

1 comment:

Batty said...

This has nothing to do with games. Let's look at what happened here: two psychopaths got drunk and beat a 3-year-old to death. To death. Not like getting carried away and dropping the kid on her head or whatever and accidentally killing her. This is a sustained beating. Until the child died.

Here's the thing about videogame violence correlating with real world violence: It's not a generalizable trend. No one should be surprised if a violent person also likes violent entertainment. Especially when EVERYONE likes that entertainment! Further, and more importantly, these violent individuals are already extreme statistical outliers. The number of people who kill others--let alone beat toddlers to death--is statistically insignificant and therefore cannot be used to generalize to an entire population.

Crazy assholes are going to kill people. There have always been crazy assholes. They have always killed people. There is nothing we can do to eliminate crazy assholes because we don't know who they are until they do something crazy. That's life in the human population. I think that both of these people need a very long "time out," so to speak.

Have you read my blog?