| That being said, there are entire worlds of contextual difference between the "violence" in chess or GC2, and a game like Grand Theft Auto, and this topic feels out of place when brought up in the same breath as GC2. |
I fully agree, until Bingjack says "and this topic..." Just because first-person violence and organizational violence are fundamentally different doesn't mean they aren't both forms of violence. Subsets can be like that. Some families don't like their cousins from Baltimore, some people don't like their noses, some churches don't like their bishops, etc.
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Pacman was violence against dots and ghosts. Space invaders was wholesale carnage. Dont even get me STARTED on missle Command....that game is horrifying if you think about it at all. Risk, Battleship, Clue. And at least those games were depicting Struggles for your very life...Monopoly was just about opressing your fellow man for imaginary currency...you know, like U.S. Dollars.
When I play GC2, I see dots and icons getting gobbled up across screen not unlike pacman. If youre bringing up this topic in the context of GC2, it means youve made a value judgement and determined that cartoonish imaginary space aliens are somehow more realistic than cartoonish pacman ghosts. When you make this argument you first have to accept that youre attaching some sort of humanity or deeper meaning to colored dots.
Why youre doing that I dont know, but its probably a pretty interesting psychological topic. I personally am not disturbed over imaginary violence against colored dots. Im disturbed by the real violence against real people going on in the world perpetrated by people who pretty certianly DONT play GC2 or games like it, cable news, talk radio, every State of the Union addess, and American Idol. But admittedly, my priorities are odd.
The point is, the level of philosophical "violence" in games has not changed. If you factor in sports, the level of violence has greatly diminished if you go back to mortal gladiator stadium combat , feeding people to lions, and that game where people tried to throw severed heads through hoops.
The only thing thats changed is that games are now getting much better at *ILLUSTRATING* the violence that was just assumed previously. They are finally getting sophisticated enough to tell stories visually in the same way movies have been doing it for years. If you took GTA, or one of the GTA clones,(which admittedly are in poor taste, but unfortunately no ones ever been able to do do anything about peoples congential tendency towards poor taste, especially when theres imaginary currency to be made), and made it back in the age of 8 bit atari 2600 video graphics where you were a colored square, shooting colored squares at other colored squares, there would be no discussion here.
Sex and Violence(Rock on!) has always been implicit in every aspect of our entertainiment, even childrens stories, since the beginning of time. Criminal activity has ALWAYS been glorified in a certain percentage of entertainment(1930's ganster movies, Treasure Island, etc...). This is not your issue. (Some)People just get squeamish when its taken out out the realm of the implied, and illustrated plainly. Why youre fine with implied imaginary violence, and with real world violent atrocities commited in your name, so long as you dont have to see it, is what you should really be pondering.
Every generation has its media pariah that a small but vocal minority makes a great show of publically blaming for the ills of society (the same ills, in pretty much the same proportions, that never change) to further their own agendas. Currently it seems to be "violent" video games and men who kiss other men( again, always been there, we just get squeamish when its illustrated for us). When I was young, it was heavy metal music. I was stupid and impressionable, so I actually believed for a time it was possible to actually modulate your voice somehow while you were singing to make words be spoken backwards as well... until I got a little older and realized that would probably be *really* hard to do. Before then, it was rock and roll and which drinking fountain people of assorted colors should be using. Before then it was, I dont know...women wearing pants or something...subversive, I say!
If I could wave my wand, and make GTA and its opportunistic clones that are throwing off the curve and giving censorship hawks a target to spearhead their cause with, just go away...I would. But if I had that kind of power, they would be in line behind a whole lot of other things I would make go away first.
