What Game Violence Can Teach 62
An anonymous reader writes "Julian Murdoch from GamersWithJobs asks the question 'Can game violence be good?' in a provocative article entitled The Red Suit. After a week playing Introversion Software's Wargames-inspired nuke game Defcon, his answer is that it can be, if not good, then at least informative. 'I admit that in a rousing teamspeak game of Defcon I am not drawn into bouts of real-time reflection. But on closing down the game for the night, I find myself oddly thoughtful: sad, reflective, a bit fragile. But not upset, and not wanting to wipe the game off my hard drive. Violence in games can teach us things. It can reach us in ways beyond mere titillation. It's all about context.'"
Re:I've learned a lot from games. (Score:5, Funny)
Lightning bolt! Lightning bolt! Lightning bolt! Lightning bolt!
Defcon is interesting (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Defcon is interesting (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm addicted to Defcon and realized I have started to think like the guys at Norad. I consider having more than 50 million people left a victory.
My goal is to simply find and destroy all silos first through conventional weaponry and save my silos for the very last moment... Which means I sacrifice a few cities in the process by not defending them.
Often times this is sucessful and I can use subs and bombers to hit the silos before they can launch more than 5 nukes in which my missle defense units can handle.
However, if they get 6 nukes in the air at any given target, my systems are hard pressed to get them all.
That said, I know that 6+ nukes at any target will get through if I time it so they all fire within 10 seconds of each other. That and if the sub is close enough to the city, I don't even have to shoot more than one nuke.
It makes me wonder if the strategists sitting in bunkers in the Rocky Mountains or in Siberia had pondered on these same issues... How many millions of people are we willing to let die in order to win? Or how many do we need to kill?
Defcon has a neat system of genocide vs survival mode in which one game you try to kill as many wheras the other you try to take as less casualties as possible. I've been doing a few Diplomacy games, but those never work out because someone drops and everyone just hits the AI...
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An earlier work along similar lines: (Score:2)
I always play as the Soviets. Partly because nuking the living crap out of America is enormous fun, but also because I've no idea of Russian geography and wouldn't know what to aim at. Is Skahaterakinskograd a major city? Fuck knows, but if I nuke Chicago I know I'm going to piss someone right off.
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should teach context for safe outlets (Score:2)
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While this is partially/sometimes true for some people, I don't play games like GTA: San Andreas or whatever because I want to kill people but I know its illegal. I play games because they are fun, they are a bit of an escape fr
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Now if you or the other player is a cheater or griefer....
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Oh, the irony!
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Actually I'd have said "games let you me fun things I'd never get to do in real life". Like being a Jedi, or flying a fighter plane, or having sex.
None of these things are necessarily illegal, but I just don't get to do them.
That said why aren't there more sex simulators? (checks to see if "post anonymous" is on)
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I think it is more complicated than than. Running your brain over violent situations repeatedly will strengthen those neuropathways. Even if you do make a conscious distinction between fantasy and rea life, you still have thos
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How would you know this?
What? (Score:1, Troll)
It's the music... (Score:2)
Violence in games taught me... (Score:1)
Personal vs. Abstract Violence (Score:2, Interesting)
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Um, why do we have to experience the same reaction to violence in order to be able to discuss it in videogames? How is this "dangerous"? Wha
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You totally overreacted... probably because you play too many violent video games.
-matthew
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The problem with your superficial examination is that it fails to take into consideration real world experience that denies your thesis. I.E
Of course violence CAN be good (Score:2, Insightful)
War sims, like America's Army, can obviously be put to good use in training and preparing soldiers for urban settings, teaching them to think critically in a "big picture" sense and visualize the entire battlefield, etc...
The more important question is does violence "teach" gamers anything in a real world sense of the issue, and I'd say the answer is a resounding no.
Not that they're incapable of it, but rather that games today aren't developed to teach us life-long moral lesso
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This is a good game. (Score:2)
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There've been games about exchanging nukes before, but none of them were as popular as Defcon, and most of them didn't concentrate solely on nuclear exchange. I can't say if they were worse or better, since, not being a huge fan of Introversion's games, I never played Defcon.
Take Superpower [mobygames.com] for example. Besides conventional warfare, you could also enter nuclear mode in the game, and exchange some nukes with the nastier of your neighbors. If I recall correctly, the game also had a MAD-meter, which would be
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Defcon is *supposed* to make you think (Score:3, Interesting)
The poster writes that when he comes away from a game of Defcon, he feels reflective, kind of sad, about it. I think that's exactly what Introversion Software wants. It's a great game, yeah, but when you play for a while and then notice, for the first time, distorted coughs and crying played randomly as part of the soundtrack, it kind of makes you stop and think. It's like, damn, I did that.
I think most games are not capable of teaching the dark side of violence. I hate to keep going back to it, but GTA is convenient here. You get points for killing. Other, less controversial games, too. Most FPS's, to an extent. Even that one racing game (Burnout?) where one game mode involves causing as much damage as you possibly can. Most games depict a cartoonish, unreal, detached violence.
Not to sound like an advertisement, but I got the same feeling of the violence making you think in Introversion's Darwinia, too. You get attached to the Darwinians, and then you have to send hordes of them to battle the virus infection. And when they do kill viruses, you have to go collect the souls of virus and Darwinian alike.
Personally, I'd like to see more games that have a more realistic depiction of violence.Are you kidding me? (Score:3, Insightful)
No matter how good a driver you think you are, if you drive recklessly fast your car is going to get banged up and will probably end in a fiery crash.
If you push the law, you can run but in the end the police are going to bust you and usually in a particularly violent manner.
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DEFCON is that, but to an extreme [hylobatidae.org] - you are so utterly detached from the millions of people you are killing that some
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Oh, you mean like the people who actually have their fingers on buttons in nuclear silos?
I don't know if I'm just old, or what, but back in the 80s we were all so afraid for our lives because of a nagging sensation (perhaps reinforced by "Dr. Strangelove" and "WarGames") that the people running the show didn't really care whether we died or not. In the event of a war
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Is it just me, or... (Score:1)
I mean it's cool and all, and yes, I've seen the movie "Wargames" and I've expected a game like this to ventually be made...
But I'm seeing it everywhere on the sites I normally frequent, and in casual talk, and I expect it'll be in the news for a bit, and I'm wondering if we're unwittingly participating in some sort of "Snakes on a Plane" type of marketing scheme.
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Not really. It's by a miniscule British games development
And to make it all
Violent games teach that in war you get VERY DEAD (Score:5, Insightful)
I used to be very good, top of the server for ten games streaks. Almost never did I survive every single round. If I can't survive after extensive in-game training with nerfed weapons what makes me think I'd survive a real war where people are really honest trying to make my life stop.
GTA is a tonne of fun, but how much would I pay it if every wrecked car involved watching my character sit in the hospital for two weeks? Only a moron doesn't make that connection.
Killing thousands of zombies in Dead Rising doesn't make me think, 'hey killing people is easy' except to the extent that I think 'hey, if it's this easy for me to kill somebody, then it's that easy for someone to kill me. Shit.'
Personally I'd like violent games to come with the insane warning stickers you see on appliances:
WARNING: If you try this in Real Life you will LOSE LIMBS, ENTER A VEGATIVE STATE or DIE PAINFULLLY.
WARNING: Save game technology DOES NOT EXIST in Real LIfe
WARNING: Acceptable in-game behavior may result in getting A KNEE SLAMMED INTO YOUR CROTCH in Real Life
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I agreed with your post up until that point, for the simple reason that I feel you shouldn't have to. In the past, people have criticised other mediums for being violent, TV being a perfect example. There was one notorious critic here in the UK who claimed that the children's cartoon Tom and Jerry was too violent. The anti-video-game lot is just the latest incarnation of this sort of thing - as my Mum likes t
Re:Violent games teach that in war you get VERY DE (Score:1)
It's easier to kill people in a game than it is in real life, and anyone who isn't a crazed Muslim is more or less afraid to die. If real life was like CS, every SWAT or special forces operation would result in insane amounts of casualties, and the US military death toll in Iraq would be in the tens or hundreds of thousands.
Re:Violent games teach that in war you get VERY DE (Score:1)
so he learned what exactly? (Score:1)
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game1
-noun
1. an amusement or pastime: children's games.
"Useful game" is an oxymoronic idea. Yes, SOME games can teach SOME skills, but saying that a game itself, or worse yet the violence in a game, is useful is like arguing that shooting heroine is good because junkies learn about hypodermics and injections.
Games are GAMES. There are no good games or bad games, just good and bad people.
The most violent game for me... (Score:1)
I'm told that Mario
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- Counter-Strike, at LAN parties
- Rock'n'Roll Racing on SNES or Genesis
- Comet Blasters! - a shareware a friend downloaded from AOL back in '96 or so
- TANKS! - the old-school DOS game
- a game I can't recall which was similar to Comet Blasters! in that it had tanks and helocopters - kinda a vs. mode version of "Jackal" for the NES, if you remember that one.
- Rampage! for the NES
I should note that these were also some of my favo
The Godfather - Violence has Consequences (Score:2)
While it is an open world game in the GTA style, consequences can be much more serious than getting chased by police. There are multiple rivals gangs, and taking back Corleone turf means taking it away from them. There are several ways to do this, but some of them require violence (it is The Godfather, after all).
If you anger a gang enough, they'll start a mob war, and all hell breaks lose as your family an
death / resurrection lessons (Score:2)
* Don't run from the cops. You'll probably get killed.
* Don't get involved in drugs, violence, gangs, etc. You'll probably get killed.
* If you lead 1/10th of the life of this character, you'll probably get killed about 1/10th the number of times you die in the game. Which is about 30. But in real life, you don't auto-rez at a hospital after plummeting off a cliff on a BMX or kamikaze dive-bombing a cessna into a crowded mall.
I strongly think extreme video game violen
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What violent video games have taught me. (Score:2)
And it's also taught me that everything you ever learned about combat in movies is bullshit. But then I kinda knew that already anyway.