Comment Of course video games ruin people... (Score 1) 587
...and thus destroy society. The end of the world is coming, thanks to violence in video games, just as it came thanks to rap, heavy metal, rock & roll, various forms of art, movies, tv, radio, and virtually any technological innovation over the past 100 years. I bet that when people first figured out how to make bronze they were like "the world is ending, things made of bronze will completely replace everything made of copper, the copper industry will go out of business, people will lose their jobs and starve, and society will be destroyed." (Or something like that, you get the point.)
You know, I don't have any problem with saying that violent video games desensitize people (not just kids) to violence and that may have (some) social impact. In the same way that Jackie Chan movies glorify martial arts and Rage Against the Machine songs can incite anger and discontent. What I (primarily) object to is a complete lack of understanding of the scale and context of the impact. If there was reasoned discourse in this country, I would expect that people would say "well, how Much impact does a particular type of simulation have?" and the result of such discussions would result in some manner of reasoned rating system which, oh wait, we have (the VALUE of said rating system notwithstanding, especially in places like Australia). But despite the at least reasonable attempt at a rating system, which makes sense, we do NOT have reasoned discourse in this country, and the result of this (and every single study, "study", and outright rant before and after it) is OH MY GOD SAVE THE CHILDRENS.
As a result, the world we live in, at least in the mainstream media, promotes that if your child plays video games, he/she/other will become a serial killer. Period, end of sentence. And we don't want that. What we want is for our children to grow up into responsible, socially conscious adults, who would never hurt anyone else, and would, for example, donate millions of dollars for buying toys for sick children on a yearly basis (http://www.childsplaycharity.org/) or disgrace and disbar bombastic lawyers who make fantastic claims without evidence and violate court orders and judicial procedures to back up the false claims (http://kotaku.com/5054772/jack-thompson-disbarred). That sounds like a reasonable thing to want from our current (and future) generations.
Now, again, I don't disagree that someone who had played through the latest Doom/Quake/Unreal/Modern Warfare clone is going to have some differences in they way they perceive violence vs someone who never consumed ANY VIOLENT MEDIA EVER (also known as an embryo), and I also admit that this particular article does not seem to want to raise the panic flag so much as say "there is some impact, how much we can't exactly calculate, but we should account for it in some way". And I think most people on this site will agree with that statement-the problem is agreeing with what should be done. (My impression is that) most people who have been exposed to significant amounts of video games believe that control should be imposed on the parental level. Whether that's right or wrong, I don't know, but what I do know is this-if we were to have reasoned discourse on this, things would be better. Unfortunately, that's really unrealistic these days.