Pwn Them Softly?

Last night, in a rather off beat conversation with my wife, I brought up upcoming game, Left4Dead.

Megan is not, not, not interested in video games.

Although I wish I had avoided the whole subject, it did get my mind going.  And it ended up being a worthwhile discussion – at least for my mental obsession.

Meg didn’t get why anyone would want to play a video game where you kill things.  I assume this is most of what she sees me play.   Gears, Halo, Half-Life, Resistance, COD, etc., etc.  In fact, the vast majority of games, movies and even books and television that we watch are focused around the same ideals.  Find whats doing bad things, kill it, arrest it, burn it with fire or exercise the demons from it.  That is pretty much entertainment in a nutshell. Oh, that and the scare factor.

You’d think having it explained in painful detail how horrible it is that people would be entertained by this stuff would turn you off from it.

It doesn’t.

Why?

Well, jesus, it’s being misinterpreted as real.  Thanks to assholes like Jack Thompson, it’s been pushed that the human mind is a god damned Simon Says game that just repeats back anything that it sees.

I believe that it is human nature to play games.  To strive to be a part of something much bigger then themselves.   Feeling something that is unusual, experiencing something so far out there (aliens, shock-horror, fantasy) – it’s just an escape.  A momentary respite from the mundane.

Why it is that fake killing and the like are where we turn to for satisfaction I haven’t fully wrapped my mind around.

There is most certainly a darker side to human nature.  Every civilization was founded on the blood and guts of it’s previous occupier.  Human history is filled with some of the most terrible things you could imagine.  Man has never been too kind to man.

Today, this may not be as evident, but it only takes a quick look to see that part of man still in full force.

What I’m getting at is that it is a part of human nature.  And taking our frustration on a video game by pwning for a few hours, sure as hell beats alternatives.

Look, this whole idea has already been statistically pwned.  Stats show that kids playing violent video games are not influenced the way people think they are.

In fact, IQs on gamers have been shown to be higher on average then those who shun them.

People always fall back on the Columbine Shooting.  No one mentions their dipshit parents.  We just hear about Doom or Marilyn Manson being the cause.  They say Doom because of how they executed the killings.  With guns.  That’s like saying that watching cooking shows is bad because someone kills a guy with a kitchen knife.

The way to settle this is simple.  They say these kinds of things didn’t happen before TV and video games.

WRONG!

1927, Bath School Disaster.  Andrew Kehoe blew up a whole god damned school.  Then, while rescue workers were digging through the wreckage, he drove up in a truck and detonated a shrapnel filled bomb, killing himself and many others.  The only game available was fucking stick ball. The greatest school killing in the history of the world!  45 DEAD and 50 injured.  How the hell can you explain that.  Too much crazy jazz music in his youth?

No, he was fucking nuts.  There are always crazy people.  It hasn’t gotten any worse as of late.

Take the V-Tech Massacre.  Horrible, horrible tragedy.  32 dead.  The press leaps all over this guy to find out what video game he thought he was playing.  Oh, oh, oh wait!  He hates video games.  He played Sonic The Hedgehog when he was a kid.  Too bad for that electrified story.

What I realized with Megan is that she just gets the pictures from what shows on the TV.  I usually play with head phones and she misses out on the whole back story and problem solving aspect.  She just gets the bloods carcasses being tossed around the screen.

In competitive mutliplayer, there is so much going on that you don’t have time to get influenced.  The timing of everything you do has to be correct.  There are obstacles to overcome that require teamwork, cooperation and efficiency.  In newer games (R2, COD:WAW, Gears2) healing teammates becomes a huge part of the game (compassion anyone?).

And these are not just AI spawned bots your working against.  Another dude, in another state is in there with you.  It’s a battle of wits and reflexes.  Sure it’s all on a TV, and there’s no physical interaction.  So what, imagine how much of a mess it would make if you had to go act this stuff out.

Okay, okay, okay.

After going through this with Megan, she sort of got what I was saying.

Then she said “I still don’t understand why though.”.

I finally fell back on my favorite:

“I just want to be ready for the zombie apocalypse.”

*facepalm*

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