Yes, but that’s something much more limited than what you’ve been saying.
You blame pretty much everything that’s wrong with society today on the changes we went through in the 1960s. You have never, AFAICT, provided a balanced outlook noting that some things are better now because of those changes, and some things are worse, but on the whole we’ve seen improvement.
And the kicker is that if you’re going to take the stance that we’re worse off today overall (as well as in numerous specifics) than we were then, then yes, you’ve got to total up the bad as well as the good from each era, from 1955 and 2015 alike.
If you’re willing to concede that overall, life is better now, despite some specific things being worse on account of the counterculture era, that gets you off that hook, IMHO, but it puts more of a burden on you of drawing the cause-and-effect relationship between the counterculture and the specific thing you’re talking about that’s going wrong now.
Sometimes I wonder if Starving Artist grew up in Pleasantville. He’s like the people who didn’t want everything to to start turning colors – he just wanted it to stay black and white.
Yeah, like I said, there are games where rape **appears. **I’ve played GTA V. None of the 3 protagonists ever rape anybody.
The third example is the only one that’s half-legit, as one of the characters does have a side storyline where he picks up random hitch hikers. Then the player has the choice of either driving them where they’re really headed or deliver them to a camp of mountain survivalists. What happens to them there is left unspoken (and there are certainly no rape scenes) but, yeah, it’s implied they get eaten. Not raped, though whether cannibalism is better is left up to the viewer. In either case, it’s absolutely played for sick laughs - a dead baby joke, if you will.
It should be added that of the three protagonists, the character in question is the one extensively portrayed as an irredeemably sick fuck, a constant abusive asshole to everyone he meets and a complete loser ; a guy that you are NOT supposed to like, nevermind emulate. Everything he does or says is an over the top dead baby joke. That’s what makes him transgressively funny ; but I really don’t see how anybody could *relate *to Trevor.
As for the other examples you gave (both GTA onlines and the DayZ one) : developpers are not in control of what **players **will do to other players within their gamespace. In all of your cites, actual humans used in game emotes, bugs and similar jank to pretend like they were raping one another. That’s not what either of the games are meant to be about, how they’re designed to play and they certainly don’t award points for that.
So, care to come up with an actual example of rape giving points, or rape by a game protagonist ?
This has actually been very illuminating. I don’t play modern video games (the last one I played was Raiden when I was a teenager). I bought one of the editions of GTA when it was on clearance out of curiosity, but never bothered to unwrap it and now I don’t know where it is. So I had just assumed there was rape and all kinds of sick shit in at least some games, just like there is in porn (FTR, not the kind I like).
To actually loop back to the topic, what do you think about the link in a lot of people’s minds between first person shooters and RL school shooters?
This is why it’s difficult to have a “debate” or even a dialogue with modern-day “conservatives” in this country. They will never debate you with facts, unless they’re facts that are from dubious sources, or facts taken completely out of context, or facts that purport to support their claims. They will never have a fair discussion with you on any issue - be it guns, economics, or anything else - because they don’t trust facts; they trust their perceptions and their own personal experiences. “I know what I know, and I don’t give a shit what you experts, with your books and your facts, tell me.”
As I’ve said, I know I’ve been among the most vocally cynical about the state of affairs in our society, but it was some kind of refreshing to see the future leaders of a little town called Parkland, Florida stand up and tell people that they’ve had enough of this crap. And the longer that people like Starving Artist insist on viewing the issue of gun rights and gun control their way, and the more that their inaction is perceived as being complicit in the carnage taking place in towns across this country, the more likely they are to completely get shut out of the discussion when a new generation of leadership actually moves from protests and hashtags to legislative action.
Personally, I’ve owned a firearm before - I don’t now but that’s a personal choice. I’ve got nothing against guns or gun owners, and I’ve got no problems with gun owners having activists and lobbyists who speak on their behalf. But the gun lobby has morphed into something entirely different from what it was even 30 years ago. Like a lot of conservative causes, it’s a bad combination of advocating political and even social views that lie on the fringes of society while having a disproportionate amount of money to express these ideas. When that is what becomes the face of the gun rights position, the rest of us can be forgiven for reaching the conclusion that they represent no reasonable position, and that the correct course of action moving forward is to ignore their position altogether. As of now, the gun rights lobby has the money to keep their political proxies employed, but if enough people mobilize against them, and if those who mobilize against them can influence public attitudes toward gun “rights”, then that changes the dynamics completely, because it changes the culture, and the new culture becomes something that groups like the NRA simply aren’t a part of anymore.
It would be wise for the the gun rights lobby to retire the likes of Lapierre and Pratt, and to replace them with people who are more reasonable and willing to help the rest of us take practical steps to reduce gun violence. Otherwise, they’re going to damage their cause, and frankly, everyone’s better off when every side of a political debate has credible representatives to give a debate some healthy balance.
Not really. There can be a disturbing amount of gore ; but ultimately even the most transgressive games are meant for their audience : they’re power fantasies for people who are the heroes of their own story. Also they’re meant to be fun. Disturbing shit isn’t fun, challenging one’s morality is interesting but not fun for most people, etc…
The GTA games in particular are an interesting case, in that while on the surface they look like they’d be huge crime power fantasies ; and they’ve certainly been painted as that in mainstream media and by anti-game moral panic crusaders ; in reality they’re 90% parody and even when they’re not their protagonists are kinda pathetic and/or shallow.
On some level I suppose the developpers want to have their cake and eat it too, in that they try at the same time to tell Scarface-like stories of “crime is sexy even if it doesn’t pay”, that kind of thing ; but at the same time you do drive bys from ice cream trucks or escape a bank heist in a bulldozer at 20 mph with a minigun on top of it and it’s just too ridiculous for anyone to take it seriously or believe “this is an accurate representation of the life of an American criminal”. The violence in that case ceases to be disturbing, because it becomes just cartoonish. The Wire it ain’t :D.
Now, you want an actually transgressive video game, look into Spec Ops : The Line. It’s an FPS which looks like and starts as your run of the mill military shooter ; then midway through starts asking the player “is it *really *OK that you’re enjoying this ? What are you getting out of this ?” in less and less subtle ways. Very, very cool and thought provoking.
But not the typical idea of fun :o
I think it’s on par with the great minds of yesteryear ascribing what they perceived as societal ills to jazz, cubism, rock’n roll, hip hop, tabletop RPGs, comic books or Jimmy Dean’s Rebel Without A Cause.
It’s equally circular : yes, you will very likely find that 99% of teenage school shooters played a lot of FPS games - because 99% of teenage kids period play a lot of FPS games. I played them extensively ; most of my friends did too. I still play some. Same goes for street gangsters listening to a lot of gangsta rap - yeah, so do all the other kids in the neighbourhood. And the 40s rapist listened to Elvis ; and the guys who broke all the Hermes’ dicks in Athens in 415 BC were probably into Eschylus. Wouldn’t have happened if they’d watched theatre plays with ONE actor like we did in the good ol’ days, dadgummit !
I’m not going to say that art forms or the messages that are woven into them have no societal effect whatsoever (although I do think that it’s also a bit circular - art influences its environment but it is also an expression thereof ; so which comes first ?) ; but I don’t believe that whatever dis-sensitizing to violence or gore or casual misogyny can be quantified in the wake of modern games plays more than an infinitesimal part in a given individual’s character or decisions. And I really, but **really **don’t buy any of the “blurring of virtual and reality” bullshit (to say nothing of the “kids playing FPSs are killers in training” bullshit - “shooting” in a game with a gamepad and shooting an actual rifle are completely different sensory experiences).
IOW, I think the people who do rape IRL, who shoot crowds, who plow cars into civilians and so on are broken people, and they were broken long before they picked up a gamepad. At worst games/movies/music might act as a prism, or an echo chamber for their intrinsic broken-ness ; but by that same token Manson heard racial war messages in Helter fucking Skelter. Broken people are going to be broken, no matter what.
I also think that the fact that they were able to get their hands on guns is a more immediate problem to solve, and a more immediate enabler of their rampages, than whatever media they chose to consume.
And, you know, when all is said and done, I don’t really picture the Las Vegas redneck as a big GTA guy ;).
It was bullshit back then too. I remember. Being born in 1953, I lived through that whole period too. Besides, nobody gave a fuck about Muscogee, or what some ex-convict said just to make money (Merle Haggard - a thief and jail bird who had no damn right to preach at anybody).
The rest of us laughed at the self righteous hypocrisy.
Well, in Crusader Kings 2, any ruling monarch who isn’t a Christian can force any woman in their court to be a concubine as long as they aren’t married. If you have the Monks and Mystics DLC and are playing as a Satanist character, you can kidnap women and put them into your prison and then force them into concubinage.
Well, yeah, but that’s just the dynamic of arranged marriages + polygyny. I’m not super hot on my Muslim history ; but I’d expect every two bit dynasty would just jump at the idea of foisting one of their daughters on the sultan’s harem on the off chance that their blood becomes the next sultan, or just to get closer access to his inner circle.
It’s pretty shitty for the woman, but then by that token every noblewoman in history (Muslim or not) was a victim of rape, since they were all set with arranged marriages they had little to no say in.
In any event, since all of this is text-based ; it’s not exactly the kind of sick, visceral thrill SA and his goon are talking about, I don’t think. Plus I mean it’s a given that people who actually enjoy Paradox games are deeply disturbed weirdoes (I kid, I kid. I never really got into them - I should be all over them given my gaming tastes, and tried them all at one point or another, but they just never click for me for some reason)
Now that I think about it, Crusader Kings 2 actually allows Christian monarchs to force women into concubinage, so long as they’re a tribal ruler and not a feudal lord.
Here’s something interesting about the shooter’s mother. After his father died in 2004, his mother filed and won a malpractice judgment - and all the money was placed into a trust fund for the boys; apparently Nikolas could get at least some of the money at age 22, and presumably Zachary as well, about $175,000 at the time. The bizarre thing is that the attorney recommended that his mother not get anything, the only time he’d ever done anything like that.
(I kid, I kid. I never really got into them - I should be all over them given my gaming tastes, and tried them all at one point or another, but they just never click for me for some reason)