The entire “Video Games Create Violent Kids” hysteria is thoroughly overrated. Hundreds of millions of kids have played video games (including, let’s face it, Mortal Kombat) and of those millions, only a few have shot up their high school or murdered their younger siblings. And who’s to say they wouldn’t have done that anyway?
It’s a fair cop. 
They’re fine. In my oldest kid’s 6th-grade class more kids play multiplayer games (Minecraft is huge) than not. If you watch them interacting in person they look like any other group of 12-year-old kids in pretty much the history of humanity. They crack stupid jokes, they run around, they make fun of each other, etc., etc.
The biggest difference may be that they don’t draw the same bright line of distinction between “socializing in person” and “socializing online” as we do. If you talk to your friend at school and you talk to your friend on Minecraft, is there a big difference there? People of my generation would probably feel there is. People of my son’s generation don’t seem to. I don’t really have a problem with it.
Interestingly, there’s a “class” of gamers that “real” gamers often look down on: “Bro-gamers”. A bro-gamer is essentially a loud jock type who plays games and the two games most often associated with them are the Madden football games and Call of Duty, a military first-person shooter. Both Madden & Call of Duty are usually played multiplayer but no one worries that the bro-gamer is a socially awkward misfit.
I think that socially awkward people may gravitate towards video games because it’s a safe outlet both for entertainment and socialization. I don’t think that playing these games is necessarily a catalyst for becoming a socially awkward person.
I don’t mean to disparage anyone with the bro-gamers remark (I’m too old to care what people play, much less look down on them for it) but it’s an interesting evolution in gaming and how broad it is across younger people. Back in the day, your stereotypical jock types might slap the books out of some guys hands, call him names and then laugh at him for playing video games. Now they’d slap the books out of his hands, call him a dork and then go home to play Madden and call each other cock-mouths over their headsets.
I agree. When I was a kid, people all of a sudden started worrying about cartoons and the impact they would have on us sponge-brained kids. It’s funny, but I never thought that jumping from a cliff would be something I could survive (Coyote and Road Runner), nor did I think repeated blasts to the face with a shotgun (Elmer Fudd and Daffy, for example) would be something that I could do to my brother and not kill him. So, Bugs Bunny cartoons started to disappear from my Saturday morning programming.
Adults are idiots. Kids are a lot smarter than that.
And as you said, even if a kid DID kill another, who’s to say they needed the video game or cartoon or whatever to jump start the process?
This is good to know. And you are right. The distinction between the two is probably much more visible for us adults than it is for kids who have grown up with the on-line social networks. I do see a difference, but for two kids playing mindcraft, perhaps there is no real difference at all.
This is interesting. I never heard of the Bro-gamers. I like that the “real” gamers look down on the “Bro-gamers”. It’s the reverse of the high school hallways, gym classes and cafeteria environments.
Gaming has fragmented into tons of cliques. JRPG fans are notorious for making fun of pretty much everyone who plays First Person Shooters (the feeling is generally reciprocated by hardcore FPS fans). Even within the JRPG fandom there’s a lot of mutual animosity between fans of individual series.
There’s also a class of gamer that’s not exactly the bro-dude gamer, but are disparaged by roughly the equivalent of gamer-hipsters. The gamer-hipsters (this is a term I just made up) tend to hate popular games, and rag on League of Legends, DOTA, and the people who play them. They usually can be found ragging on most popular AAA titles too.
You’ll usually find some commonalities. There are people who really hate Half-Life 2, to be sure, but it’s like people who really hate The Beatles. You don’t find many of them. Gaming definitely does have cliques though. I never really gave much of a crap, I think “I” (in the sense of “my interests”) have been hated on by pretty much every fandom of every game I like at some point. I like JRPGs and WRPGs and FPS games and Kart Racing games and rhythm games, I like platformers and so on. I have my individual tastes to be sure – I don’t like realistic racers, I prefer traditional shooters to modern military shooters, etc, but there’s definitely a lot of hate between hardcore genre fans.
I used to work with a guy like this, who was into obscure JRPGs and indie games. Which was fine, but he never really understood the rest of us weren’t into those sort of games so we had this bizarre situation where we had a store full of computer gamers who couldn’t talk about their hobby with everyone else there.
Hm, I actually get along with most gamers I run into - though I am an oddity, only about 5% of the EVE Online players are female, most females tend to prefer non-sandbox games, they want structure. I went on a quest with my gaming buddy before we settled on EVE where we tried a whole bunch of different games, and I was very actively closed beta testing games for friends in the industry and I think we went through all of the Korean offerings, most of the Japanese offerings and the Euro/US offerings. I determined that I really did not like the anime/cartoony oriental MMOs, I am not that girly [and yes I do know that a lot of guys play them] So GPotato is not for me 
I was in the test bunch for Aion through most of the fine tuning but dropped it before it went live as it just didn’t work for me though it is a good game. Did World of Tanks, Minecraft, not to our taste either. Went back and tried Everquest 1 about 2 years back and just really really hated the updates and the exploded moon, went back and tried World of Warcraft after the world broke up, and really didnt’ like that either. You just really can’t go back again after a break when they have done some sort of world shattering changes.
So, I play EVE Online, LOTRO, Guild Wars 2 - and a few closed betas if someone I value asks me to give something a shot and I feel up to it. I rarely dis anybody for their gaming choices, if I dis someone it is because they are acting like a griefer. As I tell my roomie [and believe me, she drives me freaking nuts with her play style] different strokes - she plays The West and Travian.
[and my absolute favorite game was closed down last year, Glitch. I just found out that Children of Ur is trying to recreate the game with the released files. I really hope they will succeed!]
Don’t forget the giant console/PC schism.
“Dudebro” was actually the word I was looking for when I was saying “Bro-gamers”. I also forgot about the obsession with Halo, although I think Call of Duty has picked up most of the slack from the gaps in new Halo releases.
And yeah about the Hipster-Retro gamers. No game can be good unless it looks like it was crapped out by a VIC-20 with food poisoning and, if you object to it, you’re everything wrong with the game industry because you obviously care more about graphics than game play. Sort of in the same genre are the 2Deep4U types who obsess over “games” that barely feature any game play and instead have you slowly experiencing your dog dying or sifting through a junk drawer to slowly piece together the tale of a dream you had when you were eight.
All are things taken to extremes though. Just because someone played and liked a game doesn’t mean they’re a stereotype.
I have never actually met these hipster-gamers, or as I assumed they would be called Indie-gamers, but I have seen signs on Steam of GOG that suggested to me there must be such a niche. I’m glad to know they exist to create a market for small game companies. There seems to be a lot of stuff on Steam that would not have seen the light of day if there hadn’t been some producers freed from the pressure to crank out triple-A blandness.
Unfortunately, by pattern detection software suggested that these indie gamers would turn out to be stuck up assholes about it. I have yet to meet them, possibly because I’m not living on a college campus such as where I heard all that crapola from the indie music people, but I don’t look forward to it.
Yeah, but “indie” gets muddled by companies like Valve, Paradox (Crusader Kings II) and CD Projekt Red (Witcher series). The hipster types don’t want games with Witcher-style graphics and game play. They want stuff that looks like VVVVVVVV, McPixel or Sword & Sworcery.
More to it, if you say you DIDN’T get into VVVVVV in part due to the graphics, it’s because you’re an idiot who needs to suckle at EA’s teat for crap AAA garbage games.
I didn’t get into it because I didn’t want to keep playing in the hopes that it got more interesting. Interesting mechanic though. Same goes for And Yet It Moves. Humble (Indie) Bundle is great. Although yeah sometimes the definition of “indie” is iffy. Like Brütal Legend: not a huge developer, but it had a budget.
Geeks are often just as cliquish and exclusionary as the cool kids. Hell, they can be far, far worse.
I… think I’m one of these. Well, not exactly what people are describing, but I… don’t like… the “big games” that tend to sell millions of copies over here. I really don’t care very much for first person shooters (I couldn’t even be bothered to finish Bioshock Infinite, which felt like an interesting story with a boring as hell game attached.), dislike sports games, and even the various 3rd person action titles that tend to get a lot of acclaim (The Batman Arkham series is one that leaps to mind) don’t really draw me in. Heck, I haven’t even bothered with Civilization. (Though I enjoyed the heck out of Sword of the Stars, though I gather it’s a bit unpopular compared to other entries in the space 4X genre.) Oh, and I’ve never actually tried League of Legends or DOTA2.
I spend a lot of time playing 2D fighting games (already not the biggest market, and for whatever reasons, my game of choice is comparatively obscure compared to the ‘big names’ of Street Fighter and Marvel vs Capcom), a fair amount playing JRPGs (except Final Fantasy) and a pretty good chunk of time playing random indie games (Though here I break the stereotype in that I really kinda -hate- games with crappy pixel art. I LOVE 2D art, but I have high demands of it in many ways. I LOVED Aquaria, and I deeply enjoy FTL, which isn’t exactly a paragon of graphics, but stuff like VVVVV or Thomas Was Alone are, I confess, an IMMEDIATE turnoff.) of obscure stuff from Japan. I don’t do this on purpose - though I do believe that I generally don’t like the art stylings employed in most AAA Western games - it’s just how it shakes out.
I try not to rail against people who do like more “mainstream” things, though sometimes I get frustrated by the fact that “nobody” likes the games I do, because I think they’re all well crafted, interesting experiences that have a lot to offer people, compared to, say, shooting a bunch of guys again. Though on the flipside, I have tons of respect for people who enjoy… well, any kind of skill-based multiplayer game. In THAT regard, I just sortof feel like I don’t have time to try to get to a level of competence that would make the games fun for me - playing one 2D fighter heavily and a couple at the dabbling level pretty consumes any time I have for that.
Cracked.com had a pretty good article on the subject yesterday.
The Mass Effect/Newtown controversy was a new one to me. Some enormously stupid people involved in that one.
