DrEvil wrote:FourthBase wrote:DrEvil wrote: ...stuff...
Edit: Gaming. Doesn't. Turn. People. Into. Monsters.
No. One. Is. Saying. That.
Gaming doesn't turn people into monsters. Correct.
Very, very, very few people are predisposed to ever be able to become monsters, anyway.
Of those very, very, very few -- it is not possible that violent pop culture could be a trigger, inspiration?
Of course, but anyone capable of doing something like this can be triggered by anything. A comic book, a movie, a TV-show, a game, the wrong comment at the wrong time. Pretty much anything.
There's nothing especially immersive about a game, especially a FPS or over-the-shoulder sandbox? Yes, anything can be a trigger. But some more likely to trigger more rare wannabes than others, perhaps? If you are in charge of minding a classroom of highly-combustible young sociopaths and were instructed to appease them with pop culture, would you feel more comfortable having them play hours of GTA in a non-mission all-rampage way, or would you feel more comfortable having them watch NCIS? You have no choice but to offer them one form of violence-based entertainment in one medium. Oh, and you don't know which one, but one of them lives in a home with loosely-stored firearms.
The media, and a lot of people, blame games, simply because they don't have a clue. They don't play games, they don't care about games and they don't understand games (Fun fact: five years ago the average gamer was a woman in her thirties). They're easy targets. Just like Dungeons & Dragons in its time, and rock music before that.
True, but when do reporters have a clue about anything? Your fun fact cannot possibly apply to FPS or violent sandboxes. The average for those games seems to be a 12-year-old boy who sounds like he's 7, virtually putting a bullet in your virtual chest and ridiculing you for your gaming incompetence in a streak of obscenities that would make George Carlin blush. Games today are a qualitatively different experience than mere music or dice RPGs or even platform 2D games.
And about CoD as "training" - if you want to train for military style action you do not play Call of Duty. That's like trying to learn real military tactics by watching a Michael Bay movie.
There's plenty of actual combat sims out there, like Arma 2 (which runs on the same engine as an actual simulator used by armed forces), or America's Army - made by the US military for your tax dollars as a recruitment tool. At least it's free to play.
CoD and such won't train you to be a soldier, but will it teach you very general rules of thumb and instill some basic instincts? Yeah, of course. Reload. Find cover. Aim for the vitals. Be quick on the draw. Stalk your prey unnoticed. Run, stop, survey, crouch, hide, run. Double-tap. Reload! No mercy. Die, n00b, lol. Fire in bursts to maintain aim. Lure. Hide. Strike. Reload. Etc.
Oh, and you don't lose points in games like Call of Duty. As elfismiles said, you can get points for kill-assists and stuff like that, but that comes in addition to other points, not at their expense.
Yeah, I haven't played all the modes, but none I'd played involved that point-stealing mechanism.
Maybe the one where you capture the floating dog tags, sort of? Not really though.
There are some games where you can lose a lot if you screw up, like Eve Online or DayZ (a zombie survival mod for Arma2), but they're more niche, and usually have a more mature player-base (but not necessarily any nicer).
If you want truly psychotic players you should try League of Legends
FourthBase wrote:Let's get real here, let's cut the shit and not just be gamer versions of NRA rednecks.
"Another shooting, hmmpph, figures...They're comin' fir our games!"
You're right, I do tend to have a knee-jerk reaction to people bashing games, but I'm just so sick of them being blamed every time. You would think that most people realize that actual guns do more damage than virtual ones.
Yes, you would think. But when a black pot is calling a grey kettle black, the kettle is still grey.
Gun nuts choose games as a scapegoat for a reason, because it's not entirely inaccurate.
If there were no games, yes, they'd be blaming death metal and horror movies.
And even that may not be entirely inaccurate.
