http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23204875/ Everybody's favourite sensationalist is back. That's right, as many now come to hold inevitable, Jack has weighed in with his misguided, sensationalist and naive arguments in relation to the latest shooting in the US. In the article above he is quoted as comparing videogames to killing simulators. He is directly blaming videogames for causing this shooting, having no background information at all. This same logic leads me to conclude that flight schools are responsible for 9/11. Obviously light instructors and flight school as killing people and pose a risk to society. I think we should ban them, or at least heavily regulate them so as the largest planes we are allowed to operate are single engine Cessna's. Now perhaps Jack, you could look at the underlying issues at hand here? How about media sensationalisation of death and suicide? What more public and devastating way to deal a blow to those you love? What better way to make your name remembered for years to come? How else can you say 'I told you I was depressed?'. The real issues at hand here are the glorification of death and the severe lack of mental health care in many countries. 'Trendy' fashion and social statements such as the Emo movement provide an easy way for truly troubled children to blend in and disappear. An overall general apathy towards mental illness and the stigma of 'weakness' attached to it mean those who truly need help are overlooked, appearing to just be 'unhappy' or 'acting emo'. A total lack of support from many different avenues of support lead people to do drastic things, not just mass murder suicides but things like arson suicides and public suicides. School shootings are not a discreet issue to be dealt with but an entire culture of depression and hopelessness incorporating many other types of extreme behavior. And now, the heart of the debate, do video games kill people? Of course not, how can they? How are they even simulators? The great majority of shooter games are based on either self defence or killing armed opponents, not unarmed, unsuspecting civilian targets. How is hitting the 'r' key training to reload a weapon? I daresay there are many people who wouldn't have a clue how to operate a weapon. Yet we have armed forces in most countries who are trained and have access to high powered automatic weapons. Why do we not see ex-soldiers on the news after they've killed scores of people in a mass shooting? Because having knowledge of guns and how to kill a person is not a driving factor to commit murder. The decision must be made consciously by those people considering such acts and the thought process required is a desperate one or a disfucntional one, not one of simple morbid curiosity. Sorry for that little rant, but perhaps some good discussion can come of it. It's a subject close to me. I spent two good years of my highschool years depressed. I never got help until about 18 months into that. My partner has only just started seeing a psychologist because she didn't want to seem 'weak' in front of her Army colleagues. I had a friend (not that close, but I knew her well) who committed suicide because noone did anything for her. She displayed outward signs of depression and her closest friends contacted the school councilor and other people but was ignored. She took a bottle of sleeping pills and swam out to sea... I'm a gamer, I was a gamer at the time and I never contemplated shooting other people. I certainly considered taking my own life, but that wasn't on account of any video game. A suicide simulator wouldn't have much replayability would it?
I agree with you. Jack is bent on blaming everything on video games. How can video games be the one single thing in someone's life to cause them to go on a shooting spree? How can you prove it was that and not violent movies or anything else in their life? How come millions of others have played games and will never do anything like this? I've played a ton of games in my life, including tons of first person shooters since back in the Wolfenstein days and I've never gone on a shooting spree...therefore video games aren't the only reason that he went on a spree...eh no point in trying to justify. He is crazy. I guess the problem is wanting to place the blame on an incident like this on just one single thing.
Jack Thompson is a jerk who probably grins from ear to ear every time there's a school shooting. He blames video games within hours of these shootings, even before the identity of the shooter or any background info is known. There were shootings long before video games. Have video games ever inspired a shooting? Probably, but then again, so has classic literature like The Catcher in the Rye and Crime & Punishment. Society will always have a problem with psychotic people responding violently to stimuli that has no effect on sane people.
Depends on the video-games-fans...how they can manage the addiction and the collateral effects of playing the game.
To me, video games are like peanuts. The vast majority of people can handle peanuts just fine, but for a rare few, exposure to them can have deadly consequences.
A long time before video games were blammed for violence and cruel acts, tv was blamed, and before that rock music, and before that masturbation, and before that books, and before that science was blamed, and books, etc etc etc. The fact is a pshyco is a pshyco is a pshyco...if it wasn't video games they were obsessing about it would be a violent book, or movie, or song, etc etc etc. You can't blame games for a damn thing, IT'S A VIDEO GAME!!! Next thing ya know they will blame Stalen's regime on the fact he played "Risk" when he was a kid!
No, I do not think video game cause people to be come killers. when you look at the people have gone on killing sprees they all have multiple other factors that can be looked at to explain why they might have done what they did.
I think blaming video games and movies is not the right thing. It looks like researchers shielding evey killer behind the video game blame game.