News
British Group Calls for Ban on Violent Games
Based on Half-Truths and Gorilla Dust
Norman Wells, director of the UK-based pressure group, Family and Youth Concern, is calling for the banning of all violent games. Citing a US study that claims to show a connection between games with high levels of “blood-spatter” and teenager aggression, Wells stated that “In view of the mounting evidence about the power of violent images to engender violent attitudes and behaviour, it is grossly irresponsible for manufacturers to devise and market violent video games.”
The full article can be found here, but, to be honest, there’s not much more to read that’s worth a good God-damn. The Sunday Mercury, the paper that broke the story, does mention that the comments were made in and about the region called the “Midlands,” a hotbed of British developers like Codemasters, Blitz and Freestyle Games. What it fails to cover, however, is any sort of details in regards to the mentioned studies. Not that the article is biased towards Mr. Wells, but without some kind of validation of the results of these studies, I can’t consider them to be legitimate.
Of course, when it comes to scaring people into a reactionary mob, validity and legitimacy have only ever gotten in the way of foolish panic and scapegoating, so, par for the course, I gusess. We’ll update you further as this story hopefully fizzles and disappears.
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Comments
"It is grossly irresponsible for manufacturers to devise and market violent video games"?
Why not, it is grossly irresponsible for parents to do a shitty job of raising their kids and teaching them the difference between reality and fantasy, as well as failing to let them know that violence is wrong?
Fucking morons.
"What Sarah said" LITERALLY.... people need to stop blaming video games for the problems that they have with their teenagers..... if they're raised correctly...there shouldn't be a problem.
Sure I don't agree with games such as Manhunt...The producer of that game must have a few loose screws.
But yeah, this has been tried so many times before...Kinda like Zellers trying to ban Rockstar games within their chain of stores throughout Canada...but they had no choice but to start selling them because of the overwhelming demand.
So what, they want us to just play bubble pop and tetris? Kinda a leap back in history don't you think? And oh no! We can't play Civilization games because people DIE! That's so violent! How far would they take this if they could ban one form of artistic 'violence'? This is just an ongoing pursuit of one revenue of censorship that has been going on for years. If Bioshock is too violent, what stops Final Fantasy from being violent as well? If parents want something censored, they should do the censoring. The rest of the world isn't going to be any cleaner, but my god these parents look a whole heck of a lot stupider.
I mean, if I were a mom I definitely wouldn't want my 5 yr old kids exposed to the graphic violence I dig into. But that doesn't mean I'd expect everyone else to do the parenting for me.