Shaking head @ Lindens - Group Management

Brenda WHO?

So, what, did she get her heart pulled out? Head and spine pulled off?

Hmh... stories like that are, oh, about 15 years old. Shit's always been blamed on games just 'cause nobody wants to take any responsibility. Hell, I'd bet you still are adamant the Columbine shooters were reenacting Doom, too, right?

Puh-lease. Said they were wrestling... so what, maybe the WWE might be involved too? Hell, I'll be more inclined to believe MK had anything to do with someone's death when said killing involves something a little more unique to the series. Maybe if you tried a little skill called independent thinking, you'd come to the same conclusion instead of bleating out exactly what CNN told you to feel.

Shame on the Communist News Network for trying to feed Jack(ass) Thompson....

Here you go Tiberious go read it for yourself then you decide. It just happened yesterday!!!!

http://www6.comcast.net/news/articles/national/2007/12/20/Mortal.Kombat.Death/?cvqh=itn_mortalcombatdeath

Except I -did- read it. How else do you think I knew to post that the article said 'one of them said they were wrestling'?

Do you just not think before you post?

I am 46 years old. When I was a little girl, we played cowboys and indians, and "army". We could have gotten hurt doing some of this, even killed. Who would you have blamed then?

My father had to have a finger amputated when he was young because one of his siblings got a little too realistic when playing "pioneer" with a real axe. Who are you going to blame for that?

Video games are not to blame for kids hurting themselves with violence. They have been doing that since humans were around. Saying something should be banned because it gives kids "violent ideas" is just rediuclous, IMO.

Maybe, maybe not. Seriously. It's an empirical question, really, whether the human organism is immune to constant exposure to intense simulated violence, either passive (e.g., movies and TV) or immersive (e.g., video games). And if you read the relevant psych literature, you don't come away with a very confident feeling either way; that's what I was trying to say a few posts back: the results just aren't that clear cut. One can't help but suspect that as technology advances and virtual environments more immersively imitate real experience, some equivalent to PTSD (for example) might obtain.

I'm pretty sure that the moral equivalent of "cowboys and indians" was played by homo habilis on the veldt; but they didn't have Wii controllers and retinal projection displays with realistic blood and maiming in games that last for hours uninterrupted, so who really knows if we're up to that?

Nonetheless, I find it a pretty far stretch to imagine that kiddie pixel sex is some kind of "gateway drug" for paedophilia--and an even further stretch to imagine that banning it from public knowledge in SL will have any impact at all on incidence of related RL offenses.

To the general, non-SL public, though, thinking SL to be "that place for paedophiles" wouldn't be good for SL users in general.

Of course honey, it was just a different link, maybe a different insite into it. The thing has been blasted all over the news. I wonder where they got the idea to link the two? Maybe from the kids that killed the girl? I do lay a lot of blame on the parents too not just the game.

Most "relevant" (to the subject of "video game violence" affecting kids) psych literature is garbage, often generated from very biased and unscientific methods, because it is very hard to perform "empirical" experiments on live humans of the appropriate age group(s), and it is usually done to fit someone's agenda as a result.

As Serenella stated, humans have been doing this since time immemorial. The only blame lies with the kids and their Elders. That includes the parents and extended family, and anyone else who comes to care for the offspring in question.

We live in a violent world. From the early hunter-gatherer days to today's concrete jungle, we have had a steady diet of violence throughout our lives. I would even argue that the level of continuous exposure to violence in RL has actually gone WAY down since before the stone age. We don't HAVE to be violent to survive anymore. However, that capacity for violence is still present in our genes and, thus, our psyche, as a legacy of those times of yore.

As a result, we have to find ways to cope with and channel our basic nature into things other than RL violence. In the case of these kids, they weren't properly conditioned in this regard, so they did what came natural without the necessary inhibitory thought processes to live in today's society. It wouldn't have mattered if it was a video game, a book, a movie, or something out of the deepest recesses of their imagination; they were ill-prepared to cope with the urge to take play to the next level, acting out some form of violence in RL.

I would also charge the media with selective reporting and sensationalism. How many cases of child violence do they NOT run stories about, simply because it isn't sensational (ie, tied with exposure to violent media)? If you want to know the REAL statistics, you're gonna have to spend some time in the municipal record and tally them yourself. The mAss Media isn't going to do it; that's too much work, and the facts don't sell copy or ad space.

So, ban all the video games, books, movies, whatever you want. It won't change the statistics of violence one whit, because the underlying cause is NOT being addressed: Parents simply are not doing their job.

The articles in the two links are identical, verbatim copies of one another, probably from a press wire service.



I don't blame "things". "Things" don't kill people; people kill people. "Things" don't force people to expose themselves to them. I lay ALL the blame on the parents AND the kids themselves, because they have a brain, and are the originators of all actions, direct and indirect, that led to this result.

People need to take responsibility for their actions and stop looking to scapegoat that responsibility onto "things".