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Pop Culture
Oct 13, 2008, 08:16AM

Fun Isn't the Point

A look into the moralism found (or not found) in video games.

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From Manhunt 2

From the article:

The most controversial games tend to come from within the indie developer community, where you don't have to worry about funding or even about turning a profit. Here you can find all manner of subject matter, from a virtual torture simulator, to a game in which players step into the role of a terrorist in an attempt to assassinate the president. But the most infamous indie game has to be Super Columbine Massacre RPG!. Created by film student Danny Ledonne and released in 2005, the game chronicles the last day in the lives of the shooters responsible for the Columbine High School Massacre in 1999. The game was not the first project to look at the Columbine tragedy. Michael Moore's 2002 documentary "Bowling For Columbine" won numerous awards, while the novel "Hey Nostradamus!" by Douglas Coupland used the event as inspiration for a fictional school shooting in the suburbs of Vancouver, which served as the catalyst for an exploration of the effects of tragedy spanning decades.

As you can see, there's some pretty scary stuff out there. And it's just the beginning.

Discussion
  • I find this kind of alarmist crap so incredibly stupid, just as I found it offensive when H. Clinton and that loathsome little turd Lieberman wasted the US Congress' time investigating or decrying violent video games. A poorly-programmed Flash torture simulator is not going to destroy America's moral tissue, we have the executive branch to do that. Alarm over violent media corrupting our youth distracts from the very non-virtual violence which pervades our foreign policy, and the structural violence which almost universally afflicts poor people (who don't own video game consoles or download smirky, pretentious "shocking" video games).

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  • Well said, asamsky. If anything people should be thanking the video game development community because they now have an out when it comes time to blame someone for violence in America as well as the the world. I think since video games haven't been around as long as books or film it is easy for someone to be opinionated on them being a reflection of reality.

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