Welcome to my blog about, at least mostly, games. Here you can find reviews, impressions, pictures and things that I think are interesting enough to write about. If you want me to speak up on something, then write it to me. Want to discuss something in a post then write it in the comments. Hope it will be good reading for you.

fredag 16 september 2011

Gaming makes you violent! Right?

Gaming makes you violent, a statement that brings up anger and hate towards conservatism in many gamers, ironically enough. But are they that far off? I will once again start my brain to explore this statement and finally come to a conclusion to the question, does gaming make you violent?

First of all, why would gaming make you violent? The most obvious answer to that would be, if you see violence, you do violence, therefore conducting violence in a video game would make you prone to do the same in the real world. This would be quite true if it wasn't for a couple of things, that humans can see that there is a difference from the real world and the gaming world, and that we have something called a conscience. We don't do thing that would hurt people for real, because it's okay in the gaming world.

But most children doesn't have a conscience the same way that adults have. Some doesn't see their selfish acts until they're 12-13 years old. But there is, ladies and gentlemen, believe it or not, a reason why most violent games are not supposed to be played by children under the age recommended on the cover. I believe that allowing a child of ten or twelve, or even older, play games like Grand Theft Auto or Gears of War, could be bad for them. I'm not saying that they will grow up to invent chainsaw machine-guns and go around shooting people, but I'm saying that they might grow up to think that violence born from hate is justified. If you hate someone enough, you are allowed to smack them in the face. I don't think that is a healthy attitude. Violence born from love, you love someone so much that you can't stand to see them beaten up, so you use violence not more than necessary, to get the beater away. To take someones life is never okay, but I'm getting of topic.

There is a saying that goes, that which your heart is filled with, comes out your mouth. If you love games, that you're going to talk a lot about games with your friends, same with everything, films, music, football or horses. if you are fed with violence all the time, you are going to be jaded from violence, the same way that if you eat raw fish all the time, you don't find it as disgusting as someone who has never done it, the same way that someone seeing blood at a hospital all the time is used to it, while one who doesn't might be chocked by it.

Recently, founder of id Software and creator of Doom and Quake, John Carmack, said that gaming does not make you violent, his evidence were that if you go to a gamers-convention, you are less likely to get beaten up than at a collage campus. He said that gaming rather reduces violent behavior. This is, as the statement gaming makes you violent, not entirely true. But there is some truth to it. I can only take myself as an example. When I was ten to twelve, I got bullied a lot, because I was very rewarding to bully, I got very angry and often hit people I couldn't handle. When I was in seventh grade I started to walk home from school after a day where I was angry and go and play super smash bros. I took out my aggression on the figures and my anger, not on my classmates that had hurt me. I started calm down, and is a calm person. Gaming helped me get my anger out. Then, if you do like I did, but start picturing your classmates as the ones you're beating up, that might actually fuel your anger, so there is always a difference in how you do things.

Now, nothing is set in stone, just because you shoot people in the face in halo, does it not mean that you are more likely to shoot people in the face for real, but somewhere we need to understand that what you see and experience affects you. I mean, how many of you weren't just a little hungry to start a underground fight club, where people could beat each other for fun, no hard feelings, when you saw Fight Club? Gaming in itself doesn't make you violence. It might help someone violent to become not so violent. It might help it to become more violent. But nothing of this can be blamed on games. Games are fun. Violent games are really fun. but as with everything else, don't let it take over your life. I wouldn't want to see you on the news.