A lot of them I have not heard of, But GTA and Vice city, I agree that they are very bad influinces on children. Shooters in themselves are one thing, but portaying the misstretment of women, murder of said women and asalt on police officers is going too far in a game. All this reminds me of an article a few years ago of a young boy writing a game maker that he was mad at them. He had a game 'name not remembered" that he liked and his mom let him play. He finally got to a very high level of points and a womans head appered above a wall and he could shoot the wall and there was the woman in all her animated naked glory. He wanted teh company to take it out so he could keep playing the game. *Gets off soap box , picks it up and exits, stage left*

Finalday

Hinneh / I / Bo / Mahar... /Keith Green\ (1953-1983)

lol finalday

Wolfy when he's happy...........................wolfy when he's mad

GTA controversial?? I am guessing you never had the pleasure of playing Postal 2.
Now that's Controverse in its purest form!!

__________________________________________________________
Oh, dear, How sad, Never mind!!-Battery Sergeant Major Williams

'Cos it's strange innit??, whenever you stand in a Library and go AAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHH,
People stare at you, Whenever you do it in an Aeroplane everyone joins in.. - Tommy Cooper

whats so controversial about GTA? hell its so freaking standard that it pains me whenever people give it criticism. Its a game where you focus on the bad guy. Its a rip of all the classic gangster, gang films over the past 20/30 years with cultural references thrown in with some original ideas and people call it controversial. The Sepetember 11th mod where you have to escape the buildings was controversial, the columbine mod for half life was controversial, GTA is just a normal game.

People need to wake up and smell the trout ive been slapping them with for the past half an hour.

@Find: im sorry, but im going to have to drill you on this. have you even PLAYED GTA? the mistreatment of women? how about the miss-treatment of CARS. ****, how many whores have you picked up when playing this game? a real player picks up ONE...and then realises it takes TOO ****ing long to regain 10% health when you can just drive to the hospital and get 100% in less time and its free. It takes a while for the whore to just GET IN your damn car, let alone let her blow you or whatever, then youve gotta back over her and get your money back. this clocks in at about 1 minute onwards, a time it can take me to get ANYWHERE on an island in liberty city pretty much.
NO serious player uses this more than to show off to his mate why this game is so bad, yet its one of the prime examples given about why the GTA games are so bad. Its a throw away joke lost on America's mothers and is about as essensial to the game as Sam Fisher's splits jump (anyone who's played splinter cell knows how USELESS this move is and how OFTEN you get the chance even to use it at all). No one takes it ****ing seriously, you smile, make red skidmarks across the street, then go and kill some gangsters. Its a cartoon comedy world of make believe so lighten and shut up.


"Ambition makes you look pretty ugly.
Kicking, screaming, gucci little piggie"

Edited by - Arcon on 3/8/2004 6:19:37 PM

it pisses me off. video games have ratings, just like movies, parents go out and rent these 18+ games (or buy them) for their kids, then complain that its too violent and that its the game maker's fault.

perhaps game retailers should crack down on renting/selling policy the way video stores do. that would solve a lot of problems
then again I'm turning 20 next week and couldn't care less, because it doesn't affect me at all

Kyp

The other day, in study hall, i farted really loud, you know...so the guys would laugh...and i swear it was so hanus that Susie Johnson almost ralphed up her salsbury steak.
it was freakin sweet...

I have seen clips of the game and done my reading. I stand by my view. I have, through my own experience seen myself get desensitized to violence that it becomes common place and exceptable. In the last 15 years, I have worked to reverse that, and it is working. There are a lot of funny and amusing games out there. I have played a bunch. I have, with age changed a lot of my view points from when I was young, So I will stay with the likes of freelancer, Tackyon the Fringe, Final fantasy VII and VIII, Star Wars Rebellion, Star Trek Armada I and II ect. To each his own.

Finalday

Hinneh / I / Bo / Mahar... /Keith Green\ (1953-1983)

Edited by - Finalday on 3/8/2004 6:38:40 PM

oh i dont doubt that im desensitized. Through the internet, games and films, ive been exposed to LOADS more things and unfortunately its become commonplace.

HOWEVER. i dont clasify myself as someone who could see a dead body and not care. I still have emotions, still have principals and morals. i think maybe ive just developed a means of deparmentalising the virual violence as being fake and real violence as real.

I think the problem is that kids who are impressionable are unable to make the distinction. THey are still learning how to operate in life and these kinds of games are not exactly helpful in the creation process of a stable person.

The games are rated, and yet they are sold to individuals who are under-age. THAT's the problem. If the stores would be a little more responsible, then we would have fewer controversies.

I remember Chiller from the old days. A relative even gave me a ROM of it. That game is really freaky; seriously. Taw? If you're reading this topic, did you ever play Chiller?

Many people still seem to dispute the influence that videos or movies may have upon the impressionable. I always find that argument to be amusing.

From the early days of in-theater movie advertising, it was learned and understood that subliminal suggestion works on a large majority of the viewing public (adults and kids).

The entire purpose of advertising is to get the viewer to buy-in to the product being pushed (without the use of subliminal suggestion as that technique has been banned). For example, how many of you, while watching programming feel the urge to eat and how may of you have noticed that you get this urge after watching food ads for a hamburger chain, pizza chain, fried chicken, etc., etc.? Is this pure coincidence? How many of you have felt thirsty after a Coke, Pepsi or other soda ad? A beer ad?

Back when cigarette smoking was allowed pretty much anywhere, it was well known that a movie scene in which the leading actors light one up normally prompted the audience to light up as well.

You probably consider yourself not to be very naive or gullible so ask yourself how these simple advertising ploys may work on the very naive or gullible.

When you take these known effects further and create an interactive game in which the game player in order to "win" (ordinarily a good thing) is permitted to consciously choose to "act" in an anti-social, if not in a brutally criminal way, what kind of effect will this have upon a highly impressionable game player?

Have any of you, with Half life and the hi-def pack, ever used the impulse 101 cheat when you enter anomalous materials and wasted every single point of ammo you have on the security guard typing on the computer? he just REFUSES TO GET HURT!! there must have been at least thirty litres of blood on the floor and the back wall when i ran out of bullets, and he wasnt dead!

Posting pic as soon as i can replicate the situation

You know whats wierd?? many people who play games and get used to the violence never really notice it till they see it. I mean im not a sqeamish or scaredy person by far, and fighting doesnt disturb me either in real life. But one day, i was walking along the street and I see a dead body just laying there (no it didnt move it just layed there) it was so wierd, since I was like 13 I had been playing games where bodies littered the screen and watched movies where dudes were making large piles of.......wait for it......bodies...... yet when I saw something like that in real life it hits you right upside the head and makes you look at your whole life from a completely different perspective. Its very wierd, you see it on tv, in games, everywhere, but when your sitting there, looking at a dead guy, thats when it all just comes together and you realize what you have been looking at all this time.

"I see dumb people....... they 're everywhere. They walk around like everyone else. They dont even know their dumb"

I remember getting GTA. I was underage so I asked my mum to get it. She is of the school that think violence in video games doesn't generally affect RL and she trusted me not to run around around with my dads air rifle and shoot people. As long as I paid her back for the game, she was fine with it. She'd also seen a demo of it that I'd played. and laughed at the thought of it spruing me to go on a killing spree. Just harmless entertainment.

My gap year in Borneo

The media always needs to have a new bogeyman to blame for the social ills of today. After Columbine it was Marilyn Manson and videogames, when you try and find out the facts you find that they used to play Doom from time to time and they used to listen to a wide variety of rock bands. Since most TLRers here are, or have recently been, teenage boys, we'll have all done those things plenty of times and yet no one here (to my knowledge) has gone on a mad rampage. There is definitely a culture of blaming others and denial of personal responsibilty in current western culture. There's people who continue to try and sue cigarette companies for lung cancer even though they began smoking after the warnings were printed on each carton. There's the people suing McDonalds for making them fat. There are companies like "The accident group" springing up all over the place, encouraging people to do things like sue the council when their little boy, Timmy, falls off of a swing. It seems that no one is prepared to accept that most of the things that happen to you in life are largely within your control.

Does any of you remember the Phantasmagoria games ? Those were interactive movies with lots of gore and many countries banned them for some very graphic violence. I agree that one of the biggest problems is that stores sell/rent the R or M rated games to underage kids. I also see lots of parents in the store, buying these games for their kids because they ask for that specific game, but they forget to check what the game is about and its age rating or they simply don't give a rats ass.

But i don't see anything controversial about video games, at least no more than what is shown on television, so what does it matter ? Some people always blame videogames for some of the violence happening in the real world and the same goes for movies. But I think that's just a bunch of crap, because that's way too easy to point at. If I see Arnold as the Terminator blowing away people without any feelings and just because they are standing in his way, does that mean that I go out and shoot people in real life ? Of course not, because i'm perfectly capabable of seeing the difference between movies and real life. Some people claim that lots of kids don't see that difference and actually think they can do stuff like that (anyone remember Columbine ?) and they say that these movies/games should be forbidden. Well, think of it, those kids obviously have serious mental issues or were very badly raised , so they would have done something eventually and they might have been influenced by images they saw in movies/games, but does that mean you have to forbid those games/movies ? NO, because most people with normal morals and values know perfectly what's real and what's not real.

Anyways, here's something about the Phantasmagoria games:

Phantasmagoria description:

Really large (not in game length, in number of cd's: 7) adventure game from Sierra. Features actors in a virtual environment. Not for young children to play. You play Adrienne, who had just moved into a new mansion with her hubby Donald. The house is changing him and you must discover its secret before he or the house kills you.

Phantasmagoria 2: A puzzle of flesh description:

In Phantasmagoria II you play the role of Curtis Craig, a 30 year-old man whose distorted childhood is filled with horrors - his dad was involved in an illegal, top-secret experiment for Wyntech, an experiment whose true nature is revealed only as the game progresses, and whose evil nature left Curtis' mother out of her wits and eventually drove her to suicide. Curtis' father was later shot, leaving the poor little boy with serious behavioural disturbances, and eventually in therapy.

Now, a year after having been released from the mental institution, Curtis is employed at Wyntech (whose manager, Paul Warner, has taken it upon himself to take care of Curtis) and tries to find out the cause of his psychotic episodes and the mysterious murders that break out all around him, all the while finding out more and more about his past life and his father's fate.

Edited by - Eraser on 3/9/2004 1:37:00 PM