For the xth time. Videogame dolls are not real people. Those dolls don't eat, sleep, shit nor think and cannot ever be permanently "killed", can only be deleted by uninstalling the game (okay: and modding on PC).
Stop censoring videogames.
A few weeks ago I was overhearing a talk between two men working in the firm I'm working in. It was in the ... what's the word ? .., dressing room where we put on our clothes that can get dirty, to protect our normal, non-worker clothes under that.
Both were talking how they were using guns, killed several people, using several guns, and how muxch better some guns were for killing than other guns. And big the explosions were, how many people were killed and how (ashooting right into the face or what it was).
THe other workes there also heared that. And they are to a great deal mentally ill people. Yes, the form is a firm in which mostly ill people work in. To a great deal mentally ill people, but also disabled / handicapped people.
Now, that was dangerous, I thought. Wha, if one of our mentally ill people was not able to see that their talk about killing lots of people was from a video game ß What if our mentally ill workers believed that what they had done was done in RL ? What if some of our mentaly ill workers actually believes now that "if they can use guns so freely in public, it is for
everyone acceptable to do so, including me" ?
Joxer, I call what I quoted above for BS, because you assume a level of self-awareness that most people just don't have. And I'm a bit scared by you ignoring Anders Breivoik, who literally said he was usingshooting games with the purpose of desensitization himself. At least that's what I had read in an newspaper at that time. (Wikipedia doesn't seem to have that, only that he did play shooter games for "practising gun skills"). What's in there is that he played WOW for 1 year as some kind of training.
What I don't see with all defenders of games which include "virtual violence" is, that they are unable to emphasize into people and assume that people might not be able to distinguish between reality and "video game reality". Plus, my old argument that we cannot say whether our unconscious part of ourselfs is able to distinguish between reality and "video game reality". We just can't. But what gets learned there wents into parts of view as well. We just cannot control it.
What I often see is that more sensitive people's views are downplayed and often openly attacked. Things like "This cannot be" or other ways to question what more sensitive actually sense. It's often as of concreteheads were claiming that THEIR way of perceiving reality was THE ONLY way of perceiving reality.
I tend to believe that desensitization with videoi games actually works. I can say that because I still sense that, feel that, if I would try to kill a "doll", as you say it, in a video game. I do not believe that I'm desensitized yet, because I can still sense it.
What I often see as well are people who are saying that I - or other more sensitive people - "should get over it", "one has to be hard", "one has to let go all sensitivity" and, more recently, from another fellow worker, "are you a man or a woman ?" He is of Turkish origin, and I suspect that this question comes from that culture. When I was saying to him that i hate that loud screeching sound of metal on/against metal when some of our workers were using the pallet transporter, I was asked by him : "Are you a man or a woman ?" I therefore assume that "being a man" means "not to be sensitive at all" and a woman means "to be sensitive" PLUS that being a woman is inferuior to being a man. A man should not be sensitive, according to Machismo.
More and more I fail to see games without violence on the PC platform. The platform has evolved into an "Machismo platform, according to that, because it shows us, delivers to us and trains us into desinsitizartion game. Games in which one is trained NOT to be sensitive. Well, I don't even see games in which the opposite happens ! : Games which shows and trains us to be more sensitive ! Like those Thief games. No shooter gamer would like them. Because they require a lvel of sensitivity I suspect modern, younger games are even
unable to.
And the more desinsitization takes place, the more violent our society becomes, I suspect. We already see that in the newspapers here. Young people (up to 30s) do acts of violence imposible to older generations.
Once, I even read an newspaper article of a robber gang. 3 young men. Their description was very much like that of a game trinity : Tank, damage dealer, healer, I thought, because of the guns these RL robbers used. Close range weapon, long range weapon, I don't remember the third anymore. Scary that game strategies go into RL that easily.