Homestar Runner Wiki Forum

I pretty much agree with the gamer's point of view. ^
Parents (or grandparents, in the case of the story cited in the first post) need to be aware of what their kids are playing. My sister does an EXCELLENT job at this with my 8 year old nephew - and she's a single parent.

I have two points on this issue - first, people disapproved of the GTA series before this scandal, but why was the "sex scene" (which you may or may not be able to access depending on your level of computer knowledge) the straw that broke the camel's back? In "Vice City" (GTA), you can engage in "adult activity" with prostitutes (the image is implied, but not seen), you can shoot and kill ANYONE (including police officers - having two cops in my immediate family, that makes me more than a little uncomfortable), and countless other illegal acts - it's not like these games were "Barney goes to the Zoo" before these patches came out. Shouldn't they have had the adult rating from the get-go? (I don't really think the burden should be placed on the company, but rather, on the consumer, but I'm just saying...)

Second - while I don't agree with banning the game, I would like to say that it's my personal opinion that the whole GTA series (sex patches or not) has been developed in very poor taste. Whatever happened to good ol' Spiderman and Mario?

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First, Jack...

Q:What constitutes violence in video games?

A:There's no real debate over that. Any M-rated game has violence levels unacceptable and definitionally harmful to anyone under 17. The industry will rue the day it accepted this labeled scheme

Me:I guess thats right...

Q:Are parents paying attention to what their kids play?

A:Nope.

Me:Woah, he got two right!!!

Q:Do you think that video games are similar to sports? There are much-touted statistics that link aggression levels to video game playing, but isn't that precisely what happens in any kind of competition?

A:I'm sorry, but a basketball games goal is to score more points, not maim the other player. That is where sportsmanship comes in. There is no sportsmanship in any GTA game. None.

me:I call a foul!!I mean, has this guy ever heard of sports games? Who said GTA is the onmly one out there???

Q:According to the Center for Child Death Review, 1,242 kids were murdered with guns and 174 children died from accidental firearm-related injuries in 2000. Aside from stories that get covered in the news [like Columbine], there are few, if any, actual statistics that show how many children's deaths are directly linked to video games. Do the facts speak for themselves? Or is it just that nobody is really keeping tabs?

A:The federal government found that in the school year 2003, there were 48 school killings. The year before that there were 16, and the year before that 17. Something is going on. I submit that the video game generation is coming of age.

Me:As I said before, The kids are already messed up. Gaming doesnt promote violence.


Jack:You see, the industry is selling these games to kids whose parents are reckless. How is that Joe Jame's fault? We need to punish the industry and the parents who are putting innocent people in harm's way.

Me:No, we need to punish Wal-Mart and all those. And, i have a question-whats Columbine?i know, Im a n00b.

Round 2:Tim Buckely, the floor is yours!!!

Q:What constitutes violence in video games?

A:The same things that constitute violence in real life constitute violence in video games. Blood and gore, for instance, is just as much violence in a video game as it is in real life. However there is a psychological difference with video games, in knowing that, just as in movies, what is happening on the screen is not real, and is stylized and even exaggerated.

Me:I agree.

Q:Is there a correlation between playing violent video games and acting in a violent manner?

A:I don't believe so. I think that if someone plays a video game, and then goes out and harms another human being, or themselves because of what they just saw in the video game, they were screwed up in the head long before they got their hands on a controller. In my profession I have met thousands and thousands of gamers, all of whom have played the same type of violent video games that I have, and we've managed not to kill each other.

Me:Hah, thats what I said!!!


Q:Different mediums, as they've come along, have had their share of controversy. From pulp horror, graphic novels, to movies, music and television; is this part of a cycle?

A:It most certainly is part of the cycle. People will find any reason they can get their hands on to shift possible blame off of themselves.

Me:Yeah...so far I cant fuind anything I cant agree with..

Tim:I'm sure that at one point or another a golfer snapped and beat someone to death with a 7-iron.

Let's ban golf, shall we?

Me:I dont know why, but that somehow makes me laugh..

Winner: Tim. Honestly, he had everything right. The parents will go and blame the PS2 or XBox, and Jack Thompson will also do that.In fact, in my other long post, I pretty much got most of the crap I said off of Tims article at his comic.So, yeah.Sorry fotr making this so frikken long.

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I disagree. I know some parents don't pay attention, but my parents would never let me play a GTA game.

Wikipedia knows.

Some people blamed the killings on Doom, because the killers had programmed a level of the game that supposedly resembled their school.

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beep beep I'm a Jeep

S'okay - Wikipedia knows.

But to make a long story short - a highly publicized high school shooting several years ago, where some critics blamed violent video games for the shootings.

EDIT: SIMULPOST'D! Dag, Jitka beat me!

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Woah, I knew it was the one I thought about!!!

Just...dont ask.

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Whoa long post length.
Sen. Joe Lieberman has always been against video game gratuity. The first time I heard about him was when he wanted to ban the first GTA, way, way back when it was from a bird's eye view. I heard him talking about how dangerous FPSs are and how sex in games is disensitizing our youth. Why attack video games, or movies, or other forms of entertainment? Because to them, its a victimless blame game. What, so they ban one game or a movie. The business still survives.
They get off clean, that's why. They say things that pleases parents, and little action has to be taken. Let's ignore the main issues like social security, education, Big Sugar, job instability, disappearing pensions, food lobbyists, medical costs, hospital closings, lonely military families, the destitue and skyrocketing college costs. Let's attack baseball and video games. They're only protecting the children of America!

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I've once seen a graph depicting the average homocide stats of the US from the 1970's or so to 1999. Marked on this graph was the release date of Doom. After this mark, the line went DOWN.

I have no way of telling how accurate it is, but it kinda ruins Jack's whole argument if it is true. Not that he will care.

How about that Jack Thompson guy? That guy must keep getting busted when playing San Andreas or something.

EDIT:

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Just curios what "Adjusted victimization rate" means, anyone know?

Bueller.... Bueller...

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I think it was the media attention to the first school shooting that gave other kids the idea. If you're going to blame video games for school shootings then blame movies and violent books too.

This debate has been around since the beginning of the pop culture era. Before video games (mainly the 50s and early 60s) parents and power hungry lawyers were angry at Comic Book publishers for publishing violent comics, now take into account that saying a hearty "dang" in that era was enough to get you a spanking but it's the same battle with different people and a different form of media.

Punish the Parents for being not involved enough or not careing enough. The kids hear the hype and they feel like they have to buy the game even though they may not want to regularly. There's always one kid in every grade in elementry school whose parents are extremely loose with dicipline or who don't know better that tell the other kids about the vices they get to sample and suddenly everyone's played the game/watched the movie (even though a large 85% are lying). I know this personally because my little brother is friends with a kid whose parents don't know better and one day I heard him talking about GTA and Family Guy (two things an 8 year old need not know about). Later that day my brother comes home saying that his friend was talling him to get a PS2 and GTA: San Andreas, that just cheeses me off.

And possibly more guilty than the parents are the store clerks that see only money. I said in a pervious post that I've only seen one time where a store clerk told the mother what the game was about, that's not enough. There shouldn't be any reprocussions for lack of sales due to this.

When you come right down to it it's the parents that decide what kids get and a majority of the time they make good decisions but there's the annoying 5% that let their kids get everything they want and then complain that what they let happen hurt their kid.

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RIP Nathan "Buz" Buzdor

I get the reference, but how is it relevant?



When Devil May Cry 3 (an M-rated game) came out, I went to a Game Stop and asked for a copy. The guy started to tell me how cool it was, took my money, and let me leave. I was fifteen, and in no way looked older.

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I belive that parents should be punished, in fact I belive that that should be the name of an organization against Jack Thompson, and other psychos like him.

P.T.P. 4 EVA!

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TAJTAHBOOM!
Teens Against Jack Thompson and His Band Of Overprotective Morons!!

Catchy, ain't it?

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Better'D!

This is a conversation with Jacko. He must use Edga Junior......

This may no be relevant, but my brother was talkin to his friend about JackThompson and gave him a nickname. Guess what it is?


Honestly though, the store should be doing their job.And yes, that clueless parent thing is a lot of peopel in my grade, some of them are my friends.

Hah, that aticle taught em. I might do the same...probably not, I dont wanna get sued lol.But man, look at what he responded:

uh huh

he obviously cheated on those law exams if thats the only thing he can say.

EDIT: 300th Post!!!!!Lets celebrate with a Jack-Thompson-Bash-Extravagansa!!

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It appears the system is down for Jacko's email service.

Hmm...we must find ANOTHER way to communicate with him!

He won't listen, what we have to do is go Triple X on his butt.

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RIP Nathan "Buz" Buzdor

Jacko has his real mail on his website



Anyone?

LOLz.Thats pretty funny. Now, our orginization must send hate-mail and stop shooting hoops.

I honestly wonder how he got all these law degrees when the smartest thing he can say is " uh huh ".

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I honestly think the best thing to do is tighten sales on video games. Go to see or buy an R-rated movie? They proof you. Buy porn? They proof you. Buy cigarettes or alcohol? They proof you. Buy an M-rated video game? The clerk tells you how much fun it is.

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I'm for MODS. I'm agaist Hot Coffee. I think it's sick/wierd to look at two cumputer generated images getting it on

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About the careless parent thing? My friend told me that girls in his sister's class (4th grade) played some M rated game.

I still have nightmares.

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Honestly though, thats pretty common. People in that grade stuff are like, dirtbiking and playing Halo.
And they have this stupid girlfriend/boyfriend thing.I make fun of it.


...I should know this stuff.I am a Fith Grader after all.

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Halo isn't even that bad, there are games far worse (Doom 3 for example) that are just as easially acessable.

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RIP Nathan "Buz" Buzdor

I don't care about what kids play, I am just concerned about parents who are too stupid to admit that they are either bad parents, or that their kid has serious brain damage.

I bought GTA:SA when I was 16. That seems to be a fair rating to me. Aaand what is scary about Doom 3?

I don't really feel the need to install Hot Coffee. I have other mods to tend to (goes off to look for the unavoidable Jack Thompson mod)

I remember people talking about GTA in elementary school.

You know, it's times like this that make Nintendo all the more worthwhile. If I had gotten a Playstation, there would be less family-orientated games. My parents abolished "blood, gore, killing games", which was perfectly fine by me. I think the only Nintendo game I couldn't get was Mortal Kombat. Which was understandable. I think that my parents made the right choice. They could have completely turned their cheek, and that would have been bad parenting.

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Yeah, that's why I like Nintendo. Fun games without all the violence.

Since this man cannot respond with intelligent reasoning, we may have to sign him up for spam emails, hate-spams, and spamvertisments. Along with an all out flame war. And maybe we need to write our congressmen and let them handle this freak of nature.

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And now that we know his address, spam snail mails.