Some things never change ? Football Manager dominates entire days, Street Fighter IV records stay remarkably poor and games get blamed, once again, for murder.
Now it has to be said that even we, the mighty ?spray, draw the line at extracting the urine out of murder. For the time being, at least.
But that's not to say we?d avoid discussing the recent shooting in Winnenden, Germany, in this here bit below the cut ? even if it does veer into the realms of slating the popular media for being a bunch of silly billys.
Or maybe it won't. Who knows?
Basically what happened was: 17-year-old Tim Kretschmer shot and killed 15 people in and around a local school, before turning the gun on himself. We don't need to go into how horrible that is ? you're (mostly) adults and are capable of forming moral judgements on your own.
So: kid, with access to guns, trained how to use them, previously treated for depression and noted as being an avid Counter Strike player ? even after the 1.6 update ruined everything.
And yet, initially at least, we thought that just for once ? for once ? the world's media would take a step back and look at the whole picture. Even The Times were quoted as saying:
?Game addiction is a symptom of something wrong and not a cause.?
Which made for some uncomfortable reading here, as we struggled to come to terms with how we were supposed to react to the fact that ? as it seemed ? the mainstream media weren't deriding gaming as the one ill to destroy us all.
How were we, the united gamers of the world, supposed to be together in our uproar against the popular media holding our passion with such contempt if they were not actually going to bother having a go at it? No, no, no ? this wasn?t going to do at all.
No, we needed things to go back ? we will always need an enemy to unite against. Where would Superman be without his Lex Luthor? Where would Jack Bauer be without his little brown foreign people? No, we need the news outlets to be maniacal about this stuff ? we need things to laugh at, to deride, to sometimes even discuss in a sensible fashion.
So thank Thor for the weeked.
The Times then went on to write a follow up piece that brought things back into the realms of normalcy; a place where her readers can continue to live a life of middle class guilt while they carry on blinding themselves with the furious froth spewing haphazardly from their mouths.
Basically, it brought the discussion back to a level most of us are comfortable with. The kind of level where an article can ? with a straight face, no less ? refer to Lieutenant-Colonel Dave Grossman as an ?expert?.
?You can see their influence in the way these school shooters aim and shoot accurately and move from one target to the next, moving through people dispassionately.?
Phew. That was a close one. We were worried days like this had gone forever.
Now we can go back to the reliable, obvious arguments of old, be backed into our familiar corner and try (fail) our hardest to defend gaming to a world of middle class knobs who just don't care.
On another note: ?it's Saint Paddy?s day ? why not have a list of great Irish game characters?? we thought. Then we realised there are about four of them, and most of them are Irish-American, like the hilariously-poorly-named Packie off GTA IV or Harman Smith of the utterly mental Killer 7. Some, like Nina Williams off Tekken, you really either don't know or don't care are Irish. Others, like all the people you meet in Ireland on the original Broken Sword, are peripheral at best.
The rest are leprechauns or drunkards, meaning the idea fell flat on it's big, fat arse.
Oh wait ? there's Finlay off the WWE games. He's a bit Irish, isn't he?
THIS WEEK: We realised, grudgingly, that FIFA 09 is ten times the game PES 09 is. It's taken a lot to come to terms with it and EA?s effort has had to go through a hell of a lot to prove itself, but it has done so. With gusto. Massive online games = more fun than small, broken online games. Konami/Seabass/whoever ? take notes.
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King Jimbo says
I never move “through people dispassionately” in video games… on the contrary I get extremely excited as I gun down enemy after enemy, even more so if I get one shot kills to the head!
David says
Have you seen that article Anne Diamond wrote on computer games a little while ago? Hilarious old fatty.
magfsh says
jkkkkkkkk