If you were to rob a bunch of college kids in the middle of the night, what would you think you would encounter? Most likely a bunch of guys passed out drunk. As you sneak into their house to steal whatever isn’t tied down, you are fucking pwned by a pissed off gamer with a samurai sword. Turns out, a burglar has hit these guys before and stole their PS3’s and laptops. The crook who was slain has a history of breaking and entering, so you can’t assume it was not the same guy coming back for more shit.
This is not going to turn into one of those “gamers kill people because they played GTA for a few hours” stories. These were college kids at Johns Hopkins which is basically an Ivy League school. I’m not saying games drove these kids to kill people, but a few hours of Ninja Gaiden might not be a bad thing every now and then.
My good friend Sean sent over a link which I thought was very interesting and relevant. I’ve been trying to get my girlfriend to admit she is a gamer, as she frequently steals my DS away from me, but she only plays certain titles because complexity and difficulty, and lack of rewards. I’m wondering if Prince of Persia would get her hooked.
I agree with the concept of making games playable by everyone where possible. In my eyes there should be tutorials for non-gamers and tutorials for gamers. Designing a game so the difficulty ratings cater to non-gamer, gamer, and hardcore instead of easy, normal, and hard would open up titles to a wider market. If there was a non-gamer setting for COD4 I’m pretty sure my Dad would give it a go and enjoy it.
“Ninety per cent of the young people who seek treatment for compulsive computer gaming are not addicted.”
To say that people can become addicted to video games is absolutely ludicrous. This article brought to us by the BBC states that there are kids out there being treated for addiction to video games such as World of Warcraft.
“But Mr. Bakker believes that this kind of cross-addiction affects only 10% of gamers. For the other 90% who may spend four hours a day or more playing games such as World of Warcraft, he no longer thinks addiction counseling is the way to treat these people.
“These kids come in showing some kind of symptoms that are similar to other addictions and chemical dependencies,” he says.
“But the more we work with these kids the less I believe we can call this addiction. What many of these kids need is their parents and their school teachers – this is a social problem.”
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again— we have to blame the parents. Video games are a large part of our society today and to make excuses for children and adolescents’ stupidity in playing video games too much is ridiculous. It’s a parent’s obligation to teach their children responsibility; responsibility involves spending too much time playing video games. When parents are unable to regulate what their children do, how their children act, then they are failures. It’s completely unfortunate the amount of horrendous parents there are in the world.
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