tdaxp

... are owed to Brendan of I Hate Linux. I visited him by the lakes of South Dakota today, and we had a wonderful time eating lunch, exploring the local university, and of course enjoying his gorgeous XBOX 360 - Westinghouse HDTV combo.

Particular, I enjoyed playing the fourth Elder Scrolls game -- Oblivion. Elder Scrolls III (Morrowind) was stunning beautiful when I first played it, and it is the only game bought after the golden age of the mid 90s (which including Civilization II, Oregon Trail II, SimCity 2000) that I truly loved. I bought both expansion packs -- Tribunal and Bloodmoon -- and loved them as well. Oblivion, from what I saw on that beautiful display, is worth heir to the Elder Scrolls name.

The text's statements on computer games are doubtful. It states that "an increasing number of studies show that playing violent games, like watching violent TV, increases hostility and aggression." However, more than half of studies looking at the connection between media violence and violent activity failed to find any significant link (Pinker 311). The spread of video games has mirrored the fall in the violent crime rate. Nor it is clear that the greater appeal of software applications to boys than girl is a problem. Newborn boys show a greater affection for mechanical contraptions than newborn girls in their first day (Alford and Hibbing 2004), so how are similar observations later on surprising? Likewise, the the Columbine shooters played “Doom” lessens when one learns the last game they played was bowling (Moore 2002).

Adam of The Metropolis Times is a longtime blogfriend of tdaxp. Recently he has taken to vidcasting, and one such vidcast (on video games and crime) has been taken up by the popular videogames-and-politics site Game Politics.

Watch the video

and join the discussion.

The link between electronic entertainment and a peaceful society has been discussed on tdaxp before

• in Computer Games Are Good For You (And Your Children),


• in Video and Computer Games Superempower Horizontal Thinking,


• and in some notes on evolutionary psychology

And remember: watch the video.

"Chasing the dream," The Economist, 4 August 2005, http://economist.com/printedition/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=4246109 (from Slashdot).

A wonderful article on The Economist and intellectually empowering computer games, and their critics:

First, an interesting divide between the Generations of Virtual Warriors and strangers to such mental dexterity

Start with the demographics. Attitudes towards gaming depend to a great extent on age. In America, for example, half of the population plays computer or video games. However most players are under 40—according to Nielsen, a market-research firm, 76% of them—while most critics of gaming are over 40. An entire generation that began gaming as children has kept playing. The average age of American gamers is 30. Most are “digital natives” who grew up surrounded by technology, argues Marc Prensky of games2train, a firm that promotes the educational use of games. He describes older people as “digital immigrants” who, like newcomers anywhere, have had to adapt in various ways to their new digital surroundings.

Then, statistical evidence that computer games physically pacify the population, as generations are raised up used to fighting with their minds, not hands

Game players, it turned out, were no more aggressive than the control group. Whether the participants had played games before, the number of hours spent gaming, and whether they liked violent movies or not, made no difference. The researchers noted, however, that more research is still needed to assess the impact of other genres, such as shoot-'em-ups or the urban violence of “Grand Theft Auto”. All games are different, and only when more detailed studies have been carried out will it be possible to generalise about the impact of gaming.

But as Steven Johnson, a cultural critic, points out in a recent book, “Everything Bad Is Good for You” gaming is now so widespread that if it did make people more violent, it ought to be obvious. Instead, he notes, in America violent crime actually fell sharply in the 1990s, just as the use of video and computer games was taking off. Of course, it's possible that crime would have fallen by even more over the period had America not taken up video games; still, video gaming has clearly not turned America into a more violent place than it was.

And some concrete examples of the benefits of being a Virtual Warrior

Another area where games are becoming more popular is in corporate training. In “Got Game”, a book published last year by Harvard Business School Press, John Beck and Mitchell Wade, two management consultants, argue that gaming provides excellent training for a career in business. Gamers, they write, are skilled at multi-tasking, good at making decisions and evaluating risks, flexible in the face of change and inclined to treat setbacks as chances to try again. Firms that understand and exploit this, they argue, can gain a competitive advantage.

Not that facts will stop the Puritan Left from attacking

This summer there has been a huge fuss about the inclusion of hidden sex scenes in “Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas”, a highly popular, but controversial, game in which the player assumes the role of a street gangster. The sex scenes are not a normal part of the game (see above for a typical image). But the offending scenes can be activated using a patch downloaded from the internet. Senator Hillary Clinton and a chorus of other American politicians have called for federal prosecutors to investigate the game and examine whether the industry's system of self-regulation, which applies age ratings to games, is working properly. Mrs Clinton accused video games of “stealing the innocence of our children” and “making the difficult job of being a parent even harder”.

...

In June, Senator Charles Schumer held a press conference to draw attention to the M-rated game “25 to Life”, in which players take the role of a policeman or a gangster. “Little Johnny should be learning how to read, not how to kill cops,” he declared. True, but little Johnny should not be smoking, drinking alcohol or watching Quentin Tarantino movies either. Just as there are rules to try to keep these things out of little Johnny's hands, there are rules for video games too. Political opportunism is part of the explanation for this double standard: many of gaming's critics in America are Democrats playing to the centre.

Happily, in this fight time is on the side of the right

Like rock and roll in the 1950s, games have been accepted by the young and largely rejected by the old. Once the young are old, and the old are dead, games will be regarded as just another medium and the debate will have moved on. Critics of gaming do not just have the facts against them; they have history against them, too. “Thirty years from now, we'll be arguing about holograms, or something,” says Mr Williams.