Violent Video Games and Second Life Named Again as a Real World Risk
By Andrew on Monday, July 23rd, 2007 at 2:28 AM PST In Gamer Life, Games Industry
Add yet another article to the list of those which state that violent video games will spawn more violence, but add to this Second Life spawning more perverts.
In an article for the Tapai Times, Peter Singer, professor of bioethics at Princeton University, makes the claim that the Second Life pedophilia debate has shifted attention away from the real culprit: violence. He argues the studies which link virtual violence to spawning real violence are stronger than those which suggest virtual acts of pedophilia spawn real acts of pedophilia.
I would love to believe that if we ceased to create violent video games that we would become a peaceful world. It would be nice if the solution were that simple. But why are we stopping at video games? Aren’t there films, books and television shows which display the same amount of graphic violence?
And let’s pretend we wiped out violent media all together. Might I ask what media human beings were watching or exposed to in the Dark Ages to make them so violent?
Can’t there just be crazy people? Yes, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold played Doom, but there’s a huge difference between those two individuals and other high school students: sanity. It’s a horrible tragedy, but what it comes down to is that they were two crazy teenagers who just went off.
God Bless us all, but let’s leave the First Amendment alone when it comes to making video games.
Andrew, your posting is poorly titled and inaccurate. The original piece in the Taipei Times does *not* even claim that SL spawns more perverts. The author of the Taipei Times article qualifies all of the negative claims about SL (e.g. “Some people think that SL might be bad”) and then makes it very clear that he disagrees.
You start by saying “add another article to the list,” but this article in the Taipei Times clearly does not belong on such a list as it is arguing the exact opposite.
Aaron