I'm commenting on the video game part, people, not the porn. Porn's got its own set of problems that most psychologists are loathe to admit, which is putting it nicely.
This is the sort of garbage that's so unhelpful to anyone who isn't hiding in his mom's basement to play it isn't funny. These were the same people who said that female actors were all immoral, and that it would die soon.
Gosh, I'm starting to wish to play Legend of Zelda again. Time to finish Skyward Sword, assuming I have the time...
There are problems with the way some guys get sucked into gaming. It's not necessitated by the very nature of videogames (though it may be opened up by that nature), unlike what's truly wrong with porn (hint: addiction is the least of the problem there). It's also not nearly as morally repugnant in any case unless the game in question is one of those (relatively) obscure freakish games that probably could be classed as porn anyway. And I've never really heard anyone address the real factors involved in problematic gaming addiction (and don't expect an article that takes porn and gaming to be two examples of manliness's death to break that trend); the sort of talk I hear instead usually would barely even be helpful for the guy who _is_ spending his life playing videogames in his mom's basement.
ReplyDeleteTo take just one example: consider the wholesome real-life interactions we should be having and ask, when did you last see such interaction among young men thrown in with their peers in real life? Excepting classically educated sorts, homeschoolers, and students of small Catholic liberal arts colleges, I mean? Do people really think that the wholesome interaction died solely or even primarily because these guys grew up with Mario (or even Master Chief)? I find that indredible, when you've got all kinds of intellectual and moral breakdown in society stretching back the past half century. No, I find it far more plausible that guys spend all their time in videogameland because the real world is crap, than that the real world became crap once guys started spending all their time in videogameland. Of course, there's a feedback loop involved, but this isn't an impossible chicken and egg scenario where you can't tell that videogame addiction is part of a much older, arguably far worse cultural trend.
DeleteHeck, take "world being crap" and extend it from social interaction to what the heck are you supposed to do with your life. Nobody would even think to suggest that videogames created the "the only meaning in life is whatever you feel like giving it!" culture that has left so many with nothing better to do than indulge whatever they feel like at the moment (e.g. play games). Sure I'll defend the virtue of open-ended and/or make-your-own goals when we're talking sandbox games -- the thing is that as awesome as sandbox is in some aspects of life (whoever said we all had to be Thomas Aquinas?), if your whole life in all its aspects is treated as a sandbox game with no extra lives, the vast majority of people go for either having a little fun and then quitting or trying to top everyone else because that's all they can do, and the few people who don't but still buy into the sandbox mentality still can't actually accomplish anything that isn't topped by the people who go the top-everyone route.
And at the end of the day, videogames just happen to be the most engaging of modern forms of entertainment -- all of which are based by the necessity of human nature on the same four things as any art (with the possible exception of still life): world, character, action and image (taking image in the broadest sense possible, the sense in which a book conjures up mental images). Some emphasize some aspects over others (in fact, the vast majority do to some extent), but then so does all other art. Some are just plain pretty crappy, but then so are many of the cheap thrillers in the bookstore. Certainly the medium lends itself more to the action element and through such a means as to be potentially addicting, but then, tv and the internet can be potentially addicting because of the intellectual laziness of following the links or the cheap dramatic points on the drama plotline -- tv doesn't get talked about anymore only because videogames became more popular, and on the other hand the internet is occassionally the object of fretting as well. But what people tend to overlook is not merely that these problems do not have to follow from our use of new media -- what people overlook is _how_ we use new media well or poorly. Nobody's talking about that; nobody's talking about what manliness is (well, except a few guys on -- plot twist -- the internet!); and that, along with fewer than nobody going out to live the stuff nobody is talking about, is why we're seeing terrible addiction begin to become common.
And baby, if you think it's already common, you haven't seen what it could be. When the economy collapses due to the labor pool drying up due to nobody caring about the stuff nobody talks about, then you'll wish people had done something more than demonize a medium as a scapegoat for our culture's long-standing and at times admitted -- nay, proudly proclaimed by at least one generation who lived before videogames existed -- collective refusal to grow up.
'Norwegian mass murder suspect Anders Behring Breivik reported during his trial that he prepared his mind and body for his marksman-focused shooting of 77 people by playing "World of Warcraft" for a year and then "Call of Duty" for 16 hours a day.'
ReplyDeleteWow. Really? Did they even -check- this for common sense? At all? 'cause I'm not seeing any possible way you could train your mind and body by playing WoW or CoD. As anyone who's actually shot an assault rifle can testify: it doesn't work like that. Especially the WoW part.
Not to mention the part where they cite the CDC for the damaging and addictive effects of porn, and then go on to make the same conjectures about video gaming, uncited, unevidenced. That right there is crap journalism. All they fall back on is anecdotal evidence. Bleaurgh.
Then there's the rant I could have about everything wrong with porn besides that it's addicting and damages relationships (those are symptoms, they ain't the disease; and no, you don't need first-hand experience to figure this stuff out any more than you need to be hit by a bullet to explain gunpowder and propulsion), but I don't think anyone wants to hear me go full-blown dissertation on such an ugly topic.
ReplyDelete