Sunday, October 25, 2009
Should we be worrying about sex and violence in video games?
So, reading these articles made me think of something I read written by Stephen King, "Why We Crave Horror Movies" (you can read it here http://iws.ccccd.edu/jdoleh/English%201301/Why%20We%20Crave%20Horror%20Movies.pdf is you want to know what he has to say). Video games and horror movies have a lot in common, but video games take Stephen King's argument a bit further, video games allow the player to be in control of the violence for the most part. Violent games don't have to be played, but the are still played, just like horror movies don't have to be watched, but many people go and watch them. There isn't anything wrong with or innate need for to feed the beast. As Stephen King puts it "The mythic horror movie, like the sick joke, has a dirty job to do. It deliberately appeals to all that is worst in us. It is morbidity unchained, our most base instincts let free, our nastiest fantasies realized . . . and it all happens, fittingly enough, in the dark. For those reasons, good liberals often shy away from horror films. For myself, I like to see the most aggressive of them – Dawn of the Dead, for instance – as lifting a trap door in the civilized forebrain and throwing a basket of raw meat to the hungry alligators swimming around in that subterranean river beneath." We have to keep those urges locked up inside of us to live in society, so we let all of our angers and fears and frustrations out some by getting the living daylights scared out of them, but others through video games and taking the actions into their own hands.
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To make a comment on my own blog, Something occurred to me this morning. I was talking about Sailor Moon with my friend and we got into the discussion about how there are characters that were made female and relationship changes (making two characters cousins) that America put into the anime, where in Japan they were male and the relationship between two people who were gay.
ReplyDeleteI instantly thought about this class and the discussion on sex in video games. In the article "Sex in Video Games," the author quotes Peter Molyneux, “You only have to look at some of the anime films to see that, but then when you look at other parts of the world, things are very different. You see the sexual liberation in Germany where any kind of sexual act is acceptable in entertainment, and then you see the total prudishness of America. You can never show any nipples, not even through an item of clothing.”
in control
ReplyDeleteI agree how you said that we ontrol the violence in video games. There are certain games like postal 2 and silent hill that allows one to take the blood feature off or on. In postal 2 you can either kill people or not, it really is in our own power to create violence or not.