*promote

Self promoting this video and sending it back into the queue for one more try; last queued Sunday, August 11th, 2013 10:03am PDT - promote requested by original submitter Procrastinatron.

I'll give them credit. They brought up two very good points. when games start to approach holodeck-levels of realism. At some point, someone's going to say...nah, we really don't need to recreate a hyper-realistic storming of Normandy Beach or whatever.

But then on the other hand, if people are able to successfully compartmentalize themselves, let them go nuts with super disturbing massively deviant simulations....as long as they can separate that from RL behavior. I'd much rather people act out demented shit with simulations than do it RL.

Yeah. While I suppose there has to be some sort of limit on what can be deemed acceptable, it is also a very slippery slope. After all, should fantasy really be criminalized? Moral sickness is perhaps the most arbitrary concept imaginable, and history is rife with examples of just how dangerous it is to criminalize supposed moral dissolution.

I imagine it will just be like just about every vice in existence, there will be people who can handle it and there will be people who can't

Remember the first Barclay episode of TNG dealing with Holo-addiction? They made the pretty clear implication that they do use the holodeck to act out sexual fantasies, they did seem to have a taboo on making holo-recreations of people they knew RL however. which, of course, Barclay did indulge in.

Of course it got somewhat more explicit after Roddenberry died and the producers decided to make humans in the 24th century a little bit more..human instead of the ultra superbeings who were paragons of virtue of Roddenberry's vision and the idea of "Vulcan Love Slave" was introduced among other things.

It would be... difficult... not to abuse the HoloDeck.

frank zappa already covered this... the radio is full of songs about love and feeling good, and thats not the pattern we see

As a game developer, I've come to realize that the graphics of a game have the most impact when a player first starts playing it. After a while the player focuses more and more on the underlying game mechanics rather than whatever violence happens to be immediately playing out on the screen.

Ie, a nonplayer sees their kid bloodily gunning down zombies for hours on end, but the kid is actually focusing on teamwork (multiplayer), scoring max points, reaching objectives, etc.

So they are implying I won't kill game characters because they look real? It can look as good as real life and I will kill game characters... Why? Because they have no soul, and no matter how good the gore and graphics look, that is fundamental of me killing them.

Just be glad I believe real people have a soul, otherwise I would feel the same way about killing you, your family, your dog and anything else purposed to be "real".

Exactly right. I like to play multiplayer FPS games, and in the one I am currently playing (Blacklight: Retribution, for those who are curious), it is possible to make your enemies heads' explode with all the charm of Gallagher smashing a watermelon.

It is, simply put, abso-fucking-lutely gorgeous.

But it's never more than a bonus. I do enjoy it for the sheer brutality of it (and that sound - like a popping balloon), but it's never the focus of the game for me. In fact, most of the time, despite the fact that the game is based on killing, I am mostly concerned with the basic mechanics of the game, and the constant competition I am in with myself.

Another series that constantly crops in these engineered controversies (and which was mentioned in this video), is GTA. People cannot seem to get this idea that teenagers are single-mindedly finding more and more ways to murder random prostitutes out of their heads, when the truth is that that's just one of MANY things you can do in GTA's sprawling cityscapes. I, for example, would sometimes enjoy simply driving fast cars around at night while listening to jazz. Same game, no prostitutes, or the wanton murder thereof, involved.

But then, I suppose "driving fast cars at night while listening to jazz on the radio" nets "news" outlets fewer views than "EVIL VIDEO GAME IS TEACHING THE YOUTH OF AMERICA TO MURDER PROSTITUTES."

Be damn the violence, future serial killers of America unite, be it Doom or Civilization, GTA or Mario Cart, what of the retarded social and motor skills created in 2 generations of peepatrons? I have noticed a direct correlation between lack of Vitamin D in the form of limited exposure to sunlight and Cheetos-stained crisp finger, as well as a general lack of interest in the vagina or practical skills and video-gaming, so please, "let them legalize homicide and debut this thrilling and encouraging youth-sensation, our hope-for-the-future, an exciting new video first-person-atrophizer and herding platform, Couch-Killers"!!

I love the 2004 Punisher game. I love it.
You can "interrogate" people in it, meaning you outright torture them for information or gratuitous, explicit death scenes. You can shove people into woodchippers, drill holes in their skull with a powerdrill, chromeplating heads or smash their pelvis with a prison cell door to pieces. Additionally there are four basic "interrogations" that you can do anywhere from banging peoples head open on the floor to threatening them with a gun (that goes off a lot). And that goes on top off the usuall ultraviolence you find in such first and third person shooters.
However, the game mechanics reward you for not killing people during interrogations and using them as well as the human shields tactically. I started playing for points, not mayhem. Which is really hard to do if you hide in a coffin with an M60 during a mob burial. It's nice to see the Punisher impaling people on actual Rhinos or crushing them in giant gears in Tony Starks living room but I'm playing to get the gold medal on that level, I wanna take the flamethrower to the zoo.
The game mechanics were really great and rewarded strategy and restraint with unlockable stuff. You actually became less violent in exchange for concept art and additional gear. That game is awesome.
The only thing that ever made me want to be violent was the way certain people behaved towards me or others. Games just feed my morbid sense of entertainment.

Which is probably why they mentioned it in the video...

I think more telling is that the shootings and the like they say are caused by video games and violent movies seem to be unique to the US despite the games and media being prevent all over the world... sure Japan isn't as into FPS games, but they still sell there. Our violent gun movies, often outdone by movies made in other markets, do well all over. Yet the violence seems to come out just in the US. I think the people who blame video games and movies need to see what other factors may be contributing, be it the fact the US is the only nation not to have affordable health care or lack of gun control, a combo of those, or something else like some sort of odd cultural difference.

Well, I don't believe people have a soul, and miraculously, I've made it almost 36 years so far with an acceptable level of murder (i.e. none). Not that I haven't wanted to kill some people at times, but there's that whole annoying morality thing that I developed for myself.

That said, here's an interesting point. I don't have a problem gunning down hordes of beautifully rendered avatars because they have no sentience.

But what happens when that changes? At what point on the AI curve is it no longer acceptable to drop entities into a virtual world to experience fear and be slaughtered?

Iain M. Banks called it the simulation problem. Let's say you have a noble goal: you want to determine what economic methodologies will produce the best outcome for your citizens. So you develop a model of the countries economy, and in order to simulate it as accurately as possible you make each citizen an intelligent agent with needs, fears, desires, etc. You then subject them to a few million iterations with everything from fascism to communism and all stops in between. Right now? not a big deal. But in the future as computing power grows exponentially, the possibility of modelling those citizens as self ware becomes greater.

I don't mind killing a realistic avatar for fun. I wouldn't even mind if I knew that that avatar was controlled by a human doing the same. But I'd have a real problem killing an AI that could think and feel.

" But I'd have a real problem killing an AI that could think and feel." That's when you'd use a suitcase nuke as opposed to a flamethrower.

That...

That sounds AWESOME.

And you are of course, completely right. I have played MANY violent games, and I have read MANY violent books, and I have listened to MANY violent songs.

And I'm still not a violent person. In fact, the last time I did anything that could even be considered close to violent was when some preppy douchebag was standing in the very middle of the aisle in a tram and ignoring all the other passengers, even little old ladies, who awkwardly had to squeeze past this greedy asshole when he could easily have moved out the way. I walked past him to step off the tram, and as I did so, I bumped him out of the way with my shoulder.

OMG SO VIOLENT RIGHT!?!? I have clearly been ruined forever.

And really, despite all the violent imagery I've taken in through all these different mediums, I haven't killed even a single person. In fact, I haven't even hit anybody since I was something like eleven years old, despite the fact that I have killed hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people and assorted animals and mythical beasts during that time.

I think a lot of the concern over the impact of violent games is coming from non-gamers who just don't understand what is going on in a gamer's head while playing.

That and it's easy for politicians to score points with the "family values" crowd when they know there will be no backlash from it.

Philosophical discussion about what games and VR will be like in the future is all fine and good too, but let's not use holodeck arguments to limit the free speech of game developers today. We're a looooong damn way off from games having the fidelity to be confused with reality, even with the Occulus Rift.

I've played a lot of violent games, but I've been nowhere near as affected from playing them as from scenes in movies. Not even horror movies, I think Saving Private Ryan is both disturbing an important representation of how horrible war can be and a very good reason why artists rights need to be protected

Don't even get me started about showing a bare breast in a game, god forbid!

But watching cigarette commercials will make you want to smoke.

Unless you happen to be a psychopath, there is a HUGE difference between killing a man and smoking a cigarette.