On Jan 17, 2008 6:37 PM, Hal Murray <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > What's wrong with erring on the safe side with a controversial topic > > like video game violence in a learning setting like the OLPC project. > > That doesn't solve anything. It just pushes the decision point down the > scale a bit. > > Instead of arguing whether something is "violent", we'll be arguing about > weather it's "violent enough" to be controversial.
Just to keep on beating that dead horse: As was mentioned earlier in this thread, there are always gliding scales. The solution is not to just forget about them and just allow everything to keep things simple. To clarify my sentence above, I don't think the topic of violence in a learning setting is so controversial. There are little learning packages I know of that situate themselves in a post-apocalyptic setting with as goal to murder as many henchmen of Satan as possible. And it's not so controversial politically, or socially. The only groups who would endorse a game like this that i can think of would be the arms lobby and some extreme Christian sects. I don't want to generalize but amongst a number of nay-sayers I sense a strong cencorship fear, while I just see a pragmatic decision to not include war material in an education project. This is the default attitude in the educational world methinks. While on the other hand the chance of a wave of gripping cencorship amongst the XO activities seems pretty slim to me. Still the strongest point to be concidered should be if a certain class of children might not react well to it. How do vague conceptions about freedom stack up against that? So to me this is a no-brainer. But then again, one might argue that one shouldn't confuse a developer-wiki with an educational package. And then you would have me beat! Btw, great game, Doom. Ah the memories.. especially on the later levels when you got the hang of strafing and would comfortably slalom around the fireballs of whole armies of those doom imps. /Ties _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list [email protected] http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
