Hi Ulysses.
I can believe the change in raction time between fps players, however I
don't think that's the only bennifit from games, ---- heck I know in real
life my spacial coordination (always quite cruddy), has improved from
playing spacial puzzles like Sokoban (the game robo E is based on), and the
massive explorable maps of the Turrican series certainly helped my
navigation skills.
Heck, I've noticed evven Core exiles is making me use my maths everytime I
need to calculate if my nebula harvester takes 35 units of fuel an hour and
holds five thousand units, how long will it run for? (the answer is close to
140 hours or almost six days).
Regarding violance, I always think people miss the difference when debating
violence between violance and intention, and how the violance is presented.
Back when I was growing up in the 90's, Mortal Combat was the bogey man of
computer game violence, and yet what you actually saw on the screen was so
unrealistically commic you couldn't take it at all seriously. For example
Sub Zero's original fatality from Mortal Combat. After winning the fight,
Sub zero would approach his opponent, (who at that point seemed to be
swaying around in some sort of daze, grabbed their unresisting head and
wrenched it off along with their spine. Their body (headless but otherwise
looking pretty okay), would be left lying on the ground spurting quite
insane amounts of blood.
The level of violence, the speed was so over the top and insane that it was
almost like a cartoon, heck even in the fights though you punched people and
blood came out they didn't show ill effects. Original doom was rather the
same.
Compare this however to something like Grand Theft Auto where you can
actually be sent on missions by the maffia as an enforcer to beat people up
with baseball bats who will cringe away from your character in fear when you
walk in, and then you can and leave them with realistically looking mangled
bones groning on the floor.
For me the debate about game violence always seems to miss the intention
out, indeed I notice myself that in films what tends to bother me isn't any
amount of blood guts and gore, but simply how much pain distress and terror
the person is in. Indeed, i find it sort of disturbing that in sensorship
rules you can have a character tortured with the famous agony beam, even got
to the point of completely breaking down, and yet this is absolutely fine
for kids where as one monster tearing someone's head off and ooooh no! this
is why as a child the scene in last star fighter (supposedly a pg film),
where the villain prooves his evilness by slowly lasering a screaming and
helpless prisoner in the face in front of the good guys bothered me far more
than all of the alien, terminator or Robocop films.
The priorities on this just seem to be amazingly wrong, and indeed with
games I'd like to see ratings and such not based on how many barrels of
guts are involved, but what actually is going on.
This isn't to say games like Grand Theft auto shouldn't exist, (an art form
is an art form after all and sensorship is generally always to be avoided
as much as possible), ---- only that it'd be nice if there was a distinction
made between what the intention is and how much gore is involved.
This is why in audio game terms something like swamp where the deaths are
quick and instant, or the bit in Hunter where Marpu the warrior grusomely
kills you if you can't solve the bone pipes puzzle are far less bad than
something of the painful, protracted deaths in Shades of Doom or Papasangre,
(those slasher birds are just plane evil!).
Beware the grue!
Dark.
---
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