When Columbine happenned no one laughed but many blamed video games such as Doom and other First Person Shooters for the massacre. Saying that the misguided students played too many violent games and wrongly influenced those students. I’m not going to take sides here but not every Risk player has gone on to take over the world (and those video game myths were largely debunked (go Wikipedia).

I bring some of this up now because of an episode of Mental (go hulu.com) I saw the other night. It involved a boy so fixated  on video games (the one here looked like World of Warcraft, a little) that made one up in his head just to have something to play when his dad took his games away. The boy then got “addicted” to the game in his head. Unable to distinguish reality from the game he stabbed his mother (and himself?), then ended up in the hospital. Facinating plot. What if EverCrack was in your head and you were addicted? How would that impact your day to day life?

Spoiler Alert (yeah, should have had this before, sorry): In the end the doc’s are able to treat him using medication but the breakthrough is achieved after the boy “wins” the game. To that end I am glad that the show did not ignore the sometimes necessary medications and go straight for the “You Won! You’re Free! Take the Red Pill!” ending. Not saying that Mental is an amazing show but with the occasional episode of House not many shows deal with mental illness and it is good to see one that does (even if the pilot did involve some unnecessary male stripping).

I posted this on the Paradox EU3 forums. Thanks for the comments fellas from other countries

If you haven’t wikipedia’d it already, you would know that the feds are applying an anti-hacking law to the case and charging Lori Drew with one count of conspiracy and three counts of inflicting emotional distress etc. etc. etc. Long and short: She used a false identity to access Megan’s computer and impersonated someone in order to do harm.

Some say this is an improper use of the statute (see digg comments) which is meant to target those who try to break into corporations etc., while using a false identity but I see no reason why you shouldn’t give it a go. She did it with intent to cause harm, not to impress a member of the opposite sex by sending a false photo over the net, not to make herself sound older or younger then she was, she did it to hurt someone - and hurt someone she did.

His evidence generally centers around the decline of American participation in clubs and community groups (i.e. bowling leagues). Some of the culprits causing this are longer working hours, monopolization of leisure time (TV, internet, American idol) by activities that do not promote community. Ouch.

I was taken back dear reader. Taken back! What do you mean the internet doesn’t promote community? Just yesterday I was gunning down some “T”s with a few Canadians on a Counter Strike server. Sure, we didn’t really know each other, and we barely communicated over VoIP, but I still used the internet to be a part of a group. How is that different then a bowling league?

Then I thought of paintball (yeah, it was a long introduction, deal with it). Years back some friends and I would go to Skirmish or Fireball Mountain to get our paintball on. You know, pay ungodly amounts of money to get pelted (and to pelt) by .68 caliber balls of paint. Joy.

To compare those experiences with the shooting of “T”s with my Canook brethren (should have been the 54th parallel! would not be fair. However, I can compare it with my week long counter-striking lan parties I had with those same paintballing friends. I will break this down into three categories: Comradeship, Memory, and Growth.

Comradeship:

Priviet tovarishi! Ah… Hello comrades! Comradeship is not friendship. Comradeship is a feeling like friendship that exists when two or more people pursue the same goal. Examples: Soviets & Americans fighting Nazis, Mortgage lenders and Realtors selling houses to sub prime borrowers, or you and your wingman when trying to do the opposite of what John Nash told you to do.

COUNTERSTRIKE:

Ten hours of sitting in a basement with your buddies downing tens of grill cheese sandwiches, or in a shed you networked with WaWa Hoagies - take your pick, actually inspired more comradeship then the actual game playing itself. Sure, having you all buy Para’s and emptying 500 rounds into the “vents” on the map “cs_assault” will result in lots of giggling (like school girls) but for some reason does not result in a solid building of comradeship.

And I will tell you why. It is because when you play CS, even with friends, you will not always be dependent on each other. Sometimes you have to rely on some amazing Frenchmen to save your continental punk ass from getting owned because your friends all went “office” and you went “garage”. You have comradeship with the Frenchman, but this comradeship is fleeting and perhaps not even acknowledged because of the poor communication system. This happens often enough that those ‘para moments’ are rare and pushed into the background.

PAINTBALL

You are trapped behind a tree while some guy firing eighteen paintballs a second at 280 fps is sweeping around to cause you bodily harm. Your buddy leaps out from behind cover to slay him and pull you to safety. Literally pull you. Dragging your fat butt over rock and stone all the while taking fire himself.

Even if that was French dude saving you from certain pain. Physical pain. A bond will result. A bond acknowledged by a muffled thank you, a nod, or a pat on the back. Something we can’t do in CS -currently.

MEMORY:

Dude. Do you remember that time you got plastered and I had a sharpie marker and your sister and… um.. I mean just a sharpie marker…

How often do you tell a story over soda, beer, or cup of kefir?

COUNTRSTRIKE:

Gee… I don’t really know. I have one good story of a game but there are so many moments that I can’t pick one out. I couldn’t pick one out if pressed. We shared days of playing CS together but I’m drawing a blank.

PAINTBALL:

Middle of the night, 48 hour game @ skirmish, watching a scene out of a Desert Storm tape as hundreds, thousands, of glow in the dark paintballs streamed through the night. Amazing.

Charging the beaches of Normandy (Skirmish) with 1000+ fellow players as tens of thousands of paintballs rained down on us. Watching the sky turn dark, as the opposing team angled shots to get maxim range, was something out of Agincourt. Amazing.

Taking over the “castle” and routing enemy forces. Hearing the cheers rise up from over 100 of my fellow gray arm banded troops. Cheering only to turn around and see my good friend clutching his neck from a real honest-to-Pete shot to the windpipe.

Watching as two lines of roughly 500 persons each square off in the middle of a field. Seeing one side begin to rout and the entire line “roll up” and run. You want an example of what a “rout” was in the civil or revolutionary war? Play a big game of paintball. It’s basically the same style of fighting only with automatic muskets.

Growth:

COUNTERSTRIKE:

The growth I will say CS playing with friends has given me is an appreciation of skill, healthy sense of risk and teamwork. Skill, because I have been bested on many occasions by someone considerably younger, and probably pre-pubescent. Risk, because sometimes if you don’t take risk, or be aggressive, you will die and your team will lose. Oh, and also Teamwork. Yes, important. “godlike” players, pre and post-pubescent alike, have been pwned by a team of variable skill because they played together as a team. Not just as a bunch of individuals all on the same “side”.

PAINTBALL:

Fear. Unbridled fear. Not that emotional “I’m afraid to lose you fear” but the fear of pain, of hurt, of being left alone in the woods surrounded by your enemies. That kind of fear. Biblical fear. How do you handle it?

Paintball, unlike CS, will test you in this regard. Do you run when your line “breaks” and the routing begins? Or do you, like another friend of mine, scream “HOLD THE LINE” in your best Mel Gibson voice while dropping to a knee and sending a stream of paint into the oncoming horde of enemies, knowing, KNOWING!, that you will likely be overrun and pelted to a glowing orange sheen in a few seconds. (No fear readers, my friend managed to actually stop the rout. By will alone he called in to existence a second line of fighters. So instead of getting pelted to “death” alone he took about 50 of his teammates with him!)

Conclusion:

Paintball is a different experience. If not for the communication barrier then for the physical one. Paintball can hurt, it immerses you in an experience that you cannot have in your living room.

So, what about “Bowling Alone”? Are the ties we form online the same as in person? Can we have a Wii online bowling league and have the same quality experience as we once did at the local lanes?

I don’t know readers… I don’t know. I am a believer in the online experience, in online gaming’s ability to be a uniter, not a divider, but sometimes real life gaming has its advantages. Especially if you like welts.

-Jim

It’s been a long time but I’ve been out and I haven’t really seen anything come across the wire in a while. However this graph from the front page of digg caught my attention:

If you want to see a bigger version of this please go backtrack the picture link.

As you can see the total rate of violent crime, as tracked by the Bureau of Justice Statistics has gone down over time, particularly when violent video games have hit the market.

Whether video games have done anything to reduce violent crime is absolutely debatable. It could have been the economy (stupid)* which picked up in the 1990s bolstered by the credit boom of the early 2000s that turned people off to crime. There is a theory of how poverty leads to crime, btw, but it has largely been buried or replaced by other ones (such as Left Realism) which replace crime with lack of opportunity and socio-economical repression. I would say that while the disparity between “rich” (top 10%) and “poor” (bottom half?) grew in the 90s and tech bubble, so did opportunity. So we all gained (even if some gained more than others).

Family activities may also have played a role. A AOL study reports that over 50% of parents surveyed responded that they spend some time during the week playing video games with their children, with over half intergenerational players spending over an hour with their kids. Wow. Do we even spend that much time together eating dinner each week?

In short there are a lot of things that could have contributed to the decline in violent crime. More money and opportunity, perhaps, or maybe it could have been the result of little Johnny spending less time getting hounded at the dinner table about his daily activities and more time assaulting covenant Battle cruisers in Halo 3 online with Mom, Dad, and lil’ Sis that kept him from assaulting his next door neighbor.

*this is not to say the economy is stupid, or believing that violent crime reduction is affected by economic conditions is stupid, it’s not, but instead this is meant to point fun at the political commentators who will blame everything from your political decisions to the weather on the economy. As in “It’s the economy, stupid”.

Another marriage ended over an addiction to World of Warcraft. This time around wife Jocelyn, 28, is leaving Peter because he has been playing WoW constantly, ignoring her, the bills, and th dishes.

After ending their six year marriage, and 13 year friendship, Jocelyn is looking for another man. This time, no gamers.