Grand Theft Auto: Hampshire
Entry posted by Guest ·
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Well, it certainly would provide me some good few hours of entertainment; marching through West Quay shopping centre blowing up all the virtual `Claire's Accesories`-style boutiques, wasting hundreds of digitally recreated So'ton chavs, and finally obliterating that goddamned misery-peddling McDonalds on the top floor.
Not ever going to happen, sadly, yet despite this apparent rage towards humanity I would only ever take pleasure in doing it `pretend`; in a simulated computer generated environment. The style and inherant substance that goes with Rockstar's fabled Grand Theft Auto series would make it all the sweeter of course, but the realism that series of gaming genius brings is the kind of realism we all fantasise about.......
Which is kinda the whole point, and one that a lot of people seem to have missed because the media organisations of the world are realising, once again, that the truth is not always the most profitable thing for them.
True? Well read this and decide for yourself: http://gr.bolt.com/oldsite/articles/violence/violence.htm
Thanks to
Prometheus entry I am spurred on to make as many people as possible see this article and formulate their own opinion of these simple investigations.
Despite the author playing down the conspiracy theory claims - and he could be said to be just a leeettle bit biased 
- I am inclined to be skeptical towards his approach, but the facts do seem to be on his side and the theory is more than plausible, it's downright bloody likely.
Personally I think he may be overstepping the mark slightly with the inferred idea that games are completely free from blame, and it can be argued (usually by Jack Thompson the anti-choice Miami lawyer who has recently pretty much destroyed his own career by going head to head with one of the most popular gaming websites in the world, and losing pitifully - further embarassing himself in the process by chasing police departments and district attorneys only to be dismissed and discredited by both - which is a thought to cheer the heart of gamers around the world) that violent games can provoke people to acts of violence.
However.
The people who are provoked into violence by a violent game will not go through their entire lives without encountering violence, in real life, in films, in music; all these are equally capable of provoking the same reactions and very likely a lethal instinct to hurt others - in short: violent people have something like a disease. They are abnormal by the majority of society's standards and they cannot control it themselves. People like that need treatment and a controlled environment, in the same way we quarantine a disease.
But on the main point:- I think, and have long believed, that violent media and games especially deal with those pent-up stressed and enraging tendencies that are particularly felt in adolesence and all throughout puberty; those that can even make people almost unbelievably people angry at inanimate objects; and what better inanimate object than one that you know is not real, but looks a lot like something that is?
It's an unattainable fantasy, and that fact is kept at the back of the mind while the main conscious brain has some fun kicking seven shades of shinola out of something that in the real world it would respect as much it would respect itself, if not in fact, in the case of many adolesents, even more so.
The violence in videogames that is so readily embraced by kids and adults alike is one that we use as therapy: a representation of our selves is seen and felt and controlled so as to hammer out all the unfairness of life onto faceless, lifeless and above all UNREAL enemies; the actual acts of depravity we indulge in to relieve these furies in some small way deal with life's troubles, and are one's that we would never even dream of doing for real.
We all need a stress release, especially kids and adolesents because although they don't know the true meaning of the word `stress` yet, we as adults have almost forgotten the meaning, and feeling, of the word `angst`.
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