Frylock72 said:
hipster666 said:
MacJack said:
Depends how you see it, i like this game because its not trying to be reallistic, unlike that other game that is like it, you know which the one with borring missions and girfriend dates everywhere. Saints row is just trying to be funny, like Yantzee said, if you put a gamer to a sandbox and tell him to do something, you know he will do the opposite just for fun.
Just me then who worries about the state of moral decay in the net generation?
I think for me the most worrying aspect of this style of game is the utter lack of consequence for your actions. Everything has a consequence. It's one of the basic laws of the universe from molecules and energy up to telling your girlfriend she has a fat ass. All I'm saying is it's a little TOO free with it's environment, allowing you to ***** slap the people who "worship" you and still have them giggling like a 12 year old at a Justin Bieber concert afterwards. I'm all for fun and not necessarily ultra realism, but I think this goes too far the other way.
The flaw in your logic is assuming people won't realize that their actions in the game are the same as their actions outside the game. Most people have the general wherewithal to realize that a game is just a game, and what they do in the game cannot be translated into a real-life situation without consequence. That's part of the problem people are having nowadays, thinking that gamers are violent sociopaths just because they enjoy a violent sandbox game.
Hmm, the assumptions here are your own, I never mentioned anything about gamers being violent sociopaths. In fact I was pointing more towards the general trend of all of society towards desentisation and that stems from a lot more than just video games. I don't think any sane person would go out into the world and run a girl over in a car to make an impression on her (other than one using the bumper), but the influences are definitely there and, in general, not good.
To be more specific if you look at access to pornography, it's never been easier for any generation to access material on sex. Does this bring a new enlightened generation of kids who know all about sex? No. It brings about a generation with anxieties over their bodies and sexual confidence before they've even started experimenting. Fake boobs are now considered more attractive among the young than real ones and personal grooming has reached OCD proportions. All this has been laid at the door of online porn where these things are normal. There is a strong argument for parental intervention and education but this would involve my generation and my parent's generation getting over their own sexual hangups and talking freely and possibly graphically about the ins and outs of sex, which I don't see changing overnight.
The argument is worth of an Extra Credits episode given it's complexity, but we have an information saturation situation for the first time in human history. We can bombard society with any image we like and, not unsurprisingly, humans tend towards sex and violence. All I'm saying is that I wish the games weren't so consequence free. Have the police chase you, rack up crime points, whatever you fancy, just I'd rather it not put you in a power tool shed, close the door and hope nothing bad happens. It's naive to think advocating extreme violence doesn't have some impact on the conscience and I'm not talking about mass murder, but just a more callous attitude, inflated ego, higher aggression. Only little things in a day but they can have larger consequences when multiplied by millions.
Check out the Stanford experiment for an extreme example of this kind of sandbox mentality:-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment