edit - Yeah I play video games with violence too, my point is that video games are a mirror that exposes a less brutal image of ourselves than we are convinced of. The truth of what we desire is as often silly or altruistic as it is selfish or violent, even in the realm of fantasy where the violence is unreal as everything else.

  • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    I remember in 1993 my dad tried saying that video games make kids violent.

    For anyone too young to pick up on the obvious situation here, 1993 was the year the media started looking at games like Mortal Kombat, and saying video games are violence simulators. In those days, news was different. Today there’s heavy bias in reporting. Watching the same story from 2 different reporting sources will often paint a vastly different picture. In those days however it wasn’t nearly the issue it is today. Fox News didn’t exist yet I don’t think. And even when it first started, it wasn’t what it would later become.

    The news was just the news. And the news was saying video games make kids violent. My dad was doing the modern day equivilant of parroting fox news talking heads points. No opinion of his own. Just parroting the news.

    So when he said that video games make kids violent, I said “Dad, I have 3 games. Sonic 2, Madden 93, and Jurassic Park. By your logic, I should be a star athlete who can play in the NFL, who runs so fast that I become a blur , and is also a velociraptor. Teenagers in the early 80s would be great at tennis, crossing the road quickly, and know how to shoot down UFOs.”

    He had no rebuttal, because nobody on the news made those arguements.

    • Hudell@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      10 hours ago

      Imagine a dad making that argument these days and then they look at their kid’s steam library and all they play is “shower with your dad simulator”

    • ryannathans@aussie.zone
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      23 hours ago

      Fox news might only go back to 96 but news was almost always politically motivated, I will accept that it may be deteriorating though