More news on the effects of violent video games. Only preliminary results, but it’s something to keep an eye on.
As a somewhat-related item: most of us figure out the difference between reality and make-believe when we’re very young. Apparently those who don’t end up in organizations like the Red Cross, which is considering accusing six hundred million videogame players of war crimes.
You just can’t make this stuff up.
There are some neat games out there though, role playing open world games like Skyrim look kind of neat, and I’ve played and enjoyed Mass Effect and Oblivion (the previous game in the series Skyrim is part of) for their story lines, though they’re not exactly non-violent, I don’t think they end up causing your brain to alter all that much in a negative way.
I assume they were talking more about games where you kill 65536 zombies in order to win. 🙂
And I played the first Elder Scrolls (Oblivion and Skyrim are Elder Scrolls IV and V) long ago, and enjoyed it, along with dozens of other games with varying levels of violence. Including at least one where you kill endless hordes of zombies. 😉
I’ve never played things like the Grand Theft Auto games, and from the descriptions I can see how they could warp a developing mind. Of course, that’s why games have maturity ratings — developing minds shouldn’t be able to get their grubby little paws on such a game to begin with.
I played Morrowind too a bit, forgot to mention that. 🙂 What were they like before Morrowind, pretty big worlds?
I think my interest in the big-world genre started with the first such game I played, “Wizardry” when I was in boarding school in 1988. I must have really hogged my poor roommates’s 8088 PC playing it, and I played it in monochrome as he didn’t have a graphics card, so all I saw were the hallways and text rather than the 4 color graphical depictions of the monster you encountered. Unfortunately the company that made Wizardry pretty much went out of business, though I assume one can probably still find it on eBay… Of course, I don’t have a 5.25 (or even a 3.5″) floppy drive to put it on anymore. 🙂 The Baulder’s Gate series owed a lot to Wizardry, those were pretty much Wizardry with some bells and whistles.
I never saw the second, but the original was a huge world. I was more interested in the quests than the world, as I knew even then the programming techniques that provided the world.