Re: Frustration Factor

by Lara Skšld 

In all truthfulness, PokŽmon is receiving a beating, but not due to its violent content. PokŽmon has been attacked by religious groups for its so-called "occult content." Some overly zealous people stated that since some PokŽmon (e.g. Abracadabra) have their names and abilities rooted in occult and Pagan lore that the game designers must be attempting to instill our children with the idea that this kind of stuff is righteous. One minister in Colorado took a Japanese blade (possibly a katana) to a stuffed Pikachu doll in front of his congregation and advised them of the evils of PokŽmon. I believe a reality check is long overdue.

Mistress Nightshadow pointed out the similarities in violent content between Final Fantasy VIII and PokŽmon and her ideas do make a lot of sense on the matter, but what I want to know is why most people do not notice that a lot of video games have extremely violent content albeit not in a gruesomly graphic manner. Some more popular examples are: the Ninja Gaiden series, Smash T.V., Total Carnage, the Legend of Zelda series, the Super Mario Bros. series, U.N. Squadron, Blackthorne, etc. To be blunt I could pick virtually any game out of virtually any genre and show that it has some form of violent content. Does anyone else see the nitpicking in this logic? I understand the fears of some people that our children may become warped after witnessing the disembowling of a zombified Orville Redenbacher as things like that simply do not happen in reality and are completely fanciful entertainment. What I do not understand is why, with a world full of violent content, we are blaming video games with even the mildest amount of violence for society's ills.

Many people think these video games are influencing our children to commit horrible attrocities, to worship evil beings, to swear, et al. Gods forbid we teach our children anything about the real world and show them the consequences so they know how moronic it is to start a war or kill someone. May we also never see a world in which our entertainment actually has a plot mixed into all of this violent content drawing the children even deeper into its unholy clutches. I admit that some games have absolutely no point to them other than to watch some characters rush about a screen and turn each other into processed meat with blunt objects and explosive devices. I believe the aforementioned to be fine examples of a control on our primal urges for "the kill." At least little Timmy is taking his aggression out on that poor pixelised man and not on his classmates.

A lot of people seem to want our children to live in a sheltered environment so they can never know the true horrors of the real world. This makes no sense as refusing to teach our children anything about what we wish them not to do gives them no idea as to why we are teaching them or what we are teaching them about. We cannot live our children's lives for them, but we can at least teach them what is most beneficial to them and to the rest of us. I am not suggesting that we have our children sit through a John Madden play-by-play recap of World War II to drive home the point that war is bad, but we do need to stop teaching them that these kinds of things do not exist. As Mistress Nightshadow stated we also need to stop nitpicking about which games are to be worried about and which are not.

RPGs are some of the most violent games on the market yet no one cares because they do not offer graphic depictions of their violence. Four characters beating up on wandering monsters for experience and looting is not something we want our children to do themselves, but that is because it is entertainment and is telling a story. Most RPGs show the consequences of evil and that through enough effort we can always reach our goals. Why is it that a RPG where one can kill limitless monsters to gain enough experience to stop the all-powerful monster can be deemed as having less violent content than a game with a limited amount of undead soldiers roaming a military base just waiting to be shot? Both games have a reason for the player to slay the enemies (protecting the innocent), but we usually see the RPGs as less violent because of the intricate plotlines they usually have weaved into them. A game like DOOM or Quake normally has one basic plotline given at the onset of the mission and the rest is up to the player. We see the violence in a game like DOOM and know what would really happen if we picked up a double-barreled shotgun and pulled the trigger on some witless creature. Do we know what happens when one runs another being through with a rapier after playing only a few battles in Final Fantasy? Aside from watching them vanish and gaining a bit of gold and experience, no we do not.

The same logic used to label RPGs as violent could be used for PokŽmon or virtually any other game where the consequences of one's actions are never fully appreciated. I am not suggesting that we give these video games more mature ratings because of this content, but I would like people to wake up and realise that what this violence (appreciable or not) is far from the source of our troubles. We have been a violent "survival of the fittest" species since our original use of bone tools and though we are a more domesticated species than the others we share this planet with we do have enough sense to know when something is horribly wrong. People play video games for entertainment whether it be from a great storyline or satisfaction of primal urges we love these items due to their effects upon us. Some games force us to use our imaginations while others show us what we could only have imagined, but the more violent games really show us nothing different than what most of our great literature describes. Anyone has read a book such as "All Quiet on the Western Front," "Crime and Punishment," or even the Holy Bible knows that violence has been utilised for entertainment and moral lessons long before video games ever came about. Some video games are good moral lessons and some are merely entertaining, but they are unacceptable by some because they offer the reality of what some of the greatest works of our human society have been describing for centuries.

Perhaps people are too afraid to admit that humans do far worse things than what we are shown in video games and so they look for scapegoats to redirect their hatred toward. If an item contains reference to any minority religion then it is "evil" and should be banned. If it harbours some graphic form of violent content then it should also be banned. Perhaps if it teaches our children anything about the real world that they will eventually be thrust into it should be banned. Are these "experts" and "specialists" really trying to keep our children locked in a fantasy world without violence or hatred? In reality they are dooming our offspring to repeat the same mistakes they made by not teaching them about them. Youth do deserve what short period of innocence they have, but eventually they need to know how society really works.

I may be wrong, though. As Hegel said, "The only thing we have learnt from history is that people have not learnt a thing from history."
Original Editorial : Frustration Factor