[_delirium]

I think people could make some pretty hateful games, yes, and some people probably do (but they aren't that popular, as far as I know). But isn't that true of any uncensored medium? People publish white-power books, and books about how Hitler was great, and we're not (at least in the U.S.) pushing for laws about those. Heck, Stormfront is on the net with no age-related access controls. It's just sort of a fact of uncensored media that you'll have to live with some pretty unpleasant stuff. What I don't see is games being uniquely dangerous, or having the unpleasant stuff in unusually high concentrations.

[JoeAltmaier]

Really? Its pretty well understood that women come off badly in video games. Either super-sexualized, or just props to be beaten and killed.

And now somebody will point to 1 or two games that don't. That's called 'the exception that proves the rule'.

[_delirium]

I agree there's a ton of sexism in games, yes. I don't see them as so outrageously different from our general culture as to be the source of a unique problem, though. Certainly not as the explanation for why the U.S. has such unusually high levels of violence for a developed country.

I mean, American culture and media are full of sexism, some of it pretty absurd. Beer ads are super-sexist, for example, and those are allowed to be shown at prime-time to children, despite peddling both sexism and alcohol. And the treatment of women in Hollywood is extremely problematic as well. I'm willing to believe that games are even more sexist than the already pretty low bar for media in general, and that's something worth criticizing game developers for, but it seems strange for a Senator to single them out. I would be really surprised if Lamar Alexander is the one to lead a general charge against sexism in the American media.

[JoeAltmaier]

Other media is temporary entertainment of an escapist sort. Viewed/read and forgotton.

Video games are immersive environments. Roleplaying continues for scores of hours. You might spend longer in one game than watching all of Star Wars put together.

And you are the protagonist in a video game! You are PERSONALLY doing all that misogynistic violence. Its fun! You get points!

I think video games are fundamentally different than all other 'media', to the point that video games aren't media at all. They are closer to a club, or a school, or a gang experience than they are to a book.

And I've played hundreds of games. I have a room at home dedicated to the playing of games, with machines arrayed around a large round table with power strips mounted below, built for the purpose. So no I'm not here to slam games through ignorance.

But we do our cause a huge disservice when we pretend not to 'get it', when we paper over the real differences between our hobby and other entertainments.

[_delirium]

I guess that part I just don't agree with. I feel much more immersed in novels than in games, myself. Games are just escapist entertainment, whereas novels have changed my worldview, stuck with me for years, and made me feel I was there. I can't think of a game that has been more than entertainment for me, and I've played quite a few also. Heck, even in sci-fi situations, Ender's Game felt much more immersive than Doom. All that stuff about "demons from hell" and "being on Mars" in Doom I just saw as sort of silly skin on top of what's fundamentally some abstract gameplay. And it's hard to take the skins of Counterstrike or CoD any more seriously than that.

More to the point, though, the scientific evidence that games change behavior more than other media just isn't very compelling, despite lots of money spent trying to prove it (some of it in the positive direction, as people with "serious games" grants try to prove that games are uniquely positioned to enact positive behavior change).

[JoeAltmaier]

You say novels have deeply impressed you - at a conscious level, with moving themes and new ideas. Despite violence, evil characters and events, maybe even genocide. They all happen in novels.

Compare a video game - you kill an NPC, scoop up some loot, scrounge around breaking all their crates and pots, then move on. Not thinking about it, not caring what it is you're doing or what it means to loot a body or take the pathetic remains of some poor wretch's miserable existance. Ha! This gun is way worse than the one I'm wielding! Throw it in the trash, or keep it to sell for coin.

Clearly they are very different experiences. You can't tell me killing innocent bystanders, looting strangers' homes, fencing stolen goods not once but 10,000 times to get to the final level - none of this penetrates, not even a little? You mention Doom which is disengenious - that was riveting when it came out because of the tension, the surprises. But we're way past that now. Now we hear the screams of carefully simulated civilians, see their blood, then loot their wallets and cars.

Why? What moron thinks this is entertainment? It substitutes shock for any scrap of intelligent gameplay, until it becomes meaningless. Until its just abstract gameplay.

Anyway maybe I'm off the mark here. But until we admit that something is going on here that's different from a book or movie, we've not begun to figure out whether it matters.

[colmvp]

People make that argument yet men are almost always victims of the most brutal deaths in cinema, specifically without the camera looking away.