Only better. Excerpt:

Announcing that these games have reduced violent crime is the sort of thing you usually only get once a year, on wacky "Opposite News" day (along with reports that cigarettes cure cancer and that or that Spaniards have stopped eating rats). But if concerned journalists can make cause-and-effect presumptions in headlines like TEEN GOES ON SHOOTING SPREE AFTER PLAYING GRAND THEFT AUTO then we are allowed to jump to similar conclusions based on this data.

So, dismissing Popular Media Conventional Wisdom for the noisy mental fart that it is, it's time to really ask how these games are changing the world. Thus began my expedition into the world of Halo 2 and into the minds of the people who play it. What I would find would shock me.

...

"So your point," John says, "if you ever had one? Why is violent crime going down? It's because we've got this now, we've got murder porn as a release. Make no mistake that if I didnÂ’t have this game, IÂ’d be smashing the bridge of your nose with the butt of my shotgun right now. And you couldnÂ’t do a damned thing about it except cry and bleed and wonder why your God has forsaken you. It's built into us. We're like The Covenant. A long time ago, back at the beginning of evolution, there was only two cavemen. One liked to kill, the other was a pacifist. The killer killed the pacifist and took his bitches. The killers bred, the pacifists died out, and a billion years later you got a species that thirsts for war like a camel thirsts for sand. It's not what we do. It's what we are."

John lights a cigarette.

"A few generations of game system from now, they'll have the virtual reality headsets, done right this time. Peripheral vision and everything. You got a headset with surround sound and there you are, in the virtual world. Twenty years after that, they'll have a system that you could literally mistake for reality. No controller in your hand, your brain impulses move you around. They'll have games where you get to fall in love with beautiful women, games where you're a rock star. This is the future of all entertainment, the future of the culture. I even read somewhere that they could hook up people so that our bodies would power the system. And you can go on there and just get lost in adventure and excitement and porn, porn, porn. Man, the porn."

Posted by: Physics Geek at 07:48 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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