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Videogames get the blame for almost everything -- from gun and knife crime, to drugs, to simply doing badly at school. Now, conservative author Bill Croke has stained gamers' hands with the blood of deers, elk and grizzly bears. Yes -- videogame fans are now animal murderers, who finish a night's play session by going out and shooting woodland creatures for a laugh.
"It's a sickeningly familiar story. Two moose shot and left to rot ... Two yearling grizzly bears killed ... An increasing wasted antelope body count ... Senselessly murdered mule deer left on the ground ... All this has nothing to do with the legal autumn hunting seasons ... it's "thrill killing," as wildlife managers call it ... It's actually a national problem.
According to studies extant, these wildlife atrocities are committed mostly by young men aged 15 to 22, the video game generation. Much has been written about the nihilistic violence that kids are exposed to when they play some of these games ...
I think it might be an easy jump to get up from a computer game, go out and pull the trigger on an elk or a deer, and then walk away with a laugh. After all, it's only a game ... Yet, I think our four-legged friends will get a break soon, as the video game-thrill killing trend graduates to a higher plane: human beings."
The anti-game set never fail to amaze me with some of the wonderful logic jumps they make. Yes, old man Croke not only suggests that animals are killed by videogames (outside of hunting season, which suddenly makes animals more sympathetic to this guy), but that they will move onto human beings eventually.
I guess it's true -- after one particularly lengthy Gears of War 2 session, I took a butcher knife and slit a hamster in two, from the balls to the eyes, then kicked my girlfriend in the vagina while laughing. It's just that easy, and happens to everyone who plays videogames.
Jim Sterling serves as reviews editor for Destructoid.com, head of the Podtoid podcast, and produces a number of news stories, original features, one-of-a-kind videos. With his passionate argumentative style, controversial opinions, harsh delivery, and dedication to brutal honesty Sterling is a name that you can't help but recognize.
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Contest:
1:22 PM on 12.11.2008
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[i] So what game were the people playing when they drove the dodo to extinction? What game were people playing when they nearly drove the American Bison to extinction? What about all the other animals that were senselessly killed in the thousands of years before games, what were those people playing?
How far did you have to stretch to make this game connection? Are you the Mr. Fantastic of scapegoating? You would have to be to make that connection. [/i]
This just in: video games forced Eve to eat the forbidden fruit. At gunpoint. Then they raped her and gave her the AIDS.
Then I murdered a few Asians, blew up a small cottage in Wiltshire, helped a grannie half-way across the road and then ran away screaming "rape" and pointing in her general direction, before finally filled a swimming pool in Clacton-on-sea with the severed fingers of Jews, and it has nothing to do with the fact that I may at some point have played Worms at some point in my life.
That's the perfect reply to Bill Croke's kindergarten logic. I'm sure my grampa beat innocent moose testicles with a mallet during his childhood, long before the advent of videogames. Must have been playing with hanafuda cards or something.
Now all of a sudden we charge the outsidez and into the forestz to shoot animalz in their retarded facez.
We must have suffered some severe trauma to have induced this WILD change in behavior.
The cowards.
That's what I thought after reading it the first time. Reading it a second time is making me think. >.> I dunno.
Obviously, he means the animals will strike back one day.
(Possibly with the help of pig-masked aliens?)
I love how he graduates from a very vague, tenuous link to a "video game-thrill killing trend" It became a trend in the space of three sentences. I imagine it was pandemic by the end of the article ...
We were going to use an M1 Garand too.