Game violence not as dangerous as film violence; tigers more dangerous than both

11:54 PM on 04.18.2007   |   Nex

22 comments

Ars Technica, brings us word of a study conducted by the British Board of Film Classification that comes to the conclusion that watching violence on television or in films has a much greater effect on people than playing a violent game, at least in the realm of flipping the hell out and murdering innocent people. According to the BBFC;

there is an appeal in being able to be violent without being vulnerable to the consequences which similar actions in real life would create, gamers are aware that they are playing a game and that it is not real life.

The study goes on to state that due to the inherently poor story-telling in games (compared to film and television), gamers feel less of an emotional connection to their chosen form of entertainment, and are thus less motivated to carry over the fictional prostitute-strangulation to their real lives.

That's all well and good, but I think the BBFC is overlooking the true threat to our society: deadly, deadly tigers. They are responsible for almost half a million human deaths every year, and our hospitals are rapidly filling with formerly stout young men who have been laid low in the prime of their lives by the voracious claws of hungry tigers. Neither our games, nor our television programs can properly prepare you for the day when you awake from a nightmarish dream only to gaze in horror out of your window onto your once green yard, now choked black and red with the blood of your entire family. On top of a macabre monument to its insatiable bloodlust crafted crudely out of the still-warm bones of your parents, will sit a tiger; and in his eyes you will see only darkness.