And another crazy technology hater falls out of the wood work to join others in the stupid position that video games are the end of society.
Bill O’Reilly, political talk show host for Fox News recently blasted the PS3 and video games for destroying society on his podcast, Radio Factor. This whack job had the following to say about the influence of video games on society:
American society is changing for the worse because of the machines… In the past to flee the real world people usually chose drugs or alcohol… now you don’t have to do that, Now all you have to do is have enough money to buy a machine…
Basically what you have is a large portion of the population, mostly younger people under the age of 45, who don’t deal with reality – ever. So they don’t know what day it is; they don’t know temperature it is; they don’t know what their neighbor looks like. They don’t know anything… because they are constantly diverted by a machine. Now what this does is it takes a person away from reality because they’ve created their own reality…
He then went on to add his two cents about the PS3 launch:
The newest thing is the PlayStation 3. Now this is a machine that allows you to play games in hi-def and all this other stuff… It’s the newest state of the art system from Sony…. It has a video game console, plays DVDs, connects you to the Internet, and tells you how handsome you are. Its six-hundred bucks. Now people lined up for hours to get this thing. Hours!
O’Reilly even bashed the iPod, even though the hypocrite has his very own podcast which can be downloaded into an iPod:
I don’t own an iPod. I would never wear an iPod… If this is your primary focus in life – the machines… it’s going to have a staggeringly negative effect, all of this, for America… did you ever talk to these computer geeks? I mean, can you carry on a conversation with them? …I really fear for the United States because, believe me, the jihadists? They’re not playing the video games. They’re killing real people over there.
The only thing in the entire podcast that made any possible sense was the fact that video games can be an addiction for some which was talked about by Bois Olson from the National Institute on Media and the Family. Gaming addiction is real and it has even led to deaths in some extreme cases, but truthfully gaming addicts aren’t a huge problem like Bill seemed to think:
The problem with this stuff is that some people can deal with it constructively… but other people get addicted to it, just like opium, just like drugs and alcohol… So this is a big, big problem. It’s going to change every single thing in this country.
The have-nots are growing. Why are they growing? Because the skill set that is necessary to earn a decent living is being deemphasized in a fantasy world of football games and shooting zombies and all that…. Now you have the “knows” and the “know-nots”, because if you spend all your youth being prisoners of machines….. you’re not going to know anything…. You’re gonna fail.
The truth is this, Bill; Computer geeks are the people building the future of this world. They work for places like NASA, Microsoft, etc. They are what make it possible for you to appear on TV each day and have your stupid podcast available to download on people’s iPods. Don’t bash the very people that make it possible for your dumb show to appear on TV everyday, Bill.
And Bill, you support the troops, but you didn’t stop to think about how troops are training on video game battle simulators? How can something that better prepares a solider for battle be a bad thing?
As for the Jihadists not having video games and killing real people, well I’m sorry Americans are killing video game enemies instead of real people. I didn’t realize that was a bad thing. Maybe we should send a few thousand PS3s overseas to the enemy, and call them “Jihad simulators” so they’ll become addicted to “training” on the systems and stop killing people too, but wait… that would make video games useful and you don’t believe the machines can be useful to better the world.
In the end like many things that Bill O’Reilly runs his idiot mouth about, he’s failed to do his research on the subject and probably failed to even think before he opened his mouth.
Oh, and Bill, we have proof you once cared enough about video games to allow a report on Nintendo on your old show, Inside Edition.
[Via Game Politics]
